Posted on 08/28/2006 8:30:01 PM PDT by FairOpinion
A national healthcare system may be the Holy Grail of American liberalism. If only the government managed medicine, the argument goes, costs could be restrained, quality assured, and access extended from the poshest beach house to the humblest shotgun shack. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” last fall, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D.–Ill.) advocated a “universal health-care system over the next 10 years.” If Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D.–N. Y.) reaches the Oval Office, she likely would take another crack at socialized medicine, as she did so disastrously in 1994.
Amy Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research sees this model more as a poisoned chalice. Her Washington-based free-market think tank (with which I am a Distinguished Fellow) has begun educating Americans on the massive belly flop that is state-sponsored healthcare. Wherever bureaucrats control medicine, the wise money says: “Don’t get sick.”
It would be bad enough if national healthcare merely offered patients low-quality treatment. Even worse, Ridenour finds, it kills them.
Breast cancer is fatal to 25 percent of its American victims. In Great Britain and New Zealand, both socialized-medicine havens, breast cancer kills 46 percent of women it strikes.
Prostate cancer proves fatal to 19 percent of its American sufferers. In single-payer Canada, the National Center for Policy Analysis reports, this ailment kills 25 percent of such men and eradicates 57 percent of their British counterparts.
After major surgery, a 2003 British study found, 2.5 percent of American patients died in hospital versus nearly 10 percent of similar Britons. Seriously ill US hospital patients die at one-seventh the pace of those in the U.K.
“In usual circumstances, people over age 75 should not be accepted” for treatment of end-state renal failure, according to New Zealand’s official guidelines. Unfortunately, for older Kiwis, government controls kidney dialysis.
According to a Populus survey, 98 percent of Britons want to reduce the time between diagnosis and treatment. Unlike America’s imperfect but more market-driven healthcare industry, nationalized systems usually divide patients and caregivers. In America, patients and doctors often make medical decisions and thus demand the best-available diagnostic tools, procedures, and drugs. Affordability obviously plays its part, but the fact that most Americans either pay for themselves or carry various levels of insurance guarantees a market whose profits reward medical innovators.
Under socialized medicine, public officials administer a single budget and usually ration care among a population whose sole choice is to take whatever therapies the state monopoly provides.
Medicrats often distribute resources based on politics rather than science. Government doctors and nurses frequently are unionized. As befalls American teachers in government schools, excellence rarely generates additional compensation -- so why excel? Without incentives, such structures eventually breed mediocrity. Patients in universal-care systems get cheated even worse than do students in failing public schools. While their pupils suffer intellectually, politically driven healthcare jeopardizes patients’ lives.
Emily Morely, 57, of Meath Park, Canada discovered that cancer had invaded her liver, lungs, pancreas, and spine. She also learned she had to wait at least three months to see an oncologist. In Canada, where private medicine is illegal, this could have meant death. However, Morely saw a doctor after one month -- once her children alerted Canada’s legislature and mounted an international publicity campaign.
James Tyndale, 54, of Cambridge, England, wanted Velcade to stop his bone-marrow cancer. However, the government’s so-called “postcode lottery” supplied this drug to some cities, but not Cambridge. The NHS finally relented after complaints from the Tories’ Shadow Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, MP.
Edward Atkinson, 75, of Norfolk, England was deleted from a government-hospital’s hip-replacement surgery waiting list after he mailed graphic pro-life literature to hospital employees. “We exercised our right to decline treatment to him for anything other than life-threatening conditions,” said administrator Ruth May. She claimed her employees objected to Atkinson’s materials. Despite a Member of Parliament’s pleas, Atkinson still awaits surgery.
For all its problems, America’s more market-friendly health system offers patients better care and would deliver greater advancements if government adopted liability reform, interstate medical insurance sales, unhindered Health Savings Accounts, and other pro-market improvements. As for importing universal care, author P.J. O’Rourke said it best: “If you think healthcare is expensive now, just wait until it’s free.”
The Dems are still working on this.
In CA, the overwhelmingly leftist Dem Legislature just passed a bill to have universal healthcare in CA.
California Assembly passes bill to provide universal health care
SEE THE FRENCH MEDICAL SYSTEM. Pure socialism and it takes forever to get to see a doctor.
The worst care anyone receives in America is better and faster and cheaper than anything government could provide if it were in charge.
The reason our healthcare can be more expensive is often a result of higher quality and availability.
Lots of people could do it worse for less money. That's not the trick. And government's track record is to do it worse for more money. What the democrats want is for that money to be somebody elses. And sell their votes for it motivated by class warfare.
On a positive note: The waiting list for an abortion is 10 months long.
Somewhere there are liberal, activists "judges" rubbing their hands together just waiting to "decide" that denying "universal healthcare" to illegal aliens is "unconstitional." America will become the world's hospital waiting room.
I think the bill passed in CA to provide universal healthcare already specifically states that it includes illegals.
Social History:
1. Do you drink alcohol....and how much daily?
2. Have you ever, or do you smoke?
3. Do you drive a car?
I answered the first one, and then rethought the whole thing and scribbled out my response.....
approx. 1 mole
I was depressed for 24 hours when I read of that CA bill. don't those morons ever learn? One crisis after another.
Be informed- and be WARNED. You won't see those frightening statistics discussed in the MSM-wonder why.........
We would be the Katrina of medical care if we allowed the Democrats to force socialized medicine.
Well, considering every major American company is getting crushed by health care costs and the expenses to manage those programs, medical bills are driving thousands to bankruptcy (even if they have health insurance), Health costs take up 13% of our GDP (the highest in the world) and US consumers are forced to accept the care accountants in the HMO say they need and not the doctors.
I think most people don't realize the devatating, and I do mean devastating effects on their health and very lives socilized healthcare would have.
A sane point from one of the articles about the CA socialized medicine the Legislature just passed:
"But opponents counter that access to health care would be limited under a single-payer system because care would be rationed and the latest medical technologies would no longer be widely available.
They also argue that the reform would result in a multi-billion dollar tax hike, and the state’s population would explode as people moved to California to take advantage of the new system, according to Senate and Assembly committee reports which list arguments for and against the bill. "
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1690230/posts
WOW....what a rant.....I wasn't quoting the Bible, by the way.....I just like the thought that goodness (being good/doing good) wins......oh, and by the way, if the doc had ASKED me, YES, I would have answered, but when they are titled SOCIAL HISTORY (NOT Medical) on a form......I find them idiotic. Have a good day to you to. SHEESH.
P.S.....LOTS of things constrict blood vessels.....fatty food, high blood pressure,
Good luck on your cataract surgery....some day I'll have mine fixed, too.....they just keep saying wait.
ping
In Canada with goverment run health care even worse certain politically correct procedures get priority funding...abortions of course and even transgender operations..you may have to wait months for hip replacement but no shortage of funding for abortion
If there is socialized medicine, I imagine they'd just remove the age limits to Medicare and open it to everyone (amd good luck getting them to screen for citizenship). I'm not retired (or in the medical field) so I've never dealt with Medicare, is it appreciably worse than Blue Cross or other private insurers?
Sooner or later, the Democrats are going to win Congress and crush the present health care system. The issue is, what's the least bad option? I'm doubtful that an expanded Medicare is worse than Hillarycare-- government controlling private insurers.
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