Replies

Read the comments after the article, like this one:

‘”Earlier this year, I woke up at about 4 in the morning with serious abdominal pain. My Mom and I went to the ER and got checked in. They did all their tests, and it turned out I had appendicitis. I got the appendix out in the next 2 hours, stayed overnight, and got checked out the next day.
Our healthcare system is far from perfect (and way too damn expensive). We need to make it better, but I don’t believe socialized medicine is the way to go. If I couldn’t have gotten care at my hosipital, and had to be moved I would’ve been scared shitless. I can’t even imagine it.

Emily M. on June 28, 2009 at 4:04 PM
And if you had been in Canada or Britian you might have died. Much cheaper to deal with than some pesky operation.

Canada’s Nationalized Health Care Continues Jeopardizing Patients’ Lives
http://ginacobb.typepad.com/gina_cobb/2007/10/canadas-nationa.html

Yet another near disaster in Canada’s socialized health care system, as a man desperately searched for a hospital to give him an emergency appendectomy:

. . . the 21-year-old Gatineau [Quebec] student went to bed, thinking he’d feel better by the morning. But when he woke up the next day, the pain was still there, and it was getting worse.

He headed to Gatineau Memorial Hospital, thinking that doctors would soon figure out what was ailing him and take care of it.

He never imagined the ordeal that would follow: The young man was turned away from five hospitals, got lost in an ambulance and, 28 hours after he was diagnosed, he had a burst appendix removed — in Montreal.

Single Payer Singularly Unsuccessful

http://www.i2i.org/main/article.php?article_id=158

In 2001, Lisa Campbells physician suspected appendicitis and sent the 18-year-old to the Royal Cornwall Hospital with a letter requesting urgent attention. She spent 12 hours on the hospital floor wrapped in a blanket. Despite a high fever, vomiting, and excruciating pain, the hospital would not examine her until a gurney was available. It took two more days to diagnose appendicitis.

As treating sick people is more expensive than letting them die, single payer systems also discriminate against the elderly and powerless.

izoneguy on June 28, 2009 at 5:24 PM’