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It must be election time again. I can tell from the constant, sycophantic media coverage of Democrat candidate Barrack Hussein
Obama. It is now rather obvious that the major media outlets have become the de facto propaganda machine for Leftism in general
and Democrats in particular.
If you don’t believe that just ask yourself this, “What would happen to John McCain’s candidacy if his pastor
of 20 years – who married Cindy and him; who baptized his children; whom he considered his mentor and “family”
– made the kind of scurrilous and outrageous statements uttered by one Jeremiah Wright?”
I can also tell it’s an election year because once again because the notion of universal health insurance is in the
news – along with the constant drumbeating and cheerleading by the mainstream media in support of it.
It seems like a bad joke, but at the very time that most Western industrialized nations are experiencing real problems with
their socialized medicine schemes (some are even considering scrapping the program in favor of the private market), the leaders
of one of the two major political parties in the United States are seriously promising to move us in the direction of nationalizing
health care right here.
Claude Castonguay – “Father of Quebec Medicare” – chaired a Canadian commission in the 1960s that
recommended universal health coverage for all Quebeckers to be paid for by tax levies. The government followed his advice
and each Canadian province followed suit, instituting the vaunted “single-payer health care system” the Left salivates
over, from coast to coast in the Great White North.
But socialized medicine, universal coverage, single-payer plans – whatever you want to call it – a rose by any
other name might smell as sweet, but nationalized health care stinks to high heaven and this week Claude Castonguay said so.
"We thought we could resolve the system's problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,"
says Castonguay. He now advocates radical reforms of the system he largely midwifed: "We are proposing to give a greater role
to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice."
He is prescribing contracting out services to the private sector, even to the point of recommending public hospitals renting
out space during off-hours to private sector doctors. He wants co-pays for patients who want to see non-government physicians.
In effect, Castonguay, the man instrumental in implementing public health insurance in Canada, wants private health insurance
for Canadians.
So what’s the problem with the Canadian system? Well, in a word, the wait.
Beginning in the mid 1980s, the Fraser Institute has measured wait times for health care services across Canada. As a result
of their research, medical waiting times are now part of the public policy debate on the quality of the Canadian system.
Since they began, the median wait time from GP referral to treatment for health care in Quebec has increased from 7.3 weeks
to 19.4 weeks in 2007.
Nadeen Esmail, Director of Health System Performance Studies at Institute and coauthor of the “How Good is Canadian
Health Care? 2007 Report,” noted that, "Despite all of the promises made by Canada's provincial and federal governments,
and despite the fact that Canadians are spending more on health care than ever before, the total wait time in Canada continues
to hover near the 18-week mark as it has since 2003,
Equally troubling is the reality that the total wait time in 2006 is 91 percent longer than it was in 1993."
Yeah, 18 weeks, and that’s the average. At 14.9 weeks, Ontario had the shortest waits. Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan,
and New Brunswick had average waits of 25.8 weeks, 28.5 weeks, and 31.9 weeks, respectively.
If you were referred to a neurosurgeon, you waited an average of 21 weeks just to see a specialist and getting treatment required
an additional 10.7 weeks.
Need an orthopedic surgeon? Canadians waited 16.2 weeks to see one, followed by another 24.2 weeks for treatment after the
first visit.
David Gratzer, a physician, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, tells of his one-time faith in socialized medicine.
One day that all changed.
“On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid
commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting
for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider
everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded
ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia
operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose
what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for
radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.”
When politicians tell you they want socialized medicine – like that in Canada – be afraid, be very afraid.
Emergency rooms in 23 of Toronto's 25 hospitals had to turn away ambulances on one recent day – and a distraught father
who had taken a doctor hostage in an attempt to get treatment for his sick baby was shot to death by police officers.
"Hallway medicine" has become so common in Winnipeg, hallway stretcher locations have permanent numbers.
Vancouver General Hospital’s parking lot has seen ambulances filled with ill patients repeatedly stack up this winter.
This also just happens to be a hospital where an estimated 20 percent of patients in the midst of heart attacks must wait
an hour or more for treatment.
”But why,” you ask, “is waiting such a plague on Canada’s – and other – socialized medicine
schemes?”
