Last week, Nevada’s government bureaucrats jacked up certain “fees” (taxes) charged to operate a medical facility through the roof. The cost to run a hospital in rural Nevada is jumping from $1,500 to almost $10,000! The fee for urban hospitals is jumping from $10,000 to almost $15,000.
The revenue from these fees (taxes) is earmarked to hire more government workers to inspect medical facilities every 12 to 18 months. “Inspections are appropriate and needed,” declared Health and Human Services director Mike Willden. “Nobody wants to go into a place that isn’t safe.”
However, to pay for the new sky-high fees (taxes), medical facilities say they might have to lay people off. So this is really nothing more than a redistribution of labor from the productive private sector to the unproductive regulatory public sector.
The excuse for raising the fees (taxes) on hospitals and other medical facilities, of course, is to “protect the public.” But if the objective is to protect the general public and the inspections are an effective and legitimate way to do that, then shouldn’t the general public pay for the cost instead of sticking it to the businesses being regulated by the government?
As Sen. John Lee (D-Las Vegas) put it: “I know patient safety is the total overall purpose of what we are doing. But in Nevada, how do you spell tax? F-E-E.”
