Sick of the healthcare debate

For all those people wanting the United States government to provide them with “public option” healthcare, be careful what you wish for; you just might get it. America isn’t the first nation that’s been seduced by the siren call of publicly funded healthcare. In fact, the U.S. is one of the few civilized nations left on earth that doesn’t have a public healthcare system—for good reason.

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All the objections raised by foes of a public, government-run healthcare program are more than valid in that their predictions have come to fruition in nations where publicly funded healthcare is the norm. The talk about rationing? It exists in most nations with a public healthcare system, leaving those covered at the mercy of bureaucrats. The biggest and simplest difference between the current system within the U.S. and those countries where healthcare is a government responsibility is that under the current American system the patient is a customer, while under publicly funded healthcare the patient is an expense. Going on the experience of the Canadian healthcare system, with which I am intimately familiar, I can only say that all publicly funded healthcare systems eventually degenerate into bureaucratic quagmires in which the patient and the doctor take a back seat to the bureaucrat. In the 25 years since the enactment of the Canada Health Act, which essentially made healthcare in Canada “free”, the quality of care and the outcome of treatment have steadily declined. In order to curtail costs governments have resorted to limiting enrollment in medical schools, creating a shortage of primary care physicians. And like Obama and the Democrats, successive provincial governments have vilified doctors as being greedy in order to gain support from the tax drones paying for the system. Prior to enactment of the Canada Health Act, Canada had a perfectly functioning healthcare system, most of which was covered by government insurance. The crucial difference is that under the old system, participation was not mandatory and doctors as well as patients could choose to opt out of public healthcare. Once “free” healthcare became the law of the land, doctors became civil servants and many chose to emigrate to the US, as they realized that government mandated “free” healthcare was neither free, nor particularly healthy.

Lessons on Healthcare

In Canada many individuals who have health issues and do not wish to wait up to 18 months to receive treatment, wind up going to the U.S. for medical care and choosing to pay for it out of their own pocket. I am a case in point. When I suddenly lost my hearing three years ago, my family doctor made an appointment for me to see an otolaryngologist. Only problem was the earliest available appointment was five months down the line. Knowing the system, I knew it would likely be one to two years before diagnosis and treatment. So I referred myself to a very capable and competent ear, nose and throat specialist in Buffalo New York, who saw me within a week, arranged a complete work up including an MRI in another week and had a diagnosis and plan of treatment the next day. The total cost to me was just over $2,000, but it was money well spent, as I had a solution to my problem within two weeks. It has now gotten to the point where Canadians are rethinking the whole public option/single payer scheme, as they realize no amount of money could solve Canada’s healthcare crisis because you can’t produce doctors from whole cloth. Many Canadians are now advocating private, for profit medical care to take some of the pressure off the public system. And while we’re on the subject of money and profits, it’s hard to understand how the just-out-of-committee Baucus Bill that’s projected to cost taxpayers $821 billion over the next decade (with no public option, yet) can wind up “saving” taxpayers $89 billion. Especially when as a result, some 29 million Americans will still not have health insurance. But then that’s based on a complicated mathematical formula that only progressive U.S. politicians can understand and we non-cognoscenti are too un-nuanced to see. The best thing the U.S. can do for itself right now is to get the politicians out of the healthcare debate because just as God made little green apples, they will screw it up and turn America into Canada. What’s worse, we Canadians will be stuck having to go to India for our non-government healthcare.