Acton Institute PowerBlog - Entries from Monday, March 3, 2008

The PowerBlog has been selected as one of the host blogs for Chuck Colson’s blog tour, promoting his new book, The Faith. It’s an honor to be included among other luminaries of the blogosphere like The Dawn Treader, Challies.com, and Tall Skinny Kiwi.

A bit about the book:

In their powerful new book The Faith, Charles Colson and Harold Fickett identify the unshakable tenets of the faith that Christians have believed through the centuries—truths that offer a ground for faith in uncertain times, hope and joy for those who despair, and reconciliation for a world at war with God and itself.

We’ve been slated in the #2 position, although things are a bit backed up since Chuck was busy last week at the National Pastors Convention. You can check out more details about that event at the Zondervan Blog.

In 2006 Colson was the featured speaker and recipient of the Faith & Freedom award at the Acton Institute’s annual dinner. Another of his recent books, God & Government, is also worth a look.

After the break is the schedule for the blog tour, which I’ll update with more specific links as the tour progresses. While the start might be delayed, the order is likely to remain the same. Each of the participants was able to submit an exclusive question for Chuck to answer.

Continue reading "The Faith Book Blog Tour"

Sorry about the wait for that angioplasty...

Don Surber thinks so, and it’s hard to argue his point when you see stories like this:

More than 400 Canadians in the full throes of a heart attack or other cardiac emergency have been sent to the United States because no hospital can provide the lifesaving care they require here.

Most of the heart patients who have been sent south since 2003 typically show up in Ontario hospitals, where they are given clot-busting drugs. If those drugs fail to open their clogged arteries, the scramble to locate angioplasty in the United States begins...

...While other provinces have sent patients out of country – British Columbia has sent 75 pregnant women or their babies to Washington State since February, 2007 – nowhere is the problem as acute as in Ontario.

At least 188 neurosurgery patients and 421 emergency cardiac patients have been sent to the United States from Ontario since the 2003-2004 fiscal year to Feb. 21 this year. Add to that 25 women with high-risk pregnancies sent south of the border in 2007.

Although Queen’s Park says it is ensuring patients receive emergency care when they need it, Progressive Conservative health critic Elizabeth Witmer says it reflects poor planning.

That is particularly the case with neurosurgery, she said, noting that four reports since 2003 have predicted a looming shortage.

“This province and the number of people going outside for care – it’s increasing in every area,” Ms. Witmer said.

“I definitely believe that it is very bad planning. ...We’re simply unable to meet the demand, but we don’t even know what the demand is.”

Read that last line again: "We’re simply unable to meet the demand, but we don’t even know what the demand is.”

Well, that’s a confidence builder.

The Canadian system is supposedly one of the main models upon which the coming American health care revolution will be based. And yet this wondrous Canadian system seems to be more and more incapable of providing relatively common medical procedures to Canadian citizens, even in Canada’s most populous province. Because the system is controlled by a bureaucracy, it doesn’t respond to market pressures (goodness knows that most of the time, bureaucracies barely respond to political pressure) and in fact can’t even figure out what the market is demanding. All of this results in the Canadian government relying on the supposedly inferior US system to provide lifesaving care in many instances. No wonder 3 out of 4 Canadians live within easy driving distance of the US border.

So what happens if we decide to go down the path toward single-payer health care in the US? You’d have to be a fool to think that we could try the same thing that the Europeans and Canadians have done and get different results. No, in the long run, we’ll experience the same sorts of inefficiencies, quality and supply problems that plague the government systems, and yes, more Canadians will die, because the safety net that currently exists for the Canadian system here in the United States will be gone.

More: Check out the video after the jump...

Continue reading "Will Socialized Health Care in the US Kill Canadians?"

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The Faith Book Blog Tour

Will Socialized Health Care in the US Kill Canadians?

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