Its always amazing to me how people on the left side of the aisle are so intent, so focused, on instituting programs that have been tried the world over throughout history, and have failed. Communism didn’t work out to well for 100 million people. And neither does Socialism. Here is Robert M. Goldberg of the Center of Medicine in the Public Interest on whether Ted Kennedy would be getting the same kind of care in say, Britain for instance:
Problem is, governments that promise to “cover everyone” always wind up cutting corners simply to save money. People with Kennedy’s condition are dying or dead as a result.
Consider Jennifer Bell of Norwich, England. In 2006, the 22-year-old complained of headaches for months – but Britain’s National Health Service made her wait a year to see a neurologist.
Then she had to wait more than three months before should could get what the NHS decided was only a “relatively urgent” MRI scan. Three days before the MRI appointment, she died.
Consider, too, the chemo drug Kennedy is receiving: Temodar, the first oral medicine for brain tumors in 25 years. socialized heal
Temodar has been widely used in this country since the FDA approved it in 2000. But a British health-care rationing agency, the National Institute for Comparative Effectiveness, ruled that, while the drug helps people live longer, it wasn’t worth the money – and denied coverage for it.
Barack Obama – and other Democrats – have been pushing a Senate bill to set up a similar US “review board” for Medicare and any future government health-care plan.
After denying this treatment completely for seven years, the NICE (did whoever named it intend the irony?) relented – partly. Even today, only a handful of Brits with brain tumors can get Temodar.
And if you want to pay for Temodar out of your own pocket, the British system forces you to pay for all of your cancer care – about $30,000 a month.
Things are no different in Canada, where the wait for an MRI (once you finally get a referral) has grown to 10 weeks. For Canadians relying on their government health care, the average wait time from diagnosis of cancer to surgery is beyond the guideline set by both the US and European societies for surgical oncology.
And HealthCanada, the government system, similar refuses to pay for treatments that are often covered in America.
Chad Curley, a 37-year-old auto worker from Windsor, Ontario, had a brain tumor like Kennedy’s but can’t have surgery because his is too large to be operable.
His tumor didn’t respond to Temodar and the same doctors now treating Sen. Kennedy told him and his wife that the Avastin combination could stop his tumor from growing and add months to his life. But HealthCanada wouldn’t pay to use Avastin to treat his tumor.
Chad’s family and friends scraped together the $5,000 for the first round of treatment in mid-November; they later saw Chad’s left-side paralysis start to subside. But the money ran out – and he died on Feb. 21.
In pushing for government-run health care, liberals are pushing for a system where only the Ted Kennedys of the world can get cutting-edge – and life-saving – care.
England tried to fix the long waits by instituting care targets. Of course there is always a way around rules like that:
Difficult cases are “falling by the wayside” as hospitals prioritise patients they can treat within 18 weeks, the Liberal Democrats said.
Some 16,800 operations were cancelled between January and March, about 15 per cent higher than for the same period last year. It is also an 8 per cent rise on the previous quarter, when 15,600 were scrapped.
The figures were released 24 hours after the Government announced it had hit its target of treating the majority of patients within 18 weeks of referral by their GP.
Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said the target was placing pressure on the health service to prioritise patients who could be treated within the 18-week time limit ahead of more difficult cases, who were pushed to the back of the queue.
Hospitals often cancel operations at the end of March to help balance their books by shifting the cost of the surgery into the next financial year’s budget, but the Liberal Democrats said that did not explain the large rise in the number of cancelled operations.
There is your socialized medicine for you. They are having a hard time treating patients within 4 and half months…..can’t wait for it to come here!
And so it goes. The left think its a GREAT idea to allow the government to run our health care but the reasons for this confidence cannot be their performance on other programs.
Hell, they can’t even save the oysters with 58 million dollars of our money….how in the hell do you believe they will provide adequate health care to 300 million people?
Just nuts.
More here.
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Liberals never look at the possible consequences of what they propose. Sure, everyone can see faults with the current health care system and how to make it affordable for all. But to change it in a way that makes it affordable, but inaccessible would be stupid.
There was a great story out of England in which a sixty two year old used pliers and vodka to pull out her own teeth because she couldn’t wait any longer to see a dentist. That is one of the basic fallacies of socialized medicine. If you get it for free, then you will use it for everything, and thus there will be limited resources, and this causes long waits. Here is my piece arguing against socialized medicine.
http://theeprovocateur.blogspot.com/2008/02/fallacy-of-socialized-medicine.html
Robert M. Goldberg isn’t exactly an unbiased, non pharma-funded source, is he?
“In pushing for government-run health care, liberals are pushing for a system where only the Ted Kennedys of the world can get cutting-edge – and life-saving – care.”
Forgive me, but – can the poor or even marginally wealthy in the US today get any cutting-edge and live-saving care like Ted Kennedy did?
Am I right in assuming they can’t get it at all without raising their own funds? Yet, even with the waits and obvious problems, they can get all of it for free in Canada?
On top of that, people with money can pay for it and get it immediately?
How does the status quo save anyone?
angryflower is a retard. i knew someone, they are dead now, who lived in canada, she had lumps all over her torso. these lumps came on within a week, she got into the doc, they said, it might be cancer wewill test you. 3 weeks later they told her she had cancer and they would dicuss treatment lateer. 2 weeks later she was dead, 3 1/2 weeks after her death the docs office called to schedule an appt for her to talk to the doc about treatment. yeah, hers may have been an extreme case, but it sure didn’t work for her. her husband loved the call from the doc after her death asking to talk to her, nice huh.
