Free, Public Healthcare

ObamaCare will be the straw the breaks this countries back.

Deja vu all over again and again and again.

Just for fun and to change things up a little, you should make your forays into sock puppetry less obvious.

YANKEE- Debra L A W thinks she knows law. She does not since she is really stupid. She can not and will not address the following. She thinks she is winning an argument about Health Care by failing to rebut. So I stick it in her ear and tell her--This article says you are wrong!

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THE CONSEQUENCES OF SINGLE-PAYER CARE IN CANADA
DAVID GRATZER: It's a great honor to be able to speak today at The Heritage Foundation. I'm always impressed by the debates and discussions that come out of Heritage. I think Americans are very lucky to have such a think tank.

Canadians who went to the United States five, 10, or 15 years ago, when they would talk about health care, would speak fondly of the best health care system in the world. Until very recently, Canadians thought they got it right and always looked south and shook their heads.

If Canadians liked to look south and brag, Americans would come north and express awe. It wasn't uncommon to find an article in The New York Times or The Washington Post discussing the health care system where everything is free, where hospitals are brand-new, where doctors and patients are absolutely content.

Losing Favor
Those days have passed. Americans still sometimes come north and express awe; Senator Kennedy was in town a few years ago for a fund raiser. Sometimes Canadian politicians go south and talk up the Canadian system; our Prime Minister lectured your President about four or five years ago. By and large, however, the enthusiasm for the Canadian system has very much waned.

I'm a fan of polls. Of course, one should always take these things with a grain of salt, but a good poll can be informative.

For example, Angus Reid, a well-respected Canadian pollster, asked Canadians to rate their health care system. When they started doing this polling in 1991, a clear majority of Canadians gave the system top marks: excellent or very good. Last year, when they did the poll again, under one in four gave the system that rating.

Angus Reid has done other polls as well. A year and a half ago, a poll sent shock waves across the country when 73 percent of Canadians described their health care system as being "in crisis." Reid actually went back and redid the poll six months later: 78 percent of Canadians now thought the system was in crisis.

People who have had reservations about the Canadian system have often talked up ideas that are very common in other Western countries: user fees being one and two-tier health care, or the ability to buy private insurance, being another.

There isn't a single politician who advocates user fees. There isn't a single politician who will publicly state that they are in favor of private insurance. And yet, just before the end of last year, a major poll commissioned by Macleans magazine showed that a clear majority of Canadians now support user fees. On private insurance, we're divided.

That may not seem so incredible, perhaps, to outside observers. But in a country where no politician is willing to advocate such ideas, it's quite a remarkable development.

The Health Care Quality Problem
So what has happened in Canada? Why is it that we've gone from being very bullish on this health care system to having great reservations? Part of it is that Canadians read newspapers, and it doesn't much matter whether you're on the west coast or the east coast; it doesn't much matter whether you're a Globe and Mail reader, or a National Post reader; every single day, there are stories describing the system.

I've just randomly chosen a few stories that have come to light recently.

The head of trauma care at Vancouver's largest hospital announces that they turn away more cases than any other center in North America. He's quoted as saying this would be unheard of in the United States.


In Manitoba, which is my former home province, the premier--the political equivalent of a governor--concedes that his pledge to end hallway medicine has fallen short. Hallway medicine is the phenomenon where the emergency rooms are so filled with patients that people are forced to lie on stretchers in hallways, often for days. Overcrowding is a periodic problem. In fact, the overcrowding is worse than last year. The community is rocked by the death of a 74-year old man who had waited in the emergency room for three hours and had not been seen.


New Brunswick announces that they will send cancer patients south to the United States for radiation therapy. New Brunswick, a small maritime province, is the seventh to publicly announce its plans to send patients south. In the best health care system in the world, the vast majority of provinces now rely on American health care to provide radiation therapy. Provinces do this because the clinically recommended waiting time for treatment is often badly exceeded. Ordinarily, oncologists suggest that there should be a two-week gap between the initial consult by the family doctor and the referral to the oncologist, and then two weeks more from the oncologist to the commencement of radiation therapy. In most Canadian provinces, we exceed that by one to two months, sometimes three.


