Obama Appoints Health Care Rationing Czar

Wait a minute! What did that title read? “Rationing Czar?” But Obama and the Democrats promised us that there wouldn’t be any rationing and that anyone who made such a claim was guilty of “fear-mongering.”

Well, let’s meet Obama’s new Rationing Czar, Donald Berwick, and see whether we were “fear-mongering” or we simply called out the Democrats’ lie earlier than they expected:

From an article by Terry Jeffrey at TownHall:

“The decision is not whether or not we will ration care,” Berwick told Biotechnology Healthcare, “the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” President Obama has nominated Berwick to be administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the federal agency that runs these two massive proto-socialist health care programs. If confirmed, he will oversee the massive cuts that Obamacare mandated in Medicare.

“Fear-mongering?” That is the term the Dems use when they want to silence critics who have correctly identified a Democrat lie.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Obama Names Rationing Czar To Run Medicare
Terry Jeffrey
TownHall.com
May 25, 2010

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel Tries To Tap-Dance His Way Out Of His Own Writings

Jake Tapper isn’t a hard-core leftist, but he is easily manipulated by the left. Tapper looks at the responses that Dr. Emanuel gives for the recent criticism of his writings about rationing of health care and the “complete lives” philosophy for determining who gets what health care and how much.

According to Tapper at ABC News:

One of the passages written by Emanuel and used as evidence by Palin and others that he would favor withholding medical care from those who aren’t productive members of society include a 1996 contribution to the Hastings Center Report, in which he said that under the “civic republican or deliberative democratic” construct, “services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia. A less obvious example is guaranteeing neuropsychological services to ensure children with learning disabilities can read and learn to reason.” Is he saying, as Palin and others have suggested, that those who aren’t “participating citizens” should have no guarantee to health care? “No,” Emanuel says, “and I think I made it pretty clear I wasn’t endorsing that view, I was analyzing that perspective and what it might mean in practical terms. The rest of the text around that quote made it made it pretty clear I was trying to analyze it and understand it, not endorse it.”

But, from the text of Where Civic Republicanism And Deliberative Democracy Meet as published in a 1996 Hastings Center Report, we see the following:

Thus, it seems there is a growing agreement between liberals, communitarians, and others that many political matters, including matters of justice- and specifically, the just allocation of health care resources–can be addressed only by invoking a particular conception of the good. … Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity-those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations-are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.

Nowhere did Dr. Emanuel say that his thinking was hypothetical. This last paragraph excerpt made it pretty clear what his stance on the issue is. His conception of “the good” is policies that “ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations-are to be socially guaranteed as basic.” In layman’s terms, that means that only those who are deemed “productive” should be getting medical coverage.

Tapper goes on to present another misleading explanation of the January 31, 2009 article published in The Lancet that Dr. Emanuel co-authored:

The oncologist suggests that his words are being twisted because opponents “don’t have a solution” to the health care reform debate. “Maybe the only tactic is to sow fear and use whatever means you have to attack whether that’s grounded in reality or not… If you don’t have good arguments you use whatever you got, I guess, to say things that are distortive and untrue.” He says “there have been previous attempts to come after me and after some of my colleagues, but this is certainly on a completely different scale and magnitude. I’ve never been mentioned on Sunday shows in this light and certainly never on the floor of Congress. The distortions are much larger than I’ve ever seen or would have believed could happen.”

But, let’s see what he wrote in that article and whether or not it jibes with his current claims:

When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated. … Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect.

No twisting there at all. Dr. Emanuel is clear and unambiguous as to what he believes. And the following graph shows where he believes resources should be rationed:

(Source: Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions; Govind Persad, Alan Wertheimer, Ezekiel J Emanuel; The Lancet, January 31, 2009)

You can clearly see where Dr. Emanuel believes that the very young and the very old should fall in the priority curve. We can assume that such low priorities will also be held for Special Needs patients as well.

You can cross reference this with Sections 1162 and 1177 of HR3200. The parallels are undeniable.

When Gov. Palin voiced her concerns about Trig and her parents being denied medical care based on their “productivity,” she was very justified.

