Barack Obama promises that when he's president, health care will be available and affordable for all.
Similar promises made years ago in Britain and Canada led to mandated government health care programs that are killing people in those countries today.
The British ministry of health, for example, in a heralded "reform" move, has decreed that British patients should get emergency room care within four hours. Without disclosing how many emergency patients die within the four-hour waiting period, the ministry has admitted that, at some hospitals, seriously ill patients are kept in ambulances for hours waiting for ER admittance so the hospital does not violate the "reform."
The London Telegraph reports that the government plans to save billions of pounds from the National Health Service budget by making "doctors" out of patients. Instead of consulting a doctor or going to a hospital, patients will be encouraged to carry out "self-care" to curb spending. This proposal actually makes some sense. When health care is "free," frivolous visits to the doctor and/or hospital carry no consequence to the patient. But the Telegraph reports that the NHS is looking to cut down on more than just frivolous visits. It's looking for patients with "arthritis, asthma and even heart failure" to treat themselves.
Debbie Hirst's breast cancer had metastasized, but the NHS would not provide her with Avastin, a drug widely used in the U.S. to control such cancers. According to a report in the New York Times, Debbie opted to pay for the drug herself while getting the rest of her publicly funded treatment. NHS bureaucrats found out about Debbie's plan and informed her doctor that Debbie would have to accept the "free" care as is or, if she wanted the Avastin, she would have to pay for it and all the rest of her treatment too.
NHS officials told the British press that to allow Debbie to pay for extra drugs to supplement government care would violate the philosophy of the NHS by giving richer patients an unfair advantage over poorer ones. British Health Secretary Alan Johnson told Parliament patients "cannot, in one episode of treatment, be treated on the NHS and then allowed, as part of the same episode and the same treatment, to pay money for more drugs. That way lies the end of the founding principles of the National Health Service."
In the land of Harry Potter, there is no magic wand that will make up for the failure of central planning of health care. The universal outcome of mandated universal health care is government rationing of health care, and, worse yet, "fairness" that could kill you.
Canadians used to tout their "single payer" government health care as the best in the world. It still is, to those Canadians who have never been seriously sick.
The Canadian Health Care System nearly killed Sylvia De Vries. The Ontario woman was afflicted with a 13 inch, 40 pound fluid-filled tumor. She was told to wait in line for treatment. Worried, she crossed into the U.S. In a Pontiac, Mich., hospital, a surgeon removed the tumor telling De Vries she could not have lived with it longer than a few weeks.
In the last two years, the government of Ontario has sent at least 164 patients to New York and Michigan for neurosurgery emergencies – defined by the Globe and Mail newspaper as "broken necks, burst aneurysms, and other types of bleeding in and around the brain."
The province of British Columbia recently experience a baby boom overwhelming its birth quota. In 2007, at least 40 mothers were airlifted from British Columbia to the U.S., particularly those with preemies needing intensive neonatal care.
The Cato Institute reports that one in seven Canadian doctors refers a patient every year to the U.S. for treatment. The Canadian government mandated and funded health care system is successful, if at all, because it uses the private health care system of the U.S. as a safety net.
Claude Castonguay chaired the 1960s government committee which fathered the Canadian single-payer government-mandated health care system. He now proposes a radical reform.
Castonguay was recently quoted as saying, "We thought we could resolve the system's problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it. We are proposing now to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice." Wow – Claude, please phone Barack.
While Obama does not advocate a complete government-mandated health care program this year as he notoriously flip-flops to the center to win the election, his personal commitment is clear. "I happen to be a proponent of a single payer health care program," Obama said back in the '90s. Last year, Obama told the New Yorker, "If you're starting from scratch, then a single payer system probably makes sense"
That's right – Obama really wants the single-payer government system that is failing in Canada and Britain, the system that is killing patients in Britain in the name of "fairness" and driving seriously ill patients out of Canada to save their lives.
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