Government frames and blames HMOs. But the government created HMOs in 1974 and mandated their use in the early 1980's. Further, government spends 52 cents out of every health care dollar in America and regulates 100% of all health care services. Health care is the most heavily regulated industry in America. Yet in 1999, the Amherst, Massachusetts Town Government passed a resolution to "end the free market carnage in health care." And the US Congress regularly subpoenas and interrogates health care providers in front of television cameras... blaming HMOs for the crimes of government.

Uruguay’s economy became less and less able to sustain the demands of its burgeoning welfare system. The bureaucracy had grown to cumbersome proportions, unions were militant and vocal about wages and benefits, and government spending was accelerating year by year. Meanwhile, exports declined, capital diminished, and investment - in a country where nearly half the work force was employed by the state - was almost non-existent. By the mid-1950's, Uruguay’s economy was in shambles. And over the next 20 years, the country underwent a period of prolonged stagnation. Unemployment rose, exports fell, and trade deficits widened. The gross national product fell sharply and real wages declined - by 1967, they were to 40% of what they were in 1957. Perhaps most devastatingly, however, inflation rose precipitously...Many Uruguayans now realize that the welfare state comes at a heavy cost. The quixotic promises of Batllism - that the state would provide for the citizen’s every need - have largely been abandoned for a more pragmatic, market-oriented economy. It is a lesson that Europe, with its high levels of unemployment, stubborn inflation, and bloated bureaucracy, is beginning to learn. It is a lesson, unfortunately, that the United States seems all too determined to resist.

The welfare culture tells the man he is not a necessary part of the family; he feels dispensable, his wife knows he is dispensable, his children sense it.

The man has the gradually sinking feeling that his role as provider, the definitive male activity from the primal days of the hunt through the industrial revolution and on into modern life, has been largely seized from him; he has been cuckolded by the compassionate state.

The American Social Security system must stand today as a frightening symbol of the almost inevitable tendency of any national relief, redistribution, or "insurance" scheme, once established, to run completely out of control.

Practically all government attempts to redistribute wealth and income tend to smother productive incentives and lead toward general impoverishment.

[T]he first requirement of solution is to sustain an economic system which has proved its ability to produce a "plenty" of goods, services, and comforts adequate for the needs of the whole population...there is no such system...that does not slow down the human stimulus and thereby decrease the volume of production...Having secured the "plenty" and the constant forward movement of the standards of living are nine-tenths of the great battle of humanity against poverty.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

A federally administered health care system would have all the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the Postal Service, and at Pentagon prices.

In countries of more advanced civilization and that a more insurrectionary spirit, the public, accustomed to expect everything to be done for them by the State, where at least to do nothing for themselves without asking from the State not only leave to do it, but even how it is to be done, naturally hold the State responsible for all evil which befalls them, and when the evil exceeds their amount of patience, they rise against the government and make what is called revolution; whereupon somebody else, with or without legitimate authority from the nation, vaults into the seat, issues his orders to the bureaucracy, and everything goes on much as it did before; the bureaucracy being unchanged, and nobody else being capable of taking their place.

MILL, JOHN STUART, On Liberty, Chapter 5

[W]here everything is done through the bureaucracy, nothing to which the bureaucracy is really adverse can be done at all... the more perfect that organization is in itself, the more successful in drawing to itself and educating for itself the persons of greatest capacity from all ranks of the community, the more complete is the bondage of all, the members of the bureaucracy included. For the governors are as much the slaves of their organization and discipline, as the governed are of the governors

MILL, JOHN STUART, On Liberty, Chapter 5

[T]he alternative to marketplace medicine isn’t infinite quantities of top-flight health care for everyone. It’s political rationing: letting a monopoly decide which treatments are truly necessary and which patients worthy of them.

A ‘mixed economy’ disintegrates a country into an institutionalized civil war of pressure groups, each fighting for legislative favors and special privileges at the expense of one another.

I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

[A] champion of the people emerges with the age-old and appealing promise of "something for nothing" - to be financed through every-increasing taxes. Supply and demand are thrown out of gear - the overhead goes up; the effective use of human energy goes down; the standard of living is lowered because money cannot buy wealth that is not produced.

-71 patients in Ontario, Canada died while waiting for bypass surgery, and another 121 had to wait so long there was no longer any point in operating. (Richard F. Davis, Canadian Medical Association Journal 160, no. 10, May 18, 1999);

-In Britain, on an annual basis, waiting lists cause a denial of treatment to 9,000 people for renal dialysis, 15,000 for cancer chemotherapy, and 17,000 for coronary artery surgery. (Source: Henry J. Aaron and William B. Schwartz, "The Painful Prescription: Rationing Hospital Care," the Brookings Institution, 1984).

This is death by waiting list. Death by rationing. Death by government.