Well, it’s that old evil duo of supply and demand. Anytime something wanted, needed, or otherwise deemed valuable, is
offered “for free,” the demand will very quickly outpace the supply. When that happens, the supply will invariably
have to be rationed. And in Canada, waiting lists are the preferred way of rationing medical care and holding down health
care spending. .
In a market economy, the costs would adjust to the point where the quantity of services provided is equal to the amount for
which patients are willing to pay. In a socialized system, however, devoid of any market mechanism, goods and services now
rendered scarce by the system itself, are rationed through mechanisms other than price.
"The long waits for needed care in Canada show the danger of abandoning markets in favor of central planning," explained Sean
Parnell, vice president of external relations at The Heartland Institute, an Illinois-based think tank. "Just as there were
long lines for food and other basic necessities in the old Soviet Union because planners couldn't accurately match supply
with demand, the politicians and bureaucrats who run health care in Canada can't provide enough health care to meet the citizens'
needs."
Dr. Gratzer agrees: "It's like the old Soviet system. Everything is free, but nothing is readily available. Except that we're
not talking about lining up for toilet paper in Russia in 1976, but queuing for surgery in Canada (today)."
Canada isn’t an isolated case, either. Britain, too, is facing a severe crisis with its once Leftist-acclaimed, Liberal-applauded
National Health Service. Both countries lag behind the U.S. in five-year cancer survival rates, transplantation outcomes and
other measures.
The London Observer of March 3, 2002, carried a story on an "unpublished report [that] shows some patients are now having
to wait more than eight months for treatment, during which time many of their cancers become incurable." Another article stated,
"According to a World Health Organization report to be published later this year, around 10,000 British people die unnecessarily
from cancer each year –three times as many as are killed on our roads."
British politicians, feeling the ire of Britons sick and tired of a system that clearly is not living up to its promises,
moved to correct the interminable wait times for emergency care that citizens routinely face. The Ministry of Health declared
that British patients should wait no more than four hours for Emergency Room. The result? Now, at some hospitals, seriously
ill patients are kept in ambulances for hours so as not to run afoul of the regulation, and at others, patients are deliberately
admitted to the wrong wards.
One myth often bandied about by proponents of socialized medicine is the fact that although the United States spends more
on health care, we don’t get more. That argument is usually supported by statistics that show that life expectancy,
which is not that much different among developed countries, as well as infant mortality, which actually is higher in the United
States than in most other developed nations.
The fact is that in this great melting pot of a country, there are a lot of phenomena that have little or nothing to do with
health care. African American men live, on average, 68 years, while Asian American males survive to age 81. There are also
wide differences in life expectancy among women, too. Those differences are generally the result of lifestyle choices and
genetics and are not due to the health care system.
What should we look at, then, if we really want to compare the comparative benefits of health care systems? Only those conditions
for which we know medical services can impact.
Among women who are diagnosed with breast cancer, only one-fifth die in the United States, compared to one third in France
and Germany, and almost half in the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
Among men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer, less than one fifth die in the United States, compared to one fourth in
Canada, almost half in France, and more than half in the United Kingdom.
It is, indeed, ironic that the dangers of the Left’s health-care agenda are being made plain in the case of Arch Liberal
Senator Ted Kennedy’s case.
An MRI detected a tumor - the median wait for an MRI across Canada was 10.1 weeks. Kennedy was then quickly diagnosed with
a malignant glioma - a rare and often-fatal form of brain cancer. Wait time in Canada for a GP referral for medical oncology
– 5 weeks. Less than two weeks later, his tumor was being removed by one of the world's experts in brain cancer at Duke
University Medical Center. He'll undergo chemo and radiation therapy that will hopefully keep the cancer from spreading.
Michael Moore – the American Left’s Leni Riefenstahl – spouts the standard Liberal line: "There are problems
in all health-care systems, but at least Europeans and Canadians have a health-care system that covers everyone."
But when governments promise to "cover everyone," they always wind up cutting corners simply to save money. And people like
Kennedy end up dead as a result.
It’s not just the wait times that have risen in the Canadian system. Since Canada’s Fraser Institute began keeping
score in, inflation-adjusted provincial health care spending per capita has increased by 34%.
Any freshman economics student knows the acronym TINSTAAFL – there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Or as humorist P.J. O’Rourke says, “If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it’s free.”
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