A Look At What’s In Store For Us If We Adopt Socialized Medicine

Hundreds of horror stories about the absurdities and inadequacies of socialized health care are coming out of the United Kingdom and Canada. Well, we can add one more to the list.

This comes from David Altaner and Bruce Rule at Bloomberg:

Jack Rosser’s doctor says taking Pfizer Inc.’s Sutent cancer drug may keep him alive long enough to see his 1-year-old daughter, Emma, enter primary school. The U.K.’s National Health Service says that’s not worth the expense.

If you read that right, then you know that under a nationalized health care system like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton envisioned, doctor’s would not be making decisions but government bureaucrats would. The above shows exactly how heartless such a nationalized system really is.

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The NHS, which provides health care to all Britons and is funded by tax revenue, is spending about 100 billion pounds this fiscal year, or more than double what it spent a decade ago, as the cost of treatments increase and the population ages. The higher costs are forcing the NHS to choose between buying expensive drugs for terminal patients and providing more services for a wider number of people. About 800 of 3,000 cancer patients lose their appeals for regulator-approved drugs each year because of cost, Canterbury- based charity Rarer Cancers Forum said. The U.K. is considering whether to make permanent a preliminary ruling that four medicines, including Sutent, are too expensive to be part of the government-funded treatment of advanced kidney cancer.

There is a reason why the U.K. is in last place among the industrialized nations for cancer survival rates. Delayed detection and delayed treatment of various diseases and conditions are part and parcel to a socialized health care system. Government run health care offers too little too late.

And this telling fact illustrates what people in the U.K. really feel about the NHS:

South Gloucestershire, the trust that includes Rosser’s home, accepts applications for Sutent funding only for exceptional cases, said Ann Jarvis, director of commissioning at the trust, in an e-mail. “Unfortunately for very expensive drugs, if they are proven to only provide a small benefit we have to prioritize other treatments.”

The people joke, “We don’t have socialized health care, we have rationed health care.”

Yes, they do. And we do not want it over here. It is a disaster.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Cancer Patients Lose Shot At Longer Life In U.K. Cuts
David Altaner and Bruce Rule
Bloomberg.com
November 18, 2008

And there is more information at the following website:

Big Government Health

And learn some not-so-well known facts about government run health care:

Learn The Facts

Another Reason For Opposing A Bailout Of The Big Three Automakers

Jobs bank programs. I doubt anyone can give one good reason why we should pay people not to work. But that is what is happening up in Detroit and one of the many reasons why the American automakers are failing.

The following excerpt comes from a story first published by the Detroit News back in 2005. It should have been a clear warning sign to anyone who read it.

Ken Pool is making good money. On weekdays, he shows up at 7 a.m. at Ford Motor Co.’s Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne, signs in, and then starts working — on a crossword puzzle. Pool hates the monotony, but the pay is good: more than $31 an hour, plus benefits. “We just go in and play crossword puzzles, watch videos that someone brings in or read the newspaper,” he says. “Otherwise, I’ve just sat.” Pool is one of more than 12,000 American autoworkers who, instead of installing windshields or bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs bank set up by Detroit automakers and Delphi Corp. as part of an extraordinary job security agreement with the United Auto Workers union.

“Extraordinary” doesn’t even begin to cover it. I doubt that other workers in the United States get such a sweetheart of a deal. But, it is the rest of the United States that pays for this program in the form of higher priced cars.

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Detroit automakers declined to discuss the programs in detail or say exactly how much they are spending, but the four-year labor contracts they signed with the UAW in 2003 established contribution caps that give a good idea of the size of the expense. According to those documents, GM agreed to contribute up to $2.1 billion over four years. DaimlerChrysler set aside $451 million for its program, along with another $50 million for salaried employees covered under the contract. Ford, which also maintained responsibility for Visteon Corp.’s UAW employees, agreed to contribute $944 million. Delphi pledged to contribute $630 million. In August, however, Delphi Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert S. “Steve” Miller said the company spent more than $100 million on its jobs bank program in the second quarter alone. “Can we keep losing $400 million a year paying for workers in the jobs bank and $400 million a year on operations? No, we cannot deal with that indefinitely,” Miller said in a recent interview with The Detroit News. “We can’t wait until 2007.”

Steve Miller got it right. Has Detroit learned any lessons from this? Maybe some small ones. The jobs bank was cut in 2007 under a collective bargaining agreement with GM, but it was not done away with.

