This is pretty much all you have to read to understand my continuing opposition to a universal health care system in the United States:

Incentives drive any system, and the incentives of a government-financed health care system are contrary to the best interests of patients. In a multipayer system, patients produce revenues for the institutions that treat them. As a result, they are courted and welcomed. In a system of bureaucratically set global budgets, patients are cost centers, drains on resources and thus must be rationed.

Luckily, though, there’s a whole lot more in Sally Pipes’ article today in the Seattle PI. As a transplant from Canada, here experience with the socialized Canadian health care system drove her to share her thoughts with Americans who are eager to try their hand at even more government control and funding of our health care system.

The Canadian health care system provides yet another vindication of the insight that in socialistic systems, everything is free yet nothing is available. Or as two Supreme Court justices noted in last week’s opinion, “access to a waiting list is not access to health care.”

Well worth the read.