Conculsion: Dr. Emanuel can spin and tap-dance all he wants. But he cannot run and hide from what he has written and published. And we should not allow him to even try.

People work hard their entire lives to ensure that their families are taken care of and to ensure that they themselves are taken care of in their twilight years. HR3200 would only serve to undo all that work and allow the government to come in and change the plans that people had made for themselves years before.

A Preview Of Universal Health Care: Oregon Woman Denied Medicine, Offered Assisted Suicide Instead

One of the beautiful things about living in the United States is that with 50 states, we can compare and contrast varying policies to see how well they work or how miserably they fail. We can also predict how national policy will play out by observing how a similar policy affects a particular state.

Oregon is a state that has Universal Health Care. According to KVAL of Eugene, Oregon:

Barbara Wagner has one wish – for more time. “I’m not ready, I’m not ready to die,” the Springfield woman said. “I’ve got things I’d still like to do.” Her doctor offered hope in the new chemotherapy drug Tarceva, but the Oregon Health Plan sent her a letter telling her the cancer treatment was not approved. Instead, the letter said, the plan would pay for comfort care, including “physician aid in dying,” better known as assisted suicide.

So, why was it not approved by a state that promised Universal Care?

One critic of assisted suicide calls the message disturbing nonetheless. “People deserve relief of their suffering, not giving them an overdose,” said Dr. William Toffler. He said the state has a financial incentive to offer death instead of life: Chemotherapy drugs such as Tarceva cost $4,000 a month while drugs for assisted suicide cost less than $100.

And here is the real kicker:

[Dr. Som] Saha said state health officials do not consider whether it is cheaper for someone in the health plan to die than live. However, he admitted they must consider the state’s limited dollars when dealing with a case such as Wagner’s. “If we invest thousands and thousands of dollars in one person’s days to weeks, we are taking away those dollars from someone,” Saha said.

There is a sinlge word to describe the above situation: RATIONING.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Health Plan Covers Assisted Suicide But Not New Cancer Treatment
Susan Harding
KVAL.com
July 31, 2008

And Speaking Of People Carrying Swastikas …

Can you identify who said the following?

“Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” “When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.” “Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects…. Adolescents have received substantial substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments…. It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does.” “Ultimately, the complete lives system does not create ‘classes of Untermenschen whose lives and well being are deemed not worth spending money on,’ but rather empowers us to decide fairly whom to save when genuine scarcity makes saving everyone impossible.” “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change. Savings will require changing how doctors think about their patients. Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others.” “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.” “Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda. If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration’s health-reform effort.”

If you guess infamous Nazi Dr. Mengele, you’d be wrong. The above was originally from Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the chief health-care policy adviser to President Obama, and the brother of Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. It appeared in a January 31, 2009 article of The Lancet.

You can access a pdf version of this article on-line here:

Principles For Allocation Of Scarce Medical Interventions
The Lancet
January 31, 2009

Now, Nancy Pelosi leveled a false charge at the American people claiming that those who questioned Obamacare were carrying swastikas at the town hall meetings where they asked legitimate question of their Congressional delegations. No swastikas were present.

But Dr. Emanuel seems to be carrying a swastika where it counts the most: in his heart. He used the same exact arguments that Dr. Mengele used in justifying Germany’s eugenics program. Clearly, Obama and his staff want to start a similar program here using HR3200 (socialized medicine) as the vehicle to implement it.

Also, did you notice the following: “When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”

And:

“Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.”

Can you believe the AARP convinced its members to support Obama?

No, this is not a scare tactic. I don’t see how I could be any scarier than Dr. Emanuel already is.

BTW, I accurately predicted something like this last January:

Nancy Pelosi Takes A Page From Nazi Propaganda: Wants To Reduce Costs Through Contraception

Another Look At Socialized Medicine From A Canadian Doctor

I find it interesting that the Dems are all about looking to other nations when it comes to interpreting American law, but when it comes to socialized medicine, they want to ignore the experiences of other nations.