Given that the Big Three are going to the Feds begging for a bailout, it was obviously too little, too late.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Jobs Bank Programs — 12,000 Paid Not To Work
Bryce G. Hoffman
The Detroit News
October 17, 2005

No Bailout For The Big Three Automakers

Most of us were pretty adamant that we did not want our tax money going to bailout failing financial institutions on Wall Street, especially since those same institutions were failing due to government regulations that forced them into bad business practices. Here we are several weeks later and it is looking like that bailout is going to go down in history as a huge, $905 billion failure.

Now, Congress is talking about bailing out the Big Three automakers, General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. I am against this bailout for essentially the same reasons as being opposed to the Wall Street bailout: bad business practices being forced upon the automakers, not by government, but by the United Auto Workers Union.

Plain and simple, because of the lunacy of the union negotiated contracts, American automakers cannot compete with foreign automakers and produce a quality car for the same low price. Thus, Detroit is in big trouble with no way out.

Investor’s Business Daily, giving credit to former Clinton Administration official Robert Riech, goes through the issues that the union brings to American automakers and why those issues prevent Detroit from competing in the world market.

Reich says that if a bailout is to be given, then the unions must be willing to give back many of their contract perks. I say that these same issues show exactly why no bailout should be given at all and the Big Three should be allowed to go into Chapter 11.

From the IBD editorial page:

[T]he companies’ poisonous contracts with the United Auto Workers union have to be torn up. The problem is that the UAW, under President Ron Gettelfinger, remains adamant: No givebacks. This is financial lunacy. Thanks in part to managerial incompetence, but mostly due to pricey union contracts, it costs American carmakers too much to build cars here; they can’t compete. When you fold in health care, pensions, hourly pay, vacations and the rest, average total compensation for a Big Three autoworker is $73.21 an hour, according to data cited by University of Michigan economist Mark Perry. Toyota, Honda and Nissan pay a still-generous $44.20 an hour in total compensation — a cost edge of nearly 40%. Is it any wonder that Ford, GM and Chrysler can’t compete? Or that, after paying their workers, they never have enough cash left to retool?

That last paragraph shows how union contracts are holding the automakers back. The automakers cannot afford to retool because they are doing things like paying laid-off workers 90% of their salaries for not working.

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These aren’t temporary problems. They’ve been brewing for decades, as management agreed over and over to labor deals that now financially strangle the industry. Yet, UAW’s Gettelfinger claims the weak economy is to blame for the industry’s woes. Nonsense. As blogger (and former corporate CEO) Jim Manzi notes, American carmakers in 1960 owned 90% of the U.S. auto market. This year, for the first time ever, that share slipped below 50%. Japan’s Big Three — Honda, Nissan and Toyota — make anywhere from $900 to $1,600 in pretax profit on each car they make in North America (mostly in southeastern states, with non-union contracts). America’s Big Three, by comparison, lose anywhere from $400 to $1,500. Truth is, they’re being out-hustled and out-priced in their own backyard due mainly to labor agreements that have driven up costs and become a millstone around their neck.

Chapter 11 will allow the Big Three to tear up those union contracts and start fresh. That is what is needed more than anything else.

Jack and Suzy Welch at Business Week make the case for Chapter 11 as well.

A government handout, however, isn’t the way to make that happen. Washington would impose conditions and promise strict oversight, but it simply can’t push through the kind of transformative change the industry needs. There would be too much political opposition, and regardless, the bailout sums being bandied about—$25 billion of taxpayer dollars, for starters—would only keep the Big Three heaving along, basically as they are. It’s a life-support solution, not a cure. That’s why the boards of the automakers should take the courageous step of putting their companies into bankruptcy. Some creditors might make the case for liquidation, but given the diminished worth of the automakers’ assets, that’s an unattractive scenario. Instead, creditors would most likely opt for the government stepping in as the debtor-in-possession financier supporting the reorganization. Talk about a fresh start. For more than a decade, U.S. carmakers have chipped away incrementally at massive legacy costs. But reorganization would open the doors to meaningful structural change through the renegotiation of contracts with creditors, dealers, and unions. And it would offer better odds of paying back taxpayers.

A bailout is not going to work and it certainly will not encourage the UAW to do the right thing and allow a massive reorganization of the Big Three’s management and production practices.

A majority of Americans were against the Wall Street bailout and it turns out that we were right to be opposed. But the Democrats in Congress are itching to repay the UAW and other unions for their political support during the elections, and they want to repay them with our tax dollars.

We need to send another message to Congress that this bailout is not acceptable. We need to tell Congress that the interests of the American people must take precedence over the interests of a bloated and self-serving labor union.

You can access these articles on-line here:

If No Givebacks, Then No Bailout
Investor’s Business Daily Editorials
November 17, 2008

GM: The Case Against A Bailout
Jack and Suzy Welch
Business Week
November 18, 2008