Honestly...

...it's like Thomas Sowell was reading our comments on health care. Do any of these sound recently familiar?

Like most young people, I was lucky enough not to have any heavy-duty medical expenses that would have required major operations or a long hospital stay. That is still true for most young people today, which is why many people in their twenties do not choose to pay for medical insurance, even when they can afford it.

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They know that, in an emergency, they can always go to an emergency room. And today the idea that you ought to pay for that out of your own pocket is considered almost quaint in some quarters.

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There are, of course, people with huge medical bills that they cannot possibly pay. Believe it or not, that also happened back before the modern welfare state.

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But that is very different from hospitals being stiffed every day by emergency room users whose only emergency is that they want to keep their money to spend on fun, instead of on doctors.

The biggest of the big lies in the "health care" hype is that a lack of insurance means a lack of medical care. The second biggest lie is that health care and medical care are the same thing.

Doctors cannot stop you from ruining your health in a hundred different ways, so statistics on everything from infant mortality to AIDS are not proof of a need for government to take over medical treatment.

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Few people show the slightest interest in what has actually happened in countries with government-controlled medical care.

We are apparently supposed to follow those countries' example without asking about the months that people in those countries spend on waiting lists for medical treatments that Americans get just by picking up a phone and making an appointment.