Anti-capitalists say that a single-payer system—in which citizens would be forced to foot the bill for each others' healthcare expenses through taxes—would be cheaper and more efficient to administer than a privately run system. Aside from being a violation of individual rights (man is not his brother's keeper), and wrong in every aspect of economics (suppressing market tendencies require much more pervasive administrative overhead than facilitating them), where is the evidence that such a large, coordinated government effort could even be executed? Nowhere. About the only examples that the twentieth century has to offer are Patton's Third Army and the Apollo Space Program (with the latter having limited justifiability).

Consider the problems the government has encountered in rolling out just one change, the infamous "Part D," to Medicare. A conspicuous Washington-section headline in the December 14th edition of the New York Times reads, "New Problems in the Medicare Drug Benefit." Insurers are reporting government delays in the handling of applications for the new prescription drug benefit. (These are new problems. That is, in addition to existing problems.) Insurers are waiting to issue identification cards to their customers, but the government cannot even verify participant names to ensure eligibility.

As for anti-capitalists' disdain for other "wasteful details" of execution, will they now see the value of marketing, consumer education, and product positioning? Probably not, even though tens of millions of seniors still cannot figure out how the prescription drug benefit works and whether they ought to enroll. Reports the Times,

Congress had assumed that beneficiaries would be grateful for the new coverage, but many have had difficulty evaluating the options. In most states, people have a choice of more than three dozen drug plans, with different premiums, deductibles, co-payments and lists of covered drugs.

That is a generous way of describing the mass confusion and frustration; nobody can spin this program into being a model of success and efficiency. The primary argument against single-payer is, of course, the rights-based argument, not the issue of practicality. But when even the practicality is so obviously doomed, it is a wonder that the idea can drum up proponents at all.

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