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Posts Tagged ‘socialized medicine’

Coral Ridge Ministries: Urgent Action Call: Healthcare
October 12, 2009Posted in Christian, Health Care, Obama, socialism | Tagged Coral Ridge Ministries, Healthcare, Obamacare, socialized medicine | Leave a Comment »

Taking A Razor To President’s Health Reform
June 23, 2009Taking A Razor To President’s Health Reform
By GEORGE F. WILL | IBD 23 June 2009
To dissect today’s health care debate, the crux of which concerns a “public option,” use the mind’s equivalent of a surgeon’s scalpel, Occam’s razor, a principle of intellectual parsimony: In solving a puzzle, start with the simplest theory.
The puzzle is: Why does the president, who says that were America “starting from scratch” he would favor a “single payer,” government-run system, insist that health care reform include a government insurance plan that competes with private insurers? The simplest answer is that such a plan will lead to a single-payer system.
Conservatives say a government program will have the intended consequence of crowding private insurers out of the market, encouraging employers to stop providing coverage and luring employees from private insurance to the government option.
The Lewin Group estimates that 70% of the 172 million people privately covered might be drawn, or pushed, to the government plan. A significant portion of the children who have enrolled in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program since eligibility requirements were relaxed in February had private insurance.
Assurances that the government plan would play by the rules that private insurers play by are implausible. Government is incapable of behaving like market-disciplined private insurers. Competition from the public option must be unfair because government does not need to make a profit and has enormous pricing and negotiating powers.
Besides, unless the point of a government plan is to be cheaper, it is pointless: If the public option conforms to the imperatives that regulations and competition impose on private insurers, there is no reason for it.
The president characteristically denies that he is doing what he is doing — putting the nation on a path to an outcome he considers desirable — just as he denies any intention of running General Motors.
Nevertheless, the unifying constant of his domestic policies — their connecting thread — is they advance the Democrats’ dependency agenda. The party of government aims to make Americans more equal by making them equally dependent on government.
Arguments for the public option are too feeble to seem ingenuous. The president says competition from a government plan is necessary to keep private insurers “honest.” Presumably, being “honest” means not colluding to set prices. Evidently he thinks that, absent competition from government, there will not be a competitive market for insurance. This ignores two facts:
There are 1,300 competing providers of health insurance. And Roll Call’s Morton Kondracke notes that the 2003 Medicare prescription drug entitlement, relying on competition among private insurers, enjoys 87% approval partly because competition has made premiums less expensive than had been projected. The program’s estimated cost from 2007 to 2016 has been reduced 43%.
Some advocates of a public option say health coverage is so complex that consumers will be befuddled by choices.
But consumers of many complicated products, from auto insurance to computers, have navigated the competition among providers, who have increased quality while lowering prices.
Although 70% of insured Americans rate their health care arrangements good or excellent, radical reform of health care is supposedly necessary because there are 45.7 million uninsured. That number is, however, a snapshot of a nation in which more than 20 million working Americans change jobs every year.
Many of them are briefly uninsured between jobs. If all the uninsured were assembled for a group photograph, and six months later the then-uninsured were assembled for another photograph, about half the people in the photos would be different.
Almost 39% of the uninsured are in five states — Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, all of which are entry points for immigrants; 21% — 9.7 million — of the uninsured are not citizens.
Up to 14 million are eligible for existing government programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Schip, veterans’ benefits, etc. — but have not enrolled.
And 9.1 million have household incomes of at least $75,000 and could purchase insurance. Those last two cohorts are more than half of the 45.7 million.
Insuring the perhaps 20 million people who are protractedly uninsured because they cannot afford insurance is conceptually simple: Give them money — (refundable) tax credits or debit cards (which have replaced food stamps) loaded with a particular value. This would produce people who are more empowered than dependent.
Unfortunately, advocates of a government option consider that a defect.
Which is why the simple idea of the dependency agenda cuts like a razor through the complexities of this debate.
Posted in Economy, Health Care | Tagged George Will, Healthcare, Obama, socialized medicine | Leave a Comment »

