Some years ago, I observed in my autobiography that when health-care becomes a free commodity, it is abused and ultimately destroyed by ignorant and weak-willed people. To these people, the concepts of self-reliance and personal responsibility are not just foreign, they might as well be Martian. Their response to any minor setback is to: 1. Blame the system; 2. Insist that society must solve their self-inflicted woe (with the assumption that the rest of us will pay for it); 3. Run crying to an expensive (but not to them) professional, be it a doctor or a social worker; and 4. Demand a magic pill that will solve all their problems.

Like most sensible and responsible analyses, mine was met by a rousing chorus of self-righteous finger-wagging and nanny-socialist tongue-clucking from the Medicare-huggers. The usual politically-correct chestnuts were dusted off: How could I blame the victims? Don’t we have a responsibility to help the self-disadvantaged! Why was I kicking people when they were down (although most of them are actually higher than a kite on some welfare-subsidized drug).

I must have reproached myself a thousand times for not realizing that the poor are somehow more deserving than those of us who have to pay for their excesses.

Well, I hate to rain on the parade of the bejewelled do-gooders and self-appointed champions of the oppressed, but a new study confirms that unfettered freely-available healthcare harms most of those it is designed to help: the poor. I will refrain from utilizing Trudeau’s one-fingered I-told-you-so salute.

The Fraser Institute study is pretty obvious common-sense stuff really (though not to the Diana-worshipping defenders of the downtrodden) – supply and demand, lack of market discipline, etc. Provide an infinite supply of (taxpayer supported) medical services and demand (especially among the lower orders who seem to view doctors as agony aunts and emergency rooms as social centres) will instantly expand to exceed the supply.

But the overt abuses (lonely people seeing $200 per hour specialists just because they need someone to talk to) are just the tip of the titanically-arrogant socialist iceberg. The Fraser Institute study points out that there are subtler, long term, but just as destructive abuses of the Medicare system. Without the self-regulating effect of market forces, poor people take disproportionate advantage of the healthcare system (disproportionately paid for by the rest of us) to selfishly increase their own life-expectancy.

Needless to say, this inflicts a whole host of evils on society – increased costs for every social program on the book, exploding crime rates and urban decay, out-of-control welfare fraud, etc. What the study points out, and the bloated poverty/social-worker complex refuse to understand, is that this most hurts the unsuspecting poor themselves. They are the ones who suffer prolonged degradation and humiliation from drug abuse, wife-beating, self-neglect, alcoholism, self-inflicted malnutrition, and so on.

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of this misguided statist meddling is that it actually exacerbates child poverty.

One of the most demonstrable effects of free (to the non-taxpaying) health-care is the dramatic reduction of infant mortality rates among the lower classes. The disastrous side-effect is more children living with poor maladjusted parents who can’t cope with normal life, and, therefore, spiralling rates of child abuse and neglect, fetal alcohol syndrome – in short, increasing all the social ills that the system is supposed to solve. Thus, the vicious cycle accelerates and the so-called advocates of the poor inadvertently slam shut the last escape hatch from the welfare trap.