Thursday, Mark hammered home the point that Obama is shoving National Health Care down our throats and doesn’t care that it will destroy our health care system and our economy in the process.
My advice to Americans: Don’t get sick!
National Health Care
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If we got Canadians coming here for their healthcare (if you’ve been to the upper NY state, check the hospital parking lots for car license plates.), where are they going to go now? Hell, where are WE supposed to go when we have to wait 8 weeks for an MRI or 10 weeks for regular check ups?
Man Skizz, you’ve got that right! I worked on a cleanroom project we sold in Prince Edward Island and boy could I tell you some true horror stories from the people there about the months long waits for minor procedures.
Conservatives need to take a good look at his subject and consider the real pros and cons. What is the best solution and how can we improve this?
Areas to consider, note necessarily in this order:
1.) Single payer system vs HMO system.
2.) Tort reform with respect to medical malpractice.
3.) Prescription drug costs.
4.) Medical administration costs.
5.) State vs Federal government vs Private Sector involvement.
6.) Personal financial mangement of healthcare costs.
7.) Personal healthcare costs that lead to personal bankrupcy.
8.) Continued availability of timely and competent healthcare services.
Natasha Richardson probably developed an intracranial bleed and/or brain swelling. I don’t believe they have over fifteen MRI’s in all of Quebec and they are all centered in and around Montreal and Quebec City. From Brooklyn, NY you have access to over two hundred state of the art units within 15 miles of any location. You are never far from an imaging center all over the State. Bottom line is that cranial injuries need immediate diagnostic intervention often followed by competent surgical intervention.
Canada is the epicenter of North American socialized medicine. I would rather be a dog with a brain injury in the US than a human in Canada with the same problem.
To answer healthcare issues, we need to take an objective look at what works and what doesn’t work. Anecdotal evidence is useful, but doesn’t make a compelling arguement because it is mostly selective based on a point of view. One can argue that gambling is good by looking at just the winners at coming from Vegas casinos.
Canadians live longer than Americans. Compare the statistics between the countries. How many Canadians go into personal bankruptcy to pay for medical costs? Having lived in both countrys both systems have their good points and weak points. Compare the % of GDP that both countries pay towards healthcare. The answer is shocking in that the US pays considerably more. Why?
Why can’t we learn from each system and make it more optimum? We need to look at this issue analytically not politically.
From my experience the US is superior when it comes to major medical treatments, however this affects a relatively small percentage of the population. The Canadian system was superior for medium to minor medical treatments. This affects most people.
The “single-payer” system has efficiency benefits, but rationed healthcare has its disadvantages. The HMO system is not as competitive or patient friendly as it should be. I cited the issues that need to be tackled in a previous post.
Ask Canadians if they would give up their healthcare?
Most would not noting the problems with their own system.
They would consider the alternative worse.
We need to look at the arguments from both sides. Learning some history about Tommy Douglas the “father” of “universal healthcare” is a good start.
The question to ask is not whether Canadians want to give up their Health Care System but, rather, if they would prefer America give up her system that also improves and saves so many Canadian lives each year? If that option didn’t exist the Canadian system might need to be overhauled just the way their military would need to be overhauled if they didn’t live under the umbrella of the finest military in the World. Oh yes, they could continue to persist like England and Germany, with mediocrity, but their morbidity and death rate would climb in direct proportion to what the US would no longer provide. It is easy to maintain a system that offers less when right next door you have the availability to pick and choose from a menu that offers everything you need when you need or want it. The world’s wealthiest people travel to American hospitals and not to England, Germany, France, Canada, Scandinavia, the Netherlands or Cuba because we provide the best care and cure rate.
The Richardson case is hard to classify as a fluke since progressive loss of mentation after a head injury is almost impossible to misdiagnose as anything but bad. There is no excuse for not getting her to Montreal on the day of the incident. This was not just the loss of two hours; it was the waste of twenty-four.
