Kl0NE

I am not a billionaire, so let me try to convince them. The first question is what does universal health care mean? Health care is not a thing that exists in nature. It is the knowledge, time, and effort of doctors, nurses, and the people who build the machines and discover the drugs. So "universal health care" means someone must provide all of that to everyone, and the question every slogan hides is: who, and on what terms? The money comes from taxation, which means it is taken from the people who earned it under threat of prison. There is no other source. "The government pays" means your neighbors pay, by force. And the care comes from the doctors. If the state sets what they may charge, what they may prescribe, and whom they must treat, then the doctor works on the government's terms, not his own. Ask what happens when fewer men choose to spend a decade training for a profession the state controls. Britain and Canada answer that question every day: waiting lists measured in months, scans and surgeries that never arrive, patients who die in queues the state calls coverage, and a steady flow of the sick toward the one country that still lets medicine turn a profit. Universal coverage is not universal care. It is a promise of care, rationed by bureaucrats, and the gap between the promise and the delivery is filled with suffering. And the innovations that would have saved the next generation, the drugs and devices nobody invents when discovery is punished with price controls, never exist at all. You cannot count what central planning prevents, which is exactly why its defenders never have to answer for it. You cannot have a right to another man's labor. Claiming one means he works for you whether he consents or not, and there is an old name for that arrangement. Is it communism? Not necessarily. That depends on the form it takes. But it is socialism and collectivism by definition: the individual's earnings and the physician's work treated as public property, distributed by the state according to need. Same with "decent wages" set by law. A wage is a price for labor. Command a price above what the work produces and the job disappears. That is why every minimum wage hike is followed by kiosks. Nobody needed a billionaire to explain this. The case against collectivism is not that it threatens billionaires. It is that it treats every man who earns anything as a means to the ends of others. The billionaires, frankly, have done a terrible job making it, which is why I am here.