The folks at Investors Business Daily are publishing (online) a chapter on the economics of medical care from Thomas Sowell's latest book. He may be our greatest living economist. This is the sort of ammunition we can use to sway those of the "Reality-Based Community" who are still actually, you know, reality-based. A small chunk (emphasis mine):
"Since governments get the resources used for medical care by taking those resources from the general population through taxation, there is no net reduction in the cost of maintaining health or curing sicknesses simply because the money is routed through political institutions and government bureaucracies, rather than being paid directly by patients to doctors.
Clearly, however, the widespread popularity of government-financed medical care systems means that many people expect some net benefit from this process. One reason is that governments typically do not simply pay whatever medical costs happen to be, as determined by supply and demand.
Governments impose price controls in order to try to keep the costs of medical care from absorbing so much of their budgets as to seriously restrict other government functions. Government-paid medical care is thus often an exercise in price control, and it creates situations that have been common for centuries in response to price controls on many other goods and services.
One of the reasons for the political popularity of price controls in general is that part of their costs are concealed — or, at least, are not visible initially when such laws are passed. Price controls are therefore particularly appealing to those who do not think beyond stage one — which can easily be a majority of the voters.
Artificially lower prices, created by government order rather than by supply and demand, encourage more use of goods or services, while discouraging the production of those same goods and services. Increased consumption and reduced production mean a shortage. The consequences are both quantitative and qualitative.
Even the visible shortages that follow price controls do not tell the whole story. Quality deterioration often accompanies reduced production under price control, whether what is being produced is food, housing, or numerous other goods and services whose prices have been kept artificially low by government fiat."
Read it, learn it, deploy it against the opposition. Don't make me break out the graphs for deadweight loss!
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