My friend Yuri Maltsev is the author of a disturbing article titled "What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us." This consequentialist tour de force was published online as a Mises Daily essay on August 21, 2009. I cannot forget the lessons imparted by Yuri in this short editorial.
In the article Yuri documents, from official sources and personal experience, the utter depravity of "the complete socialization of medicine." Example #1: "According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals." Example #2: "After seventy years of socialism, 57 percent of all Russian hospitals did not have running not water, and 36 percent of hospitals located in rural areas of Russia did not have water or sewage at all." Example #3: "At the end of the socialist experiment, the official infant-mortality rate in Russia was more than 2.5 times as high as in the United States and more than five times that of Japan." These, and similar, facts are ignored by the proponents of coercive medicine in the United States.
What is the purpose of Yuri's article? He is trying to warn Americans about the decivilizing consequences of coercive medicine. Will we listen?
In the article Yuri documents, from official sources and personal experience, the utter depravity of "the complete socialization of medicine." Example #1: "According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals." Example #2: "After seventy years of socialism, 57 percent of all Russian hospitals did not have running not water, and 36 percent of hospitals located in rural areas of Russia did not have water or sewage at all." Example #3: "At the end of the socialist experiment, the official infant-mortality rate in Russia was more than 2.5 times as high as in the United States and more than five times that of Japan." These, and similar, facts are ignored by the proponents of coercive medicine in the United States.
What is the purpose of Yuri's article? He is trying to warn Americans about the decivilizing consequences of coercive medicine. Will we listen?
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