“Friedman noted that 56 percent of all hospitals in America were privately owned and for-profit in 1910. After 60 years of subsidies for government-run hospitals, the number had fallen to about 10 percent. It took decades, but by the early 1990s government had taken over almost the entire hospital industry.” (more…)

“This ‘free’ healthcare [in Canada] is not free. The money has to come from somewhere. It doesn’t grow on trees; it doesn’t just appear out of thin air, although this has been attempted via fiat stimulus injections. No, it comes from us. Looking us square in the eyes, the Canadian government has reached right into our pockets, pulled out our wallets and taken what they wanted. No questions asked. This is beyond theft.

“We have become economic hostages. I was under the impression that slavery was done away with long ago, however we have a new form of slavery. We are slaves to our government and its publicly funded programs. We welcomed it, we’ve preached it, and we school our kids in it.” (more…)

“Europeans very often are quite ignorant about the United States. The same way, American liberals are ignorant about the real situation in Europe. And it is not as beautiful as the liberals would want it. But every time I point that in a conversation, I get the same reply: ‘What about the free healthcare?’” (more…)

“From an economic point of view, a scarce good is a scarce good, whether it is medical care or sirloin steak. The problem is that government has piled intervention on top of intervention, and driving up the costs and making care less available in the process. The ‘failure’ of the present system is a government failure, period.” (more…)

“The actual solution to the problem of runaway medical costs lies in the precise opposite of the direction chosen by the Clinton [or Obama] plan. It is not the final destruction of the individual’s rational right to medical care, which is what the Clinton plan would achieve, but the restoration and full implementation of that right – that is, the removal of all government interference that stands between buyers and sellers of medical care or in any way causes medical care to be more expensive than it otherwise would be.” (more…)

“The link between the ‘consumer’ of healthcare and the provider has been broken for decades. There is no ‘free market’ in healthcare–there isn’t any market at all. We live in a Kafka-esque nightmare system in which ‘some are more equal than others’ and hundreds of thousands of dollars are lavished on worthless tests, procedures and medications for two reasons:

1. Because there’s ‘free money’ to pay the bills

2. So-called ‘defensive medicine’ in which worthless tests are administered to stave off random (sometimes valid, sometimes nuisance) malpractice lawsuits. (more…)

“Recent debate over ‘health care’ (oh, how I hate that term) presumes to pit advocates of 100% government management of medical services against advocates of the status quo…which is only about 95% government-managed.” (more…)

Sheldon Richman of the Foundation for Economic Education presents nine fallacies of health-care reform. (more…)

The bill says that the government can make home visits, disallow further children, tell you what to eat, and more.

Listen to the 8-minute audio here: Liberty Counsel: Government to make “home visits.” “A bureaucrat is going to tell you not to have another child.”

This man from the Liberty Counsel read the entire bill. In addition to other atrocities, the plan would allow bureaucrats to transfer money out of your bank account. (more…)