It’s amazing. Did you know that there are adults who actually believe in the prosperity-generating potential of the robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul principle of governance? It’s like the “shell game”. If the peanut under the shell represents wealth, then shuffling it about through taxing schemes will magically produce more peanuts. Right?
Wrong, if one stays clear of the hallucinogenics and other intoxicants, and has the mental maturity beyond a preteen. Clinging to the illusion isn’t much different than insisting on the corporeal existence of Santa Claus.
The shyster logic isn’t understood to be shyster logic among those “feeling the Bern” and within the Democratic Party hive. It’s holy scripture. Santa Claus is real to them. Translation: Socialism is great! It’s no accident that the subjects in the 2 previous sentences begin with “S”.
No better example of the phenomena can be found than the unbridled faith in “socialized medicine”, Obamacare, “single payer”, the “public option”, and similar disfigurements of the language.
Of course, while appealing to the feeble-minded, the idea of a fat dude falling down a chimney delivering “free” goodies without any concept of cost may not be so convincing to the sober-minded. So, the equivalent of the North Pole must be created. For health care, and all things tax-and-spend, it’s Sweden or, more generally, Scandinavia … which also has the added advantage of being not too far from the North Pole.
But as in all dreams, one must awaken. Bernie Sanders invoking Sweden/Scandinavia may be more Santa Claus than the reality of mom and dad running up the credit card debt for the goodies placed under the tree. His image of Scandinavia is sheer fantasy.
The case of Robert Nielsen in Denmark, above, is instructive. He proudly boasts that he’s been on Danish welfare since 2001. He owns his own co-op apartment and eschews work. (4) This rise of dependency has shocked many Danes. It’s a problem spanning many Scandinavian countries.
The “Carina” (a psuedonym) story also outraged many Danes. She, 36 and a single mother, has been on welfare since age 16, currently receiving $2,700 a month. Many Danes are thinking the formerly unthinkable – welfare reform.
Karen Haekkerup, the minister of social affairs and integration, in 2013 exclaimed,
“In the past, people never asked for help unless they needed it. My grandmother was offered a pension and she was offended. She did not need it. But now people do not have that mentality. They think of these benefits as their rights. The rights have just expanded and expanded. And it has brought us a good quality of life. But now we need to go back to the rights and the duties. We all have to contribute.”(4)
There are more problems than the refusal to wean from the government teat. Sweden is forced to grapple with difficulties associated with a bountiful healthcare teat. One unavoidable problem arises from the necessity of implementing the “California DMV” model of provisioning government medical care. You’ll be assigned a client ID number, a priority number, take a seat and … wait. It’s how government naturally responds when confronted with millions of users for all things advertised as “free”.
(LA DMV office, 2014)
In Sweden, patients, like cattle, are herded into monolithic facilities like the one below. Everyone is assigned a district (landsting) and must utilize it’s hospital. In many cases, there ‘s only one per landsting.(1)
(Sodersjukhuset, Stockholm hospital, 2014, by Arild Vagen)
Since “free” outperforms price, public (government) eviscerates private care. The remaining private medical operations are heavily regulated by the state. They might as well be “public”. (1)
Another of the ways that the DMV-style of healthcare adapts to the crowd seeking “free” is the ranking of patients. Government prioritizes according to “future taxpayer value” and similar numbers-driven analytics. Woe be to you if you’re old and need a procedure normally assigned to the aged.(1)
Government behavior will produce a sinking sensation when one hears “wait times”. Emergency room wait times are 5-7 hours during the 9-5 slot and only Monday through Friday. Beware: Don’t get sick or injured after-hours and on weekends. Furthermore, sickness and injuries should be avoided during the public employee vacation season of June to August.(1)
“Wait times” for a general practitioner are typically a month. It’s worse for specialists. If your son is experiencing gender-identity difficulties, the surrender to surgery may have already occurred in the 18 months before seeing a child psychiatrist.(2)
Klaus Bernpainter, Swedish healthcare expert, captures the situation in an anecdote.
“When I moved to the U.S., our family health insurance took three months to kick in. One of my family members broke a leg in this period. We found a ‘five-minute clinic’ half an hour away, had the leg X-rayed, straightened and casted, with no waiting time — all for $200 cash. That kind of service is non-existent in Sweden.”(1)
Of course, the whole thing is executed by functionaries with the caring and affection of a protected, tenured DMV counter clerk.(1)
(Still from the 1962 film adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial.)
If you can’t apply the word “panacea” to Scandinavian healthcare, what about Scandinavian education? Well, their education Borg could be confused with our own. Sweden’s math and reading scores, according to OECD numbers, are more dismal than ours. For all of Scandinavia, they’re treading water with us.(5)
Much of the freebie government stuff has become a problem for them, and many in the upper northern latitudes know it. Yet, many Americans trek on up to places like Copenhagen and Stockholm and return with sugar plums dancing in their heads. Many natives have a different point of view. They notice the decline, and the depressing realization that they’re living off the fumes of the past.
Freebie-Scandinavia didn’t always exist. For example, Sweden was one of the poorest countries in Europe, hence all the 19th-century immigration to places like Minnesota and a football team named after them. Starting in 1870, an economic renaissance began. Free-market reforms on taxes, tariffs, and property rights produced a surge of prosperity. Sweden experienced the highest GDP growth in the industrial world from 1870-1936.(3)
Then, something happened on the way to the future. Forgetting the legacy in the late 60s and 70s, they embarked on an escalator of soaring taxes, spending, and welfare rolls, with the attendant rise in crime, drug addiction, welfare dependency, and red tape. In 1976, Time Magazine summarized what many Norse were thinking, “Growing numbers are plagued by a persistent, gnawing question: Is their Utopia going sour?”(3) Indeed.
And those “feeling the Bern” and the pandering, identity-politicians of the Democratic Party want us to jump on board the sour-utopia train. Much of the Trumpophobia is rooted in the fantasy of Scandinaviophilia.
We’d be much better served by keeping in mind Friedman’s old maxim TINSTAAFL – There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. The fact is, politicians can’t bring on the eschaton and its paradise.
RogerG
Sources:
(1) “The Truth About SwedenCare”, Klaus Bernpaintner, The Mises Institute, 7/10/2013, https://mises.org/library/truth-about-swedencare
(2) “Sweden’s healthcare is an embarrassment”, The Local, se, Johan Hjertqvist is President of Health Consumer Powerhouse, a Swedish-based organization which compares healthcare systems around the world (This is an abridged version of an article originally published in Swedish bySvenska Dagbladet.), http://www.thelocal.se/20150127/swedens-health-care-is-a-shame-to-the-country
(3) “No, Bernie Sanders, Scandinavia is not a socialist utopia”, Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, 10/15/2015,https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/10/15/bernie-sanders-scandinavia-not-socialist-utopia/lUk9N7dZotJRbvn8PosoIN/story.html
(4) “Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault”, Suzanne Daley, NYT, 4/20/13, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/world/europe/danes-rethink-a-welfare-state-ample-to-a-fault.html
(5) “Scandinavia Isn’t a Socialist Paradise: If you’re looking for a prosperous European country to emulate, don’t look to the high-tax social democracies of Scandinavia. Check out Switzerland, instead. ”, Kelly McDonald, The Federalist, 8/11/15, http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/11/scandinavia-isnt-a-socialist-paradise/
(6) “The strange death of social-democratic Sweden”, The Economist, 9/16/10, http://www.economist.com/node/17039151