Angryflower is right. The people of Canada have great healthcare, as long as they don’t get sick. Waiting for months to be ‘assigned’ a doctor, waiting more months and traveling hundreds of miles to get a simple medical test, then waiting many more months to see if you qualify for treatment. Yep, that’s why people in Canada (with money) come to the U.S. for treatment, and people in the U.K. fly all over the world to get simple, but lifesaving medical treatment. Buy a live saving medicine in the U.K. on your own and be removed from the medical system in the U.K. One treatment out of the ‘system’ and you’re out of the system and on your own. I can see the EMS system (worked it for 8 years) in the U.S. holding patients in the back of an ambulance for hours so they don’t ‘hurt’ the government mandated ER’s treatment record.
Make the Socialized medical system ‘volunteer’ and let the left wing Communist, aka democrats, have all they want of it.
A lot of doctors, and some hospitals, will treat people for free or at reduced rates. Some pharmaceuticals will give free medicine for those who can’t afford it.
Hospitals, by law, cannot refuse treatment based on one’s ability to pay.
Tom
this is the same government that consistently cannot understand what the 2nd amendment means when it says “shall not be infringed”… i expect nothing less than total failure from them…
the last government program that worked well was the construction of the interstate highway system… and that is older than i am… if i had that great of a failure rate, i wouldnt be able to hold a job…
chris, honey, all you have to do is look at most, not all, government employees and you will see failure. so many of them sleep at their desks, they read books and play computer games online on our dime. universal healthcare don’t work. but the people who are crying for it are buying the snake oil, they believe that they will be taken care of by the government. umm, nope. prisoners get better treatment heere than in canada, and everyone thinks it will be like that, it won’t. they are to niave to believe anything different.
People complain about the high cost of health care. I have two words to alleviate this problem: tort reform. It will never happen because the dems are in bed with trial lawyers. And it should be a rule that you don’t go to the emergency room for a sore throat and other aiklments that should be treated in a doctor’s office. Insurance companies have this rule but medicaid and medicare do not. Instead of national healthcare it would be cheaper to pay the insurance premiums for the people without insurance. That would really tick off the people who pay for their own. And what about all the health insurance companies in this country? Think of all the jobs that would be lost if they were outlawed or downsized. Not to mention the profit to investors. It’s a hell of a risk in order to insure people who either can’t or won’t insure themselves.
Don’t forget that in most medically socialized countries, Ted Kennedy’s age, weight, and alcohol consumption would have all played a part in his medical care decisions. Even here in the USA my mother was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 65. Although she had 8 brothers and sisters, 2 that were deemed a match for bone marrow transplant, her insurance coverage (Blue Cross & Blue Shield) deemed the procedure too expensive to cover for her age!!
“angryflower is a retard.”
Gee, thanks. Why bother making my tone civil? I’m sorry about your friend.
Nobody said a word about the source, just anecdotes.
What is the wait time comparison to the US? What exactly is so much better about the US system where you are actually paying more per capita for health care? You talk about trial lawyers and tort reform but defend the for-profit sickness business?
“Waiting for months to be ‘assigned’ a doctor, waiting more months and traveling hundreds of miles to get a simple medical test,”
This is *baloney*. I can get these things this evening within walking distance in a small town.
angryflower,
Are you seriously trying to convince us that there are no extended waiting periods in countries with socialized medicine?
Surely not.
A simple Google search will reveal a myriad of horror stories of people who have had to wait to get surgeries and other treatments.
When it comes to the “source” you question, I can provide you with many others if you would prefer. Of course, you will most likely delve into their backgrounds as well rather than examine the nature of what they are presenting.
The critique of socialized medicine throughout this thread,
along with much of Mr. Goldberg’s post, involves anecdotal evidence. “I
knew somebody in Canada and listen to what happened to them” We can
play that game all day long. In fact, I have a personal story that
involves having a baby under socialized healthcare in Canada and having
a baby under the health insurance Chevron Chemical Company provided for
its factory workers, of which I was one. Hint- Chevron insurance didn’t
cover that estoreric medical procedure known as childbirth. Mike Volpe’s
story can be matched by Michael Moore’s story about the guy who had to
pick which fingers to get sewed back on. Bottomline: Anecdotal tit-for-tat gets us
nowhere.
Luva responded to angryflower with an ad hominem attack and an
anecdote. What isn’t there is attempt to address angryflower’s
observation that Senator Kennedey is not your typical American.
There is little dispute that we have the best health care system in the
world, if you can afford it. But that’s like saying Sudan has
excellent national nutrition, because they eat gourmet meals in the
Presidential palace. I make no suggestion of moral equivalency between
the United States and Sudan here, so put down that club. My analogy is
logical, not moral.
A more accurate way to compare our healthcare system with the rest of
the First World starts with a prima facie analysis and goes on from
there. We are the only First World nation without some form of
nationalized healthcare. Does it seem plausible on its face that we’re
the only ones who have it right and everyone else has it wrong?
If something so massive and importantwas such a disaster in Canada or Great Britain, don’t you think the electorate there would do something about it? Remember, we’re talking about democracies here. As much as the term socialism is conflated withtotalitarian communism, like that of the former Soviet Union, highlevels of socialism exist in many of the world’s non-American democracies.
Now let’s look at two core/elemental metrics of the quality of a nation’s healthcare system:
Infant Mortality (IM) and Longevity
IM (Source: CIA statistics -ttps://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html)
The US has the 180th highest IM rate of the countries monitored. Guess who is 181? South Korea. Guess who is 182? Cuba A newborn baby stands a better chance of living in Cuba than it does in the US.
Which countries have lower IMs than the US?
Canada
United Kingdom
Germany
Norway
France
Sweden
Longevity (M/F)
(Source: World Health Organization
/http://www.who.int/whosis/database/life_tables/life_tables.cfm)
US – 75/80
UK – 77/81
Canada – 78/83
People in the UK and Canada live longer than Americans, despite their abysmal healthcare systems