The media are selling coronavirus as the worst thing since the Black Death (mortality rate: 40–60 percent). This allows them and Democrat politicians to make two arguments: one, that Trump is incompetent and, two, that socialized medicine is the answer. They are wrong on both points, especially about socialized medicine. Socialized medicine kills.

Tom Elliott has put together a mind-boggling supercut of leftists stating that the coronavirus proves the need for socialized medicine:

This is ignorance speaking. Here are the facts:

First, throughout the Cold War, Europe didn't have socialized medicine. It had American-funded medicine because America subsidized Europe's defense budget.

Second, people in socialized medicine countries don't have babies. Europe has a negative growth rate. A "pay it forward" medical system doesn't work when the bulk of the users are using (not funding) the system while the number of young people funding it shrinks. Europe tried to fix this by importing cheap labor from Turkey, Africa, and the Middle East. That's not working well.

Third, socialized medicine doesn't offer care; it offers access. Access without good outcomes is not medical care. Scott Atlas's "The Worst Study Ever?" (which is available intermittently at Commentary) broke out the numbers:

World Health Report 2000 was an intellectual fraud of historic consequence — a profoundly deceptive document that is only marginally a measure of health-care performance at all. The report's true achievement was to rank countries according to their alignment with a specific political and economic ideal — socialized medicine — and then claim it was an objective measure of "quality." [snip] The nature of the enterprise came more fully into view with WHO's introduction and explanation of the five weighted factors that made up its index. Those factors are "Health Level," which made up 25 percent of "overall care"; "Health Distribution," which made up another 25 percent; "Responsiveness," accounting for 12.5 percent; "Responsiveness Distribution," at 12.5 percent; and "Financial Fairness," at 25 percent. The definitions of each factor reveal the ways in which scientific objectivity was a secondary consideration at best. What is "Responsiveness," for example? WHO defined it in part by calculating a nation's "respect for persons." How could it possibly quantify such a subjective notion? It did so through calculations of even more vague subconditions — "respect for dignity," "confidentiality," and "autonomy."

Fourth, Reggie Hamm's viral post about hospital care in China nails how the government has no incentive to provide decent care:

I was witnessing the kind of maximum, almost brutal efficiency a society must develop when the state is the master and the individual is merely a subject. Why would a Communist country not have an effective FDA? Because who are you going to complain to if you get tainted food? The government? They don't answer to you. The press? They are owned by the government. And again, they don't answer to you. So what if you don't like the conditions in the hospital? Where else are you going to go? This hospital is the last (and only) stop. You can't opt for another place and then just pay out of your own pocket. The government has capped financial upward mobility. There is now "income equality." And that means nobody has the means to buy their way into a different (or better) situation. And even if you could, one doesn't exist. The state provides it all. You're stuck. [snip] Single payer also means single buyer. That means the dynamics of the market get eliminated. One of the natural checks-and-balances of finding a hot-shot surgeon willing to do the risky procedure or even just seek a second opinion, get chopped away little by little. Because now we're answering to the government. It isn't answering to us. After all, where are we gonna go? They've got us. And our cancer treatment or skin graft surgery or kidney stone blast is up to their red tape. Sure, we can get in the door for free. But we might die in there, waiting on someone with no incentive and who faces no recourse, to change our plasma bag.

Fifth, the only way to control prices under socialized medicine is to deny care to society's "dead weight" — the old and sick. You see that with Britain's Liverpool Care Pathway, which sent thousands of elderly patients to an early death.

Sixth, Democrats are ignoring a salient point about the coronavirus: it started in a country with socialized medicine (China) and is having its worst effects in two other countries with socialized medicine: Iran and Italy. There's a bright, flashing message in that that American leftists refuse to read.

Socialized medicine is not better medicine. It's a chimera that American leftists like because they are completely ignorant about its brutal realities.