Where do you get that Switzerland is a socialist nation, or even that they have socialised medicine as one tends to envision when thinking of Canada, Sweden, the UK, and other socialist hellholes?
Key facets of the Swiss health care system:
1. Swiss health care demonstrates that Governments need not be the single payer. Through their unusually mixed system of private and public contributions, the Swiss maintain a price mechanism which permits all people to influence the flow of funds into the system and avoid the widespread rationing typical of the UK.
2. The Swiss are price-conscious. In addition to the mixed source of funds, price consciousness is enabled through premium competition between insurers, choice of level of deductible, and co-payment.
3. Governments should not impose a single provider because consumers cannot escape bad service. There is substantial private ownership of hospitals in Switzerland as well as a large number of independent GPs and specialists who operate from their own clinics. Through unlimited consumer choice of physician, the system encourages doctors to serve their patients, and so, the quality of medical service supply is guaranteed by the market. Unfortunately, competition is less effective in the hospital sector, where cantonal cartels have forced up prices. [Phaedrus adds: this last point demontrates the evil of state-private collusion quite nicely.]
4. Since the first health insurance law of 1911, the Swiss decided to avoid a compulsory link with employers because it makes it harder to move towards systems based on responsible consumers.
If someone else seems to be paying, personal responsibility is diminished.
5. The Swiss recognise the special nature of health care it is partly a moral necessity and partly an ordinary consumer good.
6. The Swiss ensure that people dependent on government support do not have an obviously inferior service. In practice, Switzerland applies a market test.
They recognise that the state cannot guarantee the standard of care enjoyed by the rich and so it cannot honestly promise an equal service without suppressing all private health care.
(emphasis added)
(Source:
Civitas)
Additionally, the Swiss have a largely de-centralised federal power (recent trends notwithstanding) a relatively small federal (<12% of GDP) and tiny military (<1% of GDP) budgets, no state-controlled industries (except for private-public joint-venture utilities common all over the world) etc.
Hardly a socialist Utopia there.
Phaedrus
