The United Kingdom has one of the most statist healthcare systems in the world. Indeed, my Cato colleague Mike Tanner produced an excellent study showing that the U.K. system is  more rigid and centralized than what is found even in nations such as Germany and France. Not surprisingly, this has generated terrible results for the […]

A couple of years ago, Paul Krugman assured us that government-run healthcare was a good idea, writing that “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.” Well, if the stories are false, the British press must […]

That seems like a joke question, but it’s an apparently serious belief of Bruce Bartlett, a former supply-sider and Bush Administration official who has flipped sides and joined the left. I’ve known Bruce for decades and he’s a fun guy to hang out with, but he’s gone hard left in recent years, pimping for a […]

This is rather remarkable. According to a story in the UK-based Daily Mail, a man was left to die, on a hospital floor, over a period of 10 hours. I’m not sure whether this is the worst example of government-run healthcare (or non-healthcare, to be more precise). I’ve commented before about the sub-par government-run healthcare […]

This is the most depressing – but revealing – thing I have read in a long time: “the health-care sector has twice as many clerical workers as nurses and nine times as many as doctors.” That passage is from a very good column by Robert Samuelson, in which he covers a lot of ground. He […]

My good friend Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University did a very illuminating interview with Bloomberg about the serial inaccuracy of government fiscal forecasts. Veronique uses health care as an example, giving particular attention to the Medicare program. One obvious implication is that we should have zero faith in the […]

The line between political truth and literary fiction is getting very blurry. One of the main features of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was the choice of productive people to withdraw their talents from the economy to deprive the statists of a source of loot. Who would have guessed, more than 50 years later, that the […]

Michael Barone of the American Enterprise Institute goes to town on the selective, discriminatory, and politically motivated dispensation of Obamacare waivers. I particularly like how he zings the left by asking why, if Obamacare is so wonderful, so many millions of people trying to escape the President’s new scheme. But the more important message in […]

Republicans are understandably nervous about polling data showing considerable opposition to the Ryan plan’s Medicare proposal – particularly since they just voted for a budget resolution in the House of Representatives that includes such a reform. Their unease is warranted. GOPers almost surely will be subjected to a scorched-earth campaign in 2012, featuring lots of […]