Free Healthcare?

Free healthcare is a truly mind boggling thing when you think about it. We have somehow come to the conclusion that healthcare should be free. Even the suggestion that someone should pay $5 to go to the doctors to help bolster Medicare is considered extremism in our society. It is generally accepted across both sides of the isle that healthcare should be free. 

But to call it free is dishonest. Nothing is free. This is paid for by subsidies that come from tax and money printing. This has made the cost of healthcare for our society as a whole much more expensive. Whatever the government subsidizes significantly increases in price, this is a fact. This was observed with the NDIS that certain services on becoming subsidized immediately raised their prices per hour. This has happened across the medical industry and beyond. 

Across our society things are far more expensive than they should be, because of generous subsidies or welfare. I read one statistic the other day that showed the cost of housing is 50% cheaper in the USA than here, in relation to income. We mock the US often for having expensive healthcare if they don't have insurance, but if houses were 50% cheaper this would offset that a fair bit, right? This is in part because they do not have the same level of subsidies there that we do. 

So, in other words. We have created a fiction that healthcare or some other service is free. When in reality we have shifted the cost, and now we are in a situation where basic things like housing, something else the government has stimulated through subsidies and immigration, are becoming cripplingly expensive. 

To put it another way, free was a lie, we just shifted the cost burden, and now every single one of us is worse off, because we wanted to believe a lie that if the government paid for it with our money that means it is free. I would have no problem paying, $20, $30, $40 to go see a doctor on occasion. It would certainly motivate us to be more intentional about our health and why we are visiting, correct? A KFC meal is nearly $20 now. People will happily pay that to slowly poison themselves, but will violently criticize the idea that we should bear some of the cost for our own health. It is remarkable to consider that we have gotten to this place as a society. We are a very entitled people. And I don't see this changing. 

Eventually, this debt bubble will burst, and we'll end up having to pay, one way or another, all the costs anyway. No fiction can last forever.