This evening, I attended a showing of Michael Moore’s movie Sicko…
I wasn’t expecting much, so maybe it was easy to exceed my expectations. But I was pleasantly surprised that the movie wasn’t far more painful for me to watch. Although certainly not without its flaws, it has something to add. And the movie was well-made, humorous in places, poignant in others– effective and provocative.
Don Surber thinks so, and it’s hard to argue his point when you see stories like this:
Sorry about the wait for that angioplasty…
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… Read more on Will Socialized Health Care in the US Kill Canadians?…
As a person with a strong family history of cancer, this story warmed my heart. Oh wait, did I say “warmed my heart”? What I meant to say was “chilled me to the bone“:
Read more on Socialized Medicine Just Keeps Getting More Glorious…
It’s a shame that the marvel of government-controlled health care hasn’t been implemented in the US yet:
Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets.
Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour pledge.
What a fool I’ve been to oppose this massive improvement in standards of care. Hat tip to The Corner for pointing this one out.
The mammoth Congressional expansion of SCHIP is such a bad idea, even the normally big spending President Bush vetoed the bill. I wrote a piece titled, “Abandon SCHIP: Big Government Returns,” which is now available on the Acton Website.
There are a number of problems with Paul Krugman’s NYT piece earlier this week, “A Socialist Plot.” Krugman compares the American educational system to its healthcare system, arguing that because Americans aren’t inclined to disparage the former as a socialist threat, we likewise shouldn’t consider universal healthcare as a “socialist plot.”
Read more on Socialism is the American Way in Krugman’s America…
Joe Knippenberg reflects on President Bush’s speech earlier this week about advancing social justice in the Western Hemisphere:
Bush has lots to say about encouraging what he calls “capitalism for the campesinos.” He ties this to “social justice,” by which he means, above all, “meeting basic needs” to education, health care, and housing so that people can “realize their full potential, their God-given potential.” But social justice, thus conceived, doesn’t require massively redistributive government action; rather, it requires unleashing the potential of individual initiative, sowing some seeds, and leveraging the efforts of non-governmental organizations, especially faith-based ones.
In comparison to a speech from President Kennedy in 1961, Knippenberg concludes, “If you compare GWB to JFK, you’ll see that the goals aren’t all that different, but the thought put into the methods is.”
Go to this page to watch a short video highlighting the story of one man’s fight against Canada’s health system.
The film is focused on the defects of socialized medicine and so, naturally, does not deal with the serious problems existing in other systems (such as the United States). But it is an effective display of a problem that every attempt to manipulate prices encounters: how to make supply meet demand.
Transparency International is a group devoted to exposing corruption of all kinds. One of the most sickening forms of corruption in many poor countries is health care corruption. One sort of corruption is absentee-ism: medical personel bill for their services even when they aren’t at work, but are doing another job.
