Free Healthcare System Is a Fraud

While citizens are protesting against the political corruption, Indian government and politicians are planning to pave way for a new source of political corruption and this time they have chosen medical sector. Politicians assume that they are responsible to offer free services like education or healthcare for which they would levy higher taxes on common citizens. However, this is nothing but a huge corruption because on the name of providing free services, government actually robs people of their money and their right to attain proper high quality services at affordable prices. The failure of such universal healthcare system is evident from the current economic turmoil in Britain whose National Health Services is a huge burden on British economy.

What is Free Healthcare System?

Free healthcare system works upon the idea of forced economic equality for everyone. Thus, irrespective of how much you earn, you will not be provided any better medical facilities than a lazy beggar who never tried to work hard and earn enough to attain proper health care and medical security. Hence, free healthcare system is a direct end for the causality of individual efforts and hard work, it is abolition of spending of income, i.e., while a person may earn, he is not free to spend his earned money for his better health.

The government panel for NHEC¹ doesn’t want anyone including the people living below the poverty line and the rich class to pay anything for healthcare facilities. They have planned to drop all user fees of any form of government revenue of health while increasing a healthcare surcharge on taxable income of every individual.

This means that while you can take medical treatment at government hospitals, you won’t be required to pay anything. Many people will believe that it is very good idea because people often enjoy the idea of getting things free and hence they get fooled by such ponzi schemes. While government won’t take any charge from you directly, it will charge more than whatever you can spend in a year on your own health by escalating taxes on your income.

Why free health care system is Expensive?

Free healthcare system allows free visits to doctors while the taxpayers collectively pay for them. Hence, each individual realizes that it is beneficial to visit doctors because millions of taxpayers will pay for their visit. This increases the wastage of resources as everyone is encouraged to use medical facilities as much as they can irrespective of the actual need. This results in abrupt increase in number of visits to doctors.

Since individual patients don’t need to pay anything, they freely opt of unnecessary medical tests, hospitalization and surgeries and this further increases the cost of free healthcare system. In addition, to check the working of all this redundant system, the government will employ a huge bureaucratic force which will increase corruption and wastage of taxpayers’ money. While India is already suffering scarcity of medical facilities, hospital beds and doctor’s time, the free healthcare system will further increase the expenses of doctors and medical facilities by increasing fake demand of these services as even when a person can avoid hospitalization, they will prefer to take services of hospitals for which they are forced to pay surcharges. If they won’t use these services, their money will be total wastage.

The unnecessary medical tests, operations and surgeries will create delays in serving genuinely serious patients and soon the patients will realize that while they paid medical surcharges to government as taxes, they cannot attain any medical facility from government hospitals because of the extreme crowd already present there.

In order to solve this, government will increase control over medical sector by controlling the wages of doctors and price control of medicines, medical equipments. Government will also restrict doctors from practicing in private hospitals.  Ultimately, doctors and medical sector will become unattractive as doctors will fail to earn good money. This will result in lesser and lesser young talent to choose medical line and this will further cause the scarcity of efficient doctors. Government cannot decide about the necessary treatment for an individual. The doctors will also start denying necessary treatment for patients and it will increase corruption. People will be forced to pay bribes to get necessary treatment and they will have no option. Obviously, a person needing a heart transplant will not wait for his turn; he will prefer to bribe doctors to get treatment as soon as possible.

Free Healthcare is Against Advancement of Technology

The total cost of free healthcare will be enormous and unbearable by taxpayers. It will start creating huge fiscal deficit in governmental budgets and scarcity of doctors, researchers and practitioners. In order to reduce national debt and fiscal deficit, government will start opposing advancement of technology because it will further increase expenses. Advanced technology such as heart transplant is very expensive. Government will plan to reduce provision of such facilities as a result; people suffering from heart disease will die without any medical aid. In a free market, competition to increase consumers reduces the cost of such advanced technology but in healthcare system, it will be necessary to decrease patients and hence cost will increase.

Even by reducing such advanced medical facilities, government will fail to cut expenditure and hence it will totally abolish any medical advancement and will deliberately exclude many health categories ranging from cosmetic surgeries to bypass surgeries in order to contain the collective price of the Free Health Care System. Even those people who could have saved their lives by paying for such medical procedure will have no choice to attain medical help.

Higher degrees of Corruption through Free Health Care NHEC System

The free health care will increase the demand of medical services while causing enormous scarcity of doctors, hospital beds, medical facilities and resources, it will become a platform for bureaucratic and political corruption. Politicians and administrators will realize that government cannot fulfill the demand of citizens. They will start taking advantage of this situation and will start taking bribery and scams. This will further increase national debt and to control fiscal deficit and to increase profits of politicians, government officers, doctors, government will start prohibiting necessary medical procedures for the common person. While government will denounce medical advancement and better medical facilities, it will also start denying medical services for those citizens who according to the government are only a burden. Hence, government will start denying medical help for older people who don’t earn and take pensions and children because they don’t earn and pay taxes.  The government will also be forced to reduce medical help for those who are poor enough to not to pay any tax.

The government initially is trying to provide necessary medical facility for the elders, infants and poor people but ultimately, the government will sacrifice these same people.

Free lunch is an imagination. Anyone who believes in free lunch should be shocked to see that it actually brings malnutrition, food poisoning, ill health and death of many poor kids for which these free lunches are arranged while such mid-day meals and free lunch system certainly increases corruption.

Most of the European countries provide such socialistic programs of free lunch, free medical services through Universal health care and ‘education for all’ programs. However, most of those countries are suffering huge national debt and dangers of bankruptcy. Many countries like Greece and Britain have started reducing or prohibiting necessary services for old and unemployed people and because of this, people of Greece and Britain revolted against government and created riots in Greece and Britain. The United States under the leadership of Democratic president Barack Obama who is certainly a socialist² also adopted similar Universal Health and Universal education programs and the result is, America lost its economic supremacy and its national debt credit was downgraded. America is facing dangers of bankruptcy. India has already faced bankruptcy in 1991 because of similar socialistic programs but the government is again trying to adopt similar methods just to win vote bank, but at last, India will also suffer the same fate as is currently faced by Greece, Britain and other European countries.

It must be noted that India’s national debt and fiscal deficit is already too high then its production rate.

Why government is promoting this wasteful planning?

Currently, whole India is angry against political corruption. Government is trying to woo vote bank by announcing such seemingly good schemes which will attract poor people at present but at last will cause high inflation and price rise of medical services and will make poor unable to attain any medical help.

1. New Cess may be levied to Fund Free Health Care [↩]
2. America is Socialist Under Barack Obama [↩]