Conservative Think Tank Ranks Countries With Government-Run Health Care As The Freest In World
By Zack Beauchamp on Jan 11, 2013 at 6:00 pm
Former Senator Jim DeMint, the new president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has decried Obamacare as “a cancer” that is “is fundamentally inconsistent with liberty.” During the Senate Obamacare fight, DeMint famously declared “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”
But a new report from DeMint’s own organization suggests that, far from being incompatible with freedom, countries with health care systems with as much or significantly more government control over healthcare are the freest countries in the world.
The report in question is Heritage’s Economic Freedom Index, released annually since 1997. The report defines the concept of “economic freedom” in misleading right-wing terms, but even by those standards, it appears that universal health care systems far more expansive than Obamacare aren’t “fundamentally inconsistent with liberty.” In fact, the ten “freest” economies in 2013 by Heritage’s lights range from mandating individuals save a certain amount of money for health care to almost the entire health care system, including hospitals, being owned and operated by the government:
1. Hong Kong: The semi-autonomous city inside China has a universal, publicly run health care system: about 80 percent of Hong Kong hospitals are government owned and operated. While private supplemental insurance is available, it’s more expensive than public services.
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read more:
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/01/11/1429241/conservative-think-tank-ranks-government-run-health-care-as-compatible-with-freedom/
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