Dead Wait
June 23, 2009Dead Wait
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | 22 June 2009
Reform: As Americans debate who’s in control of their health care system, a lot of Britons aren’t concerned about how the argument turns out. They’re too busy trying to get a hospital room before it’s too late.
IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure
In Great Britain, where the government’s in charge of health care, as many as 1 million people are waiting to get into hospitals at any given time, says the National Center for Policy Analysis.
In Canada, another country where the government metes out care, roughly 900,000 are waiting for hospital beds, the Fraser Institute reports. The New Zealand government says that 90,000 are on hospital waiting lists there.
“Those people constitute only 1% to 2% of the population in those countries,” says NCPA President John Goodman, “but keep in mind that only about 15% of the population actually enters a hospital each year. Many of the people waiting are waiting in pain. Many are risking their lives by waiting. And there is no market mechanism in these countries to get care to people who need it first.”
President Obama told the American Medical Association last week that “there are countries where a single-payer system works pretty well,” then said that those who say that he’s “trying to bring about government-run health care” are “not telling the truth.”
Critics of Obama’s public-option plan, in which the federal government offers taxpayer-subsidized medical insurance, believe that such a system will eventually crush the private insurance market. That would leave the federal government as the only provider of coverage and in full control of the health care system.
It’ll be a while before we know who’s telling the truth. But by the time the issue is settled, millions in those countries “where a single-payer system works pretty well” will have died or needlessly suffered waiting to be admitted into a hospital.
Yet we are constantly told that it’s America’s health care system that is substandard. A recent Reuters story that said “the U.S. system consistently ranks worse than other developed countries on many key measures” is typical of the noncritical reporting that convinces the public that American medical care is in shambles.
This is why a national columnist such as Marie Cocco can write without challenge that we have “a system that pretty much everyone believes is crumbling to the point of collapse.”
The perception, though, is easily crushed by the asking of a single question: “If you needed the best health care in the world, where would you go to get it?”
The facts say:
• Survival rates in the U.S. for common cancers are higher, and in some cases much higher, than in Europe and Canada.
• Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed nations and spend less time waiting for care than Canadians and Britons.
• Americans have more access to new medical technologies than Canadians and United Kingdom residents, and are responsible for most health care innovations.
• Americans are more satisfied with their care than their counterparts in nations with socialized medicine.
The argument that American health care is lacking is usually based on rankings compiled by the World Health Organization, which places the U.S. 37th out of 191 nations in its “World Health Report.” It’s a mistake, though, to put much into the WHO’s grades.
“They are not,” says one expert, “an objective measure of the relative performance of national health care systems.”
That expert, Glen Whitman, an associate professor of economics at California State University, Northridge, has looked at the WHO rankings and found that they “depend crucially on a number of underlying assumptions — some of them logically incoherent, some characterized by substantial uncertainty, and some rooted in ideological beliefs and values that not everyone shares.”
No one has a right to health care. Attempts to provide such a right have produced regimes that in reality are far uglier than the American system is perceived to be. Systems will continue to grow worse until policymakers acknowledge that health care is a personal responsibility and grant patients what they should already have: full authority over the decisions that affect their health.
Posted in Health Care | Tagged Canada, Healthcare, socialized medicine | Leave a Comment »

Socialized Healthcare Posters.
June 15, 2009From reader John:
From reader Tootywink and her sister:
From reader Kevin:
From blogger Doug Ross:
From reader Pocono Joe:
From reader Dave:
From reader Rob:
source: MichelleMalkin
Posted in Cartoons, Health Care, Obama | Tagged Cartoons, Healthcare, Obama, posters, socialized medicine | Leave a Comment »

How to Stop Socialized Health Care
June 15, 2009
Posted in Health Care, Obama | Tagged Health Care, socialized medicine | Leave a Comment »