In Alberta earlier this year, a young man dies because of the profound emergency room overcrowding. He is 23. On a winter's night, he develops pain in his flank and goes to the local emergency room. It is so crowded that he grows impatient and goes to another. There, he waits six hours. No one sees him. Exhausted and frustrated, he goes home. The pain continues, so he finally decides to go to the local community hospital. It's too late: His appendix ruptured. He dies from the complications hours later.
Those are some of the examples of the cruelty of what goes on in Canada. But they don't give you the flavor of the insanity--and I'll use that term in a nonprofessional sense--of the Canadian system.

MRI scanners are very difficult to get in Canada. There are long wait times. In my book, I talk about a political struggle on Vancouver Island where the wait time for a non-urgent MRI scan was over a year--"non-urgent" being defined by government officials, not by physicians. In the province I now live in, Ontario, there are long wait times for MRIs.

Part of the problem is that we have so few of these scanners. Canada per capita has as many MRI scanners as Colombia and Mexico. It wouldn't be fair to try and compare us to the United States or Western Europe. And the few MRIs that we have tend to run on bankers' hours. MRI scanners are expensive to operate. So if an MRI scanner stops dealing with humans at 5 p.m., there are still hours you could run the scanner.

What many MRI clinics now do to make a little bit of money is rent out their facilities to veterinarians. There was a story, which caused quite a scandal, that a London man was expected to wait seven months for an MRI but his dog could get one in just a couple of weeks. They, of course, addressed this discrepancy in a very Canadian way: by preventing veterinarians from booking the off hours.

They're still renting out in some parts of the country. Where I live now, Toronto, there's an MRI scanner that was renting out to vets. A patient came up with a clever idea: He tried to book himself for an appointment under the name of "Spot." Spot was a good name to choose, because Spot could be seen a hell of a lot faster than a person bearing a less canine name.
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Yankee--Debra gave herself the name L A W. She is deluded. If she really knew L A W, she would be able to rebut the following but she shivers in fear when she sees evidence like that below. She is a fraud, Yankee.

Note:
Sticker shock
Chicago Tribune




The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Monday, June 22:

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Talk about bad timing for President Barack Obama.

There he was on Monday, exhorting doctors at an American Medical Association confab to join his once-in-a-generation overhaul of health care in America. He drew several standing ovations, even as he told them things that would probably cut their pay.

But then, on the same day, came an astonishing Congressional Budget Office analysis of what all this could cost.

The CBO analyzed the first major health-care proposal introduced, by Sen. Edward Kennedy, and concluded that it would cost more than $1 trillion over 10 years. That sent a jolt of sticker shock through Congress.

But hold on. Here's the kicker to that breathtaking figure: Even after spending all that money, 37 million Americans still wouldn't have health insurance.

Yes, that's a tentative analysis, as the CBO warned. It will change as the bill is fleshed out. And the Kennedy bill is only one of several health-care reform proposals now percolating in Congress.

But the analysis sure seemed to rattle advocacy groups and the White House. "This is not the administration's bill and it's not even the final Senate committee bill," a White House spokesman said.

Ooh, chilly.

So, OK, this is a work in progress, things will change, blah blah blah. But the point here is that the CBO analysis tells us three things that probably won't change, no matter how a major health-care reform law is crafted.

It will be:

_Complicated.

_Extremely expensive.

_Full of unforeseen consequences.

Congress doesn't have to take our word for it. Lawmakers can learn from the experience of Massachusetts, the first state to mandate health insurance coverage.

How are things going there? We'd say it's mixed.

At last count, the Bay State had the lowest rate of uninsured people in the nation, 2.6 percent. That's compared to the national average of 15 percent. Those holdouts are either unwilling to pay for insurance (and willing to incur the penalties assessed by the state) or they can't afford the insurance (even with state subsidies) and aren't required to buy it. Conclusion: Even if coverage is mandated, Congress will have to settle for something less than universal coverage.