The Wall Street Journal has a column by Canadian-born physician Dr. David Gratzer concerning socialized medicine in his home country.

Here is what he has to say:

Born and raised in Canada, I once believed that government health care is compassionate and equitable. It is neither. My views changed in medical school. Yes, everyone in Canada is covered by a “single payer” — the government. But Canadians wait for practically any procedure or diagnostic test or specialist consultation in the public system.

Not just in Canada, but in Great Britain as well and any other country that practices socialized medicine. And the waiting is extremely detrimental to patients who need care as soon as possible:

The problems were brought home when a relative had difficulty walking. He was in chronic pain. His doctor suggested a referral to a neurologist; an MRI would need to be done, then possibly a referral to another specialist. The wait would have stretched to roughly a year. If surgery was needed, the wait would be months more. Not wanting to stay confined to his house, he had the surgery done in the U.S., at the Mayo Clinic, and paid for it himself. Such stories are common. For example, Sylvia de Vries, an Ontario woman, had a 40-pound fluid-filled tumor removed from her abdomen by an American surgeon in 2006. Her Michigan doctor estimated that she was within weeks of dying, but she was still on a wait list for a Canadian specialist. Indeed, Canada’s provincial governments themselves rely on American medicine. Between 2006 and 2008, Ontario sent more than 160 patients to New York and Michigan for emergency neurosurgery — described by the Globe and Mail newspaper as “broken necks, burst aneurysms and other types of bleeding in or around the brain.”

Why would we want to move to a system that is so inefficient and so low-quality? The failures of socialized medicine are myriad:

Only half of ER patients are treated in a timely manner by national and international standards, according to a government study. The physician shortage is so severe that some towns hold lotteries, with the winners gaining access to the local doc. Overall, according to a study published in Lancet Oncology last year, five-year cancer survival rates are higher in the U.S. than those in Canada. Based on data from the Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health (done by Statistics Canada and the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics), Americans have greater access to preventive screening tests and have higher treatment rates for chronic illnesses. No wonder: To limit the growth in health spending, governments restrict the supply of health care by rationing it through waiting. The same survey data show, as June and Paul O’Neill note in a paper published in 2007 in the Forum for Health Economics & Policy, that the poor under socialized medicine seem to be less healthy relative to the nonpoor than their American counterparts.

Rationing. That’s what socialized medicine comes down to. The government will decide who gets what treatment and when. That is the main reason why cancer survival rates are lower in places like Canada and Great Britain. Delayed detection and delayed treatment allows cancer to spread and grow in a patient until, in many cases, the treatment comes too late and the government then decrees that the patient is now a “hopeless diagnosis” and should be left to die.

But, it seems as though the people of Canada have learned their lesson. Dr. Gratzer asks a very profound question while presenting some good evidence that privatized medicine is the way to go. Make sure you read the following excerpt all the way through:

Ironically, as the U.S. is on the verge of rushing toward government health care, Canada is reforming its system in the opposite direction. In 2005, Canada’s supreme court struck down key laws in Quebec that established a government monopoly of health services. Claude Castonguay, who headed the Quebec government commission that recommended the creation of its public health-care system in the 1960s, also has second thoughts. Last year, after completing another review, he declared the system in “crisis” and suggested a massive expansion of private services — even advocating that public hospitals rent facilities to physicians in off-hours. And the medical establishment? Dr. Brian Day, an orthopedic surgeon, grew increasingly frustrated by government cutbacks that reduced his access to an operating room and increased the number of patients on his hospital waiting list. He built a private hospital in Vancouver in the 1990s. Last year, he completed a term as the president of the Canadian Medical Association and was succeeded by a Quebec radiologist who owns several private clinics. In Canada, private-sector health care is growing. Dr. Day estimates that 50,000 people are seen at private clinics every year in British Columbia. According to the New York Times, a private clinic opens at a rate of about one a week across the country. Public-private partnerships, once a taboo topic, are embraced by provincial governments. In the United Kingdom, where socialized medicine was established after World War II through the National Health Service, the present Labour government has introduced a choice in surgeries by allowing patients to choose among facilities, often including private ones. Even in Sweden, the government has turned over services to the private sector. Americans need to ask a basic question: Why are they rushing into a system of government-dominated health care when the very countries that have experienced it for so long are backing away?

You can access the complete column on-line here:

Canada’s ObamaCare Precedent
Dr. David Gratzer
Wall Street Journal
June 9, 2009

Another Look At Socialized Medicine From A Canadian Doctor

I find it interesting that the Dems are all about looking to other nations when it comes to interpreting American law, but when it comes to socialized medicine, they want to ignore the experiences of other nations.

The Wall Street Journal has a column by Canadian-born physician Dr. David Gratzer concerning socialized medicine in his home country.

Here is what he has to say:

Born and raised in Canada, I once believed that government health care is compassionate and equitable. It is neither. My views changed in medical school. Yes, everyone in Canada is covered by a “single payer” — the government. But Canadians wait for practically any procedure or diagnostic test or specialist consultation in the public system.

Not just in Canada, but in Great Britain as well and any other country that practices socialized medicine. And the waiting is extremely detrimental to patients who need care as soon as possible:

The problems were brought home when a relative had difficulty walking. He was in chronic pain. His doctor suggested a referral to a neurologist; an MRI would need to be done, then possibly a referral to another specialist. The wait would have stretched to roughly a year. If surgery was needed, the wait would be months more. Not wanting to stay confined to his house, he had the surgery done in the U.S., at the Mayo Clinic, and paid for it himself. Such stories are common. For example, Sylvia de Vries, an Ontario woman, had a 40-pound fluid-filled tumor removed from her abdomen by an American surgeon in 2006. Her Michigan doctor estimated that she was within weeks of dying, but she was still on a wait list for a Canadian specialist. Indeed, Canada’s provincial governments themselves rely on American medicine. Between 2006 and 2008, Ontario sent more than 160 patients to New York and Michigan for emergency neurosurgery — described by the Globe and Mail newspaper as “broken necks, burst aneurysms and other types of bleeding in or around the brain.”

Why would we want to move to a system that is so inefficient and so low-quality? The failures of socialized medicine are myriad:

Only half of ER patients are treated in a timely manner by national and international standards, according to a government study. The physician shortage is so severe that some towns hold lotteries, with the winners gaining access to the local doc. Overall, according to a study published in Lancet Oncology last year, five-year cancer survival rates are higher in the U.S. than those in Canada. Based on data from the Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health (done by Statistics Canada and the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics), Americans have greater access to preventive screening tests and have higher treatment rates for chronic illnesses. No wonder: To limit the growth in health spending, governments restrict the supply of health care by rationing it through waiting. The same survey data show, as June and Paul O’Neill note in a paper published in 2007 in the Forum for Health Economics & Policy, that the poor under socialized medicine seem to be less healthy relative to the nonpoor than their American counterparts.

Rationing. That’s what socialized medicine comes down to. The government will decide who gets what treatment and when. That is the main reason why cancer survival rates are lower in places like Canada and Great Britain. Delayed detection and delayed treatment allows cancer to spread and grow in a patient until, in many cases, the treatment comes too late and the government then decrees that the patient is now a “hopeless diagnosis” and should be left to die.

But, it seems as though the people of Canada have learned their lesson. Dr. Gratzer asks a very profound question while presenting some good evidence that privatized medicine is the way to go. Make sure you read the following excerpt all the way through:

Ironically, as the U.S. is on the verge of rushing toward government health care, Canada is reforming its system in the opposite direction. In 2005, Canada’s supreme court struck down key laws in Quebec that established a government monopoly of health services. Claude Castonguay, who headed the Quebec government commission that recommended the creation of its public health-care system in the 1960s, also has second thoughts. Last year, after completing another review, he declared the system in “crisis” and suggested a massive expansion of private services — even advocating that public hospitals rent facilities to physicians in off-hours. And the medical establishment? Dr. Brian Day, an orthopedic surgeon, grew increasingly frustrated by government cutbacks that reduced his access to an operating room and increased the number of patients on his hospital waiting list. He built a private hospital in Vancouver in the 1990s. Last year, he completed a term as the president of the Canadian Medical Association and was succeeded by a Quebec radiologist who owns several private clinics. In Canada, private-sector health care is growing. Dr. Day estimates that 50,000 people are seen at private clinics every year in British Columbia. According to the New York Times, a private clinic opens at a rate of about one a week across the country. Public-private partnerships, once a taboo topic, are embraced by provincial governments. In the United Kingdom, where socialized medicine was established after World War II through the National Health Service, the present Labour government has introduced a choice in surgeries by allowing patients to choose among facilities, often including private ones. Even in Sweden, the government has turned over services to the private sector. Americans need to ask a basic question: Why are they rushing into a system of government-dominated health care when the very countries that have experienced it for so long are backing away?

You can access the complete column on-line here:

Canada’s ObamaCare Precedent
Dr. David Gratzer
Wall Street Journal
June 9, 2009

Another Look At Socialized Medicine From A Canadian Doctor

I find it interesting that the Dems are all about looking to other nations when it comes to interpreting American law, but when it comes to socialized medicine, they want to ignore the experiences of other nations.

The Wall Street Journal has a column by Canadian-born physician Dr. David Gratzer concerning socialized medicine in his home country.

Here is what he has to say:

Born and raised in Canada, I once believed that government health care is compassionate and equitable. It is neither. My views changed in medical school. Yes, everyone in Canada is covered by a “single payer” — the government. But Canadians wait for practically any procedure or diagnostic test or specialist consultation in the public system.

Not just in Canada, but in Great Britain as well and any other country that practices socialized medicine. And the waiting is extremely detrimental to patients who need care as soon as possible:

The problems were brought home when a relative had difficulty walking. He was in chronic pain. His doctor suggested a referral to a neurologist; an MRI would need to be done, then possibly a referral to another specialist. The wait would have stretched to roughly a year. If surgery was needed, the wait would be months more. Not wanting to stay confined to his house, he had the surgery done in the U.S., at the Mayo Clinic, and paid for it himself. Such stories are common. For example, Sylvia de Vries, an Ontario woman, had a 40-pound fluid-filled tumor removed from her abdomen by an American surgeon in 2006. Her Michigan doctor estimated that she was within weeks of dying, but she was still on a wait list for a Canadian specialist. Indeed, Canada’s provincial governments themselves rely on American medicine. Between 2006 and 2008, Ontario sent more than 160 patients to New York and Michigan for emergency neurosurgery — described by the Globe and Mail newspaper as “broken necks, burst aneurysms and other types of bleeding in or around the brain.”

Why would we want to move to a system that is so inefficient and so low-quality? The failures of socialized medicine are myriad:

Only half of ER patients are treated in a timely manner by national and international standards, according to a government study. The physician shortage is so severe that some towns hold lotteries, with the winners gaining access to the local doc. Overall, according to a study published in Lancet Oncology last year, five-year cancer survival rates are higher in the U.S. than those in Canada. Based on data from the Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health (done by Statistics Canada and the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics), Americans have greater access to preventive screening tests and have higher treatment rates for chronic illnesses. No wonder: To limit the growth in health spending, governments restrict the supply of health care by rationing it through waiting. The same survey data show, as June and Paul O’Neill note in a paper published in 2007 in the Forum for Health Economics & Policy, that the poor under socialized medicine seem to be less healthy relative to the nonpoor than their American counterparts.

Rationing. That’s what socialized medicine comes down to. The government will decide who gets what treatment and when. That is the main reason why cancer survival rates are lower in places like Canada and Great Britain. Delayed detection and delayed treatment allows cancer to spread and grow in a patient until, in many cases, the treatment comes too late and the government then decrees that the patient is now a “hopeless diagnosis” and should be left to die.

But, it seems as though the people of Canada have learned their lesson. Dr. Gratzer asks a very profound question while presenting some good evidence that privatized medicine is the way to go. Make sure to read the following excerpt all the way through:

Ironically, as the U.S. is on the verge of rushing toward government health care