Statistics may show that Canadians live longer but culture, race, nationality, diet and lifestyle associated with personal preventive care has a lot to do with such conclusions and not just the availability and quality of interventional medicine and surgery. Our medical system and pharmaceutical companies keep us alive despite what we do to ourselves.
Ultimately without individual free market participation and the pressures exerted by supply and demand efficiency suffers, quality goes down and rationing undermines the process. Incidentally, in a free society, how does any government gain authority over an individual to prevent them from choosing what they deem is necessary for their own health and welfare?
Yes, Canadian nationalized banks did not invest in toxic mortgages because they were cautious and prevented from doing so by sagacious government policy while our banks were not only encouraged but were actually mandated to do the wrong thing. All that tells me is that the American government demanded that banks make wrong choices without the disadvantage of nationalization so I can just imagine what damage they will incur after they get total control.
Task, you hit the nail on the head with this one, “The world’s wealthiest people travel to American hospitals and not to England, Germany, France, Canada, Scandinavia, the Netherlands or Cuba because we provide the best care and cure rate.” I’ll add, yes but only for the wealthy or with a good private plan.” But is it true for everyone, or even the average American, in the United States? Should it be so? Remember conservative America is largely represented by hard working middle America.
This is the debate that we are having in this democracy. There are many thousands of Americans are flocking to Canada to purchase affordable life saving prescription drugs so that they can live. This is the other side of the discussion.
Why are medical malpractice suits so high in the US vs elsewhere? Why do so many doctors practice “not to be sued” medicine? President Bush brought up these issues in the past campaign against Kerry. Unfortunately they were not addressed as far as I’m aware which has left the door open for the other side. I would like to note that a classmate friend of mine who is a MD in Canada made those same arguments several years ago to me. Those issues need to be addressed.
As Conservatives, we need to develop workable solutions and responses to these questions based on facts and statistics.
We need to formulate a good comprehensive plan that is a workable counter to the disasterous plan that will be developed by this current administration. (Anything they develop will be disasterous as they are the most incompetent/self-serving politicans in the history of this great country.)
I may be a Tory conservative, but heck Mulroney, and Reagan were great friends weren’t they!
On a point of correction, Canadian Banks are not nationalized. That is a myth that they are. As conservatives we don’t need to go into Michael Moore territory on our side.
Canadian Banks are regulated and well run because they are run conservatively not liberally like their cousins to the south! There is more I can add, but the following article is speaks for itself.
http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2009/03/03/f-canada-banks.html
I believe it was Mark Steyn that led me to believe that Canada had nationalized her banks. I appreciate the correction.
Two years ago at about this time, while photographing American crocodiles (not alligators) in Everglades National Park I experienced a bad fall that severed my right biceps insertion tendon from the radial head. I completed the trip knowing that I was not in any danger and had at least a two-week window to allow for a surgical solution. This is not a complicated injury but the repair can be and if any hand surgeon tells you that he has done more than 5 or 6 in his lifetime he is not truthful. I contacted all the good surgeons in Florida and even found several Jai alai players who experienced the same injury and reviewed their particular surgeons, the procedure and the recovery period. Armed with that knowledge I elected for a one-incision technique along with local nerve blocks, assisted by minimal IV sedation and the only person that I felt comfortable to do it that way was the head of hand surgery at the Hospital for Special Surgery in NYC. To make a long story short I called for an appointment, was called back by the surgeon himself, arrived in NYC four days later, had a complete physical evaluation, ECG, blood work, x-rays, an ultrasound of the damaged tendon in the AM of the surgery day, had the surgery performed in the afternoon and was released in the early PM to make an uncomplicated recovery over the following several months. Try to arrange that in any other country. It still cost about ten thousand out of pocket, over what insurance paid and, for what was done, I consider that a medical bargain. You never, ever want to give up the option to choose what doctor or surgeon you can have or the care that you get.