Canadian Healthcare
June 10, 2009
Americans need to ask a basic question: Why are they rushing into a system of government-dominated health care when the very countries that have experienced it for so long are backing away?
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Posted in Health Care | Tagged America, American Healthcare, Canada, Obama, socialized medicine, USA | 2 Comments »

Tales From Health Care Crypts
March 5, 2009Tales From Health Care Crypts
By WALTER E. WILLIAMS | IBD 5 March 2009
Government health care advocates used to sing the praises of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS). That’s until its poor delivery of health care services became known.
A recent study by David Green and Laura Casper, “Delay, Denial and Dilution,” written for the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, concludes that the NHS health care services are just about the worst in the developed world.
The head of the World Health Organization calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care.
Twelve percent of specialists surveyed admitted refusing kidney dialysis to patients suffering from kidney failure because of limits on cash.
Waiting lists for medical treatment have become so long that there are now “waiting lists” for the waiting list.
Government health care advocates sing the praises of Canada’s single-payer system. Canada’s government system isn’t that different from Britain’s.
For example, after a Canadian has been referred to a specialist, the waiting list for gynecological surgery is four to 12 weeks, cataract removal 12 to 18 weeks, tonsillectomy three to 36 weeks and neurosurgery five to 30 weeks.
Toronto-area hospitals, concerned about lawsuits, ask patients to sign a legal release accepting that while delays in treatment may jeopardize their health, they nevertheless hold the hospital blameless.
Canadians have an option Britainers don’t: close proximity of American hospitals. In fact, the Canadian government spends over $1 billion each year for Canadians to receive medical treatment in our country. I wonder how much money the U.S. government spends for Americans to be treated in Canada.
“OK, Williams,” you say, “Sweden is the world’s socialist wonder.” Sven R. Larson tells about some of Sweden’s problems in “Lesson from Sweden’s Universal Health System: Tales from the Health-care Crypt,” published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (Spring 2008).
Mr. D., a Gothenburg multiple sclerosis patient, was prescribed a new drug. His doctor’s request was denied because the drug was 33% more expensive than the older medicine. Mr. D. offered to pay for the medicine himself but was prevented from doing so. The bureaucrats said it would set a bad precedent and lead to unequal access to medicine.
Malmo, with its 280,000 residents, is Sweden’s third-largest city. To see a physician, a patient must go to one of two local clinics before they can see a specialist. The clinics have security guards to keep patients from getting unruly as they wait hours to see a doctor. The guards also prevent new patients from entering the clinic when the waiting room is considered full.
Uppsala, a city with 200,000 people, has only one specialist in mammography. Sweden’s National Cancer Foundation reports that in a few years most Swedish women will not have access to mammography.
Dr. Olle Stendahl, a professor of medicine at Linkoping University, pointed out a side effect of government-run medicine: its impact on innovation.
“In our budget-government health care there is no room for curious, young physicians and other professionals to challenge established views,” he said. “New knowledge is not attractive but typically considered a problem (that brings) increased costs and disturbances in today’s slimmed-down health care.”
These are just a few of the problems of Sweden’s single-payer government-run health care system. I wonder how many Americans would like a system that would, as in the case of Mr. D. of Gothenburg, prohibit private purchase of your own medicine if the government refused paying.
We have problems in our health care system, but most of them are a result of too much government. Over 50% of health care expenditures in our country are made by government. Government health care advocates might say that they will avoid the horrors of other government-run systems. Don’t believe them.
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which published Sven Larson’s paper, is a group of liberty-oriented doctors and health care practitioners who haven’t sold their members down the socialist river as have other medical associations. They deserve our thanks for being a major player in the ’90s defeat of “Hillarycare.”
Posted in Economy, Health Care, Obama | Tagged Health Care, hillarycare, Obama, socialized medicine, Stories from the other side of the border | Leave a Comment »