Equality Kills

From the TimesOnline: "A WOMAN will be denied free National Health Service treatment for breast cancer if she seeks to improve her chances by paying privately for an additional drug...Ministers say it is unfair on patients who cannot afford such top-up drugs and that it will create a two-tier NHS. It is thought thousands of patients suffer as a result of the policy." (Via AdamSmith.org)

Let's say that John makes $100,000 a year while Bill makes $50,000 a year. One easy way to eliminate inequality between John and Bill is to destroy $50,000 of John's income each year. And this is essentially what the NHS is doing.

If rich people can afford expensive drugs that poor people can't, then the rich will have unequal health outcomes. To reduce this type of inequality the NHS is trying to get rich people to not take the expensive drugs even though the cost of these drugs will be born entirely by the rich patients. The NHS, therefore, is increasing medical equality just by reducing the health of affluent patients.

Whenever leftists talk about imposing very high taxes on the rich, free market types respond by saying that such taxes will cause the rich to work much less and so might actually reduce the welfare of everyone else. But I suspect that many on the left are so committed to equality that they would be willing to make everyone worse off so long as the rich suffered vastly more than everyone else.