[NYC GOP Chick]

The principal cause of this shortfall is easy to discern. In the early 1990s, federal and provincial health ministers sought to reduce the number of students admitted to medical schools, encouraged older doctors to retire early and limited the number of foreign-trained docs entering the country. The theory was that fewer physicians would result in lower medicare billings and fewer hospital admissions, thus producing savings to public treasuries -- as though doctors control who gets sick and how many seek treatment.

Of *course* it takes useless bureaucrats to turn medical care into some commodity whose use can be predicted and something that can be rationed without regard to people's lives. I bet they also have a certain set percentage of unnecessary deaths that they're willing to accept -- in order to stay on budget.

And as the Fraser Institute pointed out again this week, waiting lists grow longer each year. Nearly 900,000 Canadians are currently waiting for diagnosis or treatment for what ails them. Waits lengthened in 2003 to an average of 17.7 weeks nationally for all procedures, up from 16.5 weeks the year before. More troubling still, Fraser found that specialists now believe "over 90% of waiting times are ... beyond clinically reasonable times." Hundreds die annually waiting for treatment that would come much faster in other nations; thousands more live with severe pain or disability.

Hillarycare -- as envisioned by Hitlery itself -- would have been even worse than this, given our larger and more diverse population.

Governments have proven themselves hopeless at getting the money to where it will do the most good, so the task should be left to the rest of us. By freeing patients to buy extra care, or faster care, our health system will receive the market signals so vital to determining the balance between supply and demand. Private spending will also increase the amount of money in the system as a whole, thus permitting governments to redirect the amount they spend to the needy patients who need it most.

But as the Sinkmaster himself once told a cheering crowd in upstate NY, regarding proposed GOP tax cuts: "What if we give you back YOUR OWN MONEY AND YOU SPEND IT WRONG?" We can't have people making decisions for themselves, now can we?!

That's the whole socialist/democRat argument in a nutshell -- that we are too stupid, selfish, short-sighted, whatever, to manage our own money and our own lives, and the *only* way we can survive in this big bad world is to hand over all control (and money) to the oh so wise politicians.

[litany_of_lies]

Canadians won't receive the world-class level of health care they deserve.

Whether they deserve world-class care is highly debatable.

Too many Canadians consider "free" nationalized healthcare to be their national treasure, and wave it in our faces when there are headlines about uninsured or underinsured patients, medical inflation, etc.

They are stewing in their own juices (you make your bed and you lie in it, or in this case wait forever to lie in it), and until they figure out that it's the lockstep liberals who have controlled the country for the past 20 years or so who have ruined the healthcare system for everyone, it's hard to have a lot of sympathy.

[friendly]

Post 11: excelent!!

And you are absolutely right that the rats would make our system far, far worse that the rapidly declining Canadian mess.

[SauronOfMordor]

That's the whole socialist/democRat argument in a nutshell -- that we are too stupid, selfish, short-sighted, whatever, to manage our own money and our own lives, and the *only* way we can survive in this big bad world is to hand over all control (and money) to the oh so wise politicians.

That's the whole attractiveness of Socialism to the intelligencia (alias the chattering class): they visualize themselves as the "planners" of the planned economy