The incentives that are an essential part of recently passed healthcare reform have been tried many times before, always with the same result, warns economist Yuri Maltsev, Ph.D., in the summer 2011 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (www.jpands.org/vol16no2/maltsev.pdf) and in a presentation to AAPS members in Omaha last month.
Before defecting to the West, Maltsev was a member of a senior Soviet economics team that worked on President Gorbachev's reform package under perestroika.
The Soviet system looked good on paper, employing plan indicators to indicate hospital performance, Maltsev observes. Statistics such as infant mortality were misleading, however, and actual quality was appalling. In Russia, patients over the age of 60 were considered worthless parasites, and those over 70 were often denied even routine care unless they were members of the elite class.
"Age discrimination is very apparent in all government-run or heavily regulated medical systems," Maltsev writes. It has not yet taken hold in the U.S. because the elderly vote in large numbers. But Americans are insidiously being prepared for it by the architects of Obama's plan, he notes.
In Russia, the trend is toward privatization, while "Obama suggested a system that we can rightly define as communist or socialist," states Maltsev, quoting Oleg Kulikov, a member of the Russian Duma (parliament). Kulikov also remarked that "they [Americans] are assuming positions that we've abandoned."
While Marxist ideas perpetuate hatred and envy, blaming those who are better off for societal miseries, the real problem is socialist ideology. Socialists "ignored the fact that nobody puts forth effort without reward," Maltsev states. Apathy resulting from lack of any incentive to excel resulted in widespread corruption and extensive loss of life.
The crisis of the socialist welfare state throughout Europe is triggering calls for privatization as a critical feature of a more efficient and more humane system.