Any one in America can get similar treatment, if not the same, by many different routes. In my office we provide medical insurance availability for everyone. Some already have it with their spouses, some we give full coverage and for those that we don’t we offer variable GHI plans with rates from $250 to $700 monthly and we pay half the amount of any program they select. That is pre-tax dollars and although we usually accompany that by a bump in salary, making any financial pain quite negligible, we still have some people who elect not to buy it. I know most of my employees very well and the most mysterious thing is that those who wish not to purchase insurance are the ones who drive the best cars, vacation in the best places and owe thousands of dollars on their credit cards for non-essential expenditures. These are the same people who have more debt on their credit cards than what I paid out of pocket for the above-described scenario.
Socialism is actually causing a perceived increase in the cost of medical care in that it shifts the expense from those that don’t pay to the one’s that do. When a hospital treats some for nothing, or for less than market costs, they then maximally charge private insurance carriers and workman’s comp insurance companies whenever they get the chance to make up the difference. The private world is involuntarily subsidizing the system.
Everyone should pay something and although I am not fond of mandating I am even less fond of stealing other peoples time, effort and property unless they volunteer to give it away so on that note required medical savings accounts have several advantages. They can be flexible and pay for what you want or, at minimum, for only catastrophic care; they incorporate personal supervision of expenses because you keep what you don’t use and that directly puts pressure on the providers to give the best for the least; finally it is consistent with freedom of choice in allowing the individual to choose the plan, the provider and, eventually, the type and extent of care he ultimately wishes to use.
Canadian health care is not cheap. It is paid for by Canadian tax dollars. American health care is also not cheap but if you consider what the individual pays in Canada on a collective basis as opposed to what the individual pays in America on a private basis the costs differences are negligible while the advantages in choice, time to treatment, quality of treatment and American incentivized devotion to innovative medical technology that benefits the world market leaves the American free market as the best solution for any individual as it strives to give the most for the least.
Medical care will never just service the rich, unless it is socialized, because the market will always provide a variety of care at a variety of prices. If government restricts what is afforded, the best and the brightest will not choose a medical career and there will be fewer doctors that are less qualified working even less time as they seek to offset income restrictions with other jobs. People will wait long periods for rationed care that will, at best, be marginal and to the extent that they need better care they will pay out of pocket, under the table or travel to alternative locations, such as India, where there is currently a market for the Europeans that desire or need more care than their native socialized countries can provide while being less costly than what would be charged in the US. To the extent that life-saving care becomes scarce it becomes more probably that only the wealthy will have the means to by-pass the system, which is supposedly the very thing that socialism is supposed to defeat.
The biggest expense people have is taxes. We could run America on a fraction of what it currently costs if government were not in the confiscation, redistribution and entitlement business. If people took home much more of what they earned and if the products and services that they purchase cost less to provide, as a result of removing the built in taxes, we could easily pay for what we need. The business of America is business and that includes the medical business. To the extent that our government misinterprets the establishment clause of the first amendment and attempts to erroneously place a wall between the mere mention of God and the State it should actually use the same concept and place a wall between the State and business. To the extent that it doesn’t, as is now profoundly apparent with the Obama Administration, any attempt to provide good medical care for all will end up providing such good care for no one.
If we end up with socialized medicine, the loss of our system will be a loss for the world and the people that will miss it most, besides us, will be our neighbor to the north.
Thank you for a well thought out response. It was very educational. While I maintain that there are healthcare issues that I cited in my previous post that need to be addressed by the US system, it is becoming absolutely obvious that the Canadian system over time is unable to keep up with the cost of the technology without a major change to its “Universal Healthcare” system or excessive tax increases on an already excessively taxed nation.
It is obvious to those who objectively examine this issue that the quality of Canadian healthcare relative to US heathcare is certainly deteriorating over time. Perhaps the Canadian system is not as bad as it is in Britain, but it is certainly heading in that direction. Canadians who cannot tolerate rationed major diagnotic services and surgeries flock the the US. You are so right that Canadians will eventually lose their “American Option” should the US nationalize its healthcare.
Mark Levin in a March 12 radio broadcast again eloguently discussed the healthcare issue. It was very educational.