Then there's the budget. The state expected to spend $472 million in fiscal 2008 for its health-care plan. The actual cost: $628 million. Budget projections for fiscal 2010 range from $750 million to $880 million. The state is struggling because it underestimated the number of adults who would sign up for subsidized insurance, which under some circumstances covers a family of four that earns up to about $66,000.

Conclusion: Congress has considered subsidizing American families earning up to $110,000 to buy insurance. That would be too broad and too expensive. It appears that lawmakers are moving away from such a commitment.

Beyond the numbers, what about suddenly insured patients who need care? A recent report by the Urban Institute wasn't too reassuring. It found that even those who got health-care coverage in Massachusetts found they couldn't afford needed treatments. It's not clear why.

The sudden influx of the insured has strained the health-care system in the Bay State. Patients report long waits to see doctors. One in five patients has reported being told that a doctor was not accepting new patients, or not accepting patients with their type of insurance, according to the report.

The upshot: People still wound up in emergency rooms for routine care. That undercuts a major premise for covering all Americans, which is to stop them from going to the emergency room for routine care that could be less expensively dispensed in the doctor's office.

Obama wants to push a bill through Congress before the August recess. That deadline may be slipping, thanks in part to this bolt of fiscal reality from the CBO.

Debra L A W wrote in answer to Yankee--

Deja vu all over again and again and again.

Just for fun and to change things up a little, you should make your forays into sock puppetry less obvious.
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Isn't she clever, Yankee, but too stupid to rebut the evidence that I gave above and will give below-

hello?

troll patrol.

(CAN I SEE YOUR TROLL I.D. PLEASE?)

What Debra L A W either does not know or won't admit is that when theDETAILS of the Obama Plan( where the money to pay for it will come from and exactly who will be covered and how are released, the public resistance to it will double.

My Troll ID? It is lodged firmly where the sun does not shine. Would you care to inspect it?

Resistance to Obama is increasing. People know that he lied to them in his campaign;

Note:

More Voters See Their Taxes Increasing Under Obama
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 Email to a Friend ShareThisAdvertisement
Thirty-nine percent (39%) of likely voters now expect their personal taxes to rise under the Obama administration, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

That's up three points over the past two weeks,up eight points since the inauguration, and the highest level of concern measured to date.

Still, 40% don’t expect their taxes to change under the new administration. Only 10% now say they expect their personal taxes to decrease under Obama.

During last fall's campaign, then-candidate Obama pledged to cut taxes for 95% of Americans. Just 26% of voters believe he has kept that promise.
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JUST 26% OF THE VOTERS BELIEVE THAT OBAMA HAS KEPT THAT PROMISE.

How can you say that, with any certainty, genoves? Has there been some sort of definitive national survey, or something?

ben dover, are ya's...

how does one become a multiple log-in troll?

just kurious...

spam...

Actually I was wondering about the surveyed evidence for your comment: "people know that he lied to them in his campaign".
Which pollsters have surveyed such a change of perception? What percentage of those polled believed his words during his campaign now think he was a liar during that campaign?

You dont follow politics much, do you?
Its easy to know that Obama lied.
He is a politician, and if he is talking, he is lying.
Especially when he makes any type promise to anyone.

Of course, thats true of ALL politicians, on all sides.
Its just a matter of deciding whose lies you choose to believe.

Actually I do follow politics, mysterman.

And I certainly don't automatically believe everything that any politician says.

But I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, & why ...

Im saying that ALL politicians lie, including Obama.

They will tell you what you want to hear, even if that is in direct contradiction to what they told another group earlier that same day.

And this is something that has been going for only the last 3 months. Where were you during Bushes 8 years? However I do agree that all politicians are liers.

You will be hard pressed to find any post by me defending Bush when I thought he was lying.

Even those people on here whom I disagree with will admit that I am fairly even handed.

And <sigh> I said I did not automatically agree with everything which any politician said ... I think "any politician" includes Obama, yes?

I don't wish to make a big deal about this (which I consider something of a storm in a teacup, actually.) but I don't appreciate your patronizing attitude in your initial post to me.:



But anyway, anyway .....