Single Payer Threat to Cancer Patients

American Spectator ^ | January 10, 2018, | BETSY MCCAUGHEY

[nickcarraway]

reast cancer kills 39% fewer women than twenty-five years ago. Prostate cancer kills 52% fewer men, the American Cancer Society announced last week. You can thank new technologies that detect cancer early and defeat it for many of the lives saved. Americans diagnosed with most types of cancer have better odds of surviving it in the U.S. than anywhere else on the planet.

But watch out. These staggering achievements are at risk. A chorus of Democratic politicians is kicking off 2018 with renewed calls for universal, government run healthcare. Leading the pack for single-payer are presidential contenders Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

Single-payer advocates intend to make their scheme affordable by slashing the use of costly medical technology and new drugs. That’s a death sentence for many cancer patients, robbing them of what they need to beat their illness.

Decades of medical inroads against cancer and America’s other top killer — cardiovascular disease — mean the average American turning 65 now will live nearly four years longer than someone who turned that age in 1970. Four bonus years of life.

Washington politicians who claim American healthcare is “broken” ignorantly disregard these facts. They measure progress by how many people have insurance rather than by how many patients can survive cancer and heart disease, the two diseases responsible for almost half the deaths in the U.S.

The lead editorial in the current issue of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, by Stanford economist Victor Fuchs, claims the way to make universal health insurance affordable is to curtail use of mammograms, costly new drugs, and diagnostic technologies.

[AndyTheBear]

reast cancer kills 39% fewer women than twenty-five years ago

Wow! I had never even heard of reast cancer before...that's shocking.

[omega4412]

Single payer = single formulary

[Lizavetta]

Stop saying single payer. Call it what it is.

TAXPAYER-FUNDED.

[nickcarraway]

I think that’s far too benevolent a description.

[Lizavetta]

Care to give a better description?

[MplsSteve]

You know that many in Congress, academia and the entertainment industry who push single payer will never ever have to live under one of that plan.

They’ll still get all the best treatments, best doctors, etc. etc.

[adorno]

Single-payer advocates intend to make their scheme affordable by slashing the use of costly medical technology and new drugs.

Democrats work one step at a time. It's how our government to grow to such a humongous and expensive size.

They already created Medicaid and Mecicare and CHIP and Obamacare.

Obamacare was supposed to be their starting point towards single-payer healthcare. That is still their goal.

So, the next step is to get single-payer, which they're looking to get next time they're in control.

They're willing to sacrifice expensive medicines and expensive procedure, in order to attain the single-payer, which they'll try to sell as "affordable" because of the lowered cost of medicines and treatments and equipment.

If they achieve that goal, they will, for certain, go after the medicines and equipment and treatments which they had "sacrificed". Once they have the single-payer system working, they will be twisting arms and blackmailing the drugs companies, and then....

they will have achieved their ultimate goal of complete government control of the healthcare system.

[PAR35]

The Obama team was upset that white males were getting treated for prostate cancer, so they cut back on testing.