A Stitch in Haste

A key premise in any call for socialized medicine is that physicians (and nurses and dentists and physical therapists and orderlies and equipment technicians and pharmacists and ...) will continue to do what they do now, as much as they do it now (and where they do it now and as well as they do it now and for as long as they do it now and ...) despite the efforts by government to enslave them. Like a battered spouse, the health care professional will, the bureaucrats presume, simply put up with it forever.

It's akin to New York City's tax-and-spend liberals — especially Mayor Michael Bloomberg — believing that no matter how much they tax residents, people simply won't leave, precisely because "there's something about being a New Yorker." Do whatever you want to doctors — they won't quit, precisely because "there's something about being a doctor."

Exhibit A:

The [British] government should have capped the money GPs can make out of their new contract, the health secretary says. The proportion of profits GPs take out of their practices has increased since the new contract started in 2004, pushing average pay above £100,000.

In an interview with the BBC News website, Patricia Hewitt said in hindsight ministers would have wanted to ensure doctors did not take so much.

If you're smart enough to become a doctor, then you are smart enough to become a lawyer, accountant, investment banker or a dozen other ultra-skilled occupations that are not price capped. The laws of economics are not subject to repeal by any legislature. An artificial price ceiling creates a shortage, regardless of what "noble goals" underlie it. Doctors, especially future doctors, will not be turned into indentured servants without limit.

Speaking of which — Exhibit B:

Even doctors in training are figuring out how [California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's socialized medicine] plan might affect them. Some physicians believe Schwarzenegger's plan might drive doctors out of state, but University of Southern California medical student Julia Cormano says she would stay in California — but reconsider her choice of specialties. Cormano, co-president of the med school's students' association, says the talk on campus is whether students, who can carry as much as $200,000 in loans, would be forced out of general medicine with the additional drain on future income.

So at best (i.e., assuming doctors don't leave the state or retire early, and that young people don't switch from pre-med to pre-law), Schwarzenegger's plan will be like pushing on a wallpaper bubble: the problem will just pop up somewhere else. You might still have doctors — just the wrong kind (which, somehow, "solves the problem").

As I remarked previously: How insane does a politician have to be to conclude that the best way to increase the supply of a scarce resource is by taxing it?

(Both links via Kevin, M.D.)