Government healthcare is bad for your health

A friend who lives in Tennessee sent me an email last week, decrying that the “experts” advising President Obama on healthcare are suggesting that PSA tests for men aren’t necessary and should not be covered under government healthcare.

PSA tests are widely used to detect prostate cancer, among other conditions, in men by testing the blood for Prostate Specific Antigens (PSAs). These PSAs don’t necessarily indicate that there is cancer in the prostate gland, but are an indicator that something untoward may be happening there, warranting further investigation. This made my friend mad as hell, as both he and his brother are prostate cancer survivors and both men’s cancer was discovered when elevated PSAs caused their doctor to order a biopsy. Without the PSA tests it is likely that both my friend and his brother may not be around today, as prostate cancer is very serious and very aggressive. How aggressive? So aggressive that it killed a close friend of mine, a Urologist, no less, in a matter of weeks. A PSA test may have saved his life. Similarly government “experts” came out with another pearl of wisdom less than two years ago, stating that women shouldn’t worry about getting tested for breast cancer until they’re over age 50. The U.S. Preventive Service Task Force, a government-sponsored group of doctors that is advising on Obamacare is telling women they have nothing to worry about until they’re over 50. Perhaps they could tell that to my friend Kim, who was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 39 and since being treated has managed to stay cancer free into her 50s.

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The problem with government healthcare is that it isn’t particularly interested in actually looking after people’s health. It’s much more interested in managing budgets and keeping down costs. Most jurisdictions that provide government healthcare also allow for the provision of a private alternative so that citizens have a choice. Canada, which has long had a single-payer healthcare system and does not allow alternative private access, has seen its quality of healthcare drop precipitously along with treatment outcomes. What’s worse, healthcare in Canada is now rationed because of lowering enrollments in medical schools, with the result that nearly 15% of all Canadians are without a primary care physician. In addition, access to specialties have been severely curtailed through waiting lists that are routinely in excess of six to eight months and can be as long as several years. But the Canadian healthcare bureaucracy is purring along like a well-oiled sewing machine and is creating new bureaucratic positions much like a bunny in heat, all the while driving healthcare costs through the roof. Healthcare costs in Canada are now approaching 50% of the entire budgets of most provinces. This is what Americans have to look forward to under Obamacare. First, the individual healthcare mandate, which makes it illegal NOT to buy healthcare insurance, will drive all private insurance companies out of the health insurance business, leaving only a government entity. Then, as costs increase because of a lack of competition in the field, some healthcare procedures will be de-listed, like the PSA tests and mammograms for women under 50 talked about above. The government healthcare entity will become more and more concerned with conserving costs and in usual bureaucratic fashion will grow the bureaucracy to do so while the patient gets relegated from being a customer to being a drain on resources. Hey, but don’t take my word for it; come to the Workers’ Paradise of Canada and see for yourself just how well the single-payer healthcare system is working--or Not! And then picture this system trying to deal with 320 million souls wanting to see a doctor. It’s the single biggest reason that those in Washington who passed the Obamacare Bill in the dead of night have excluded themselves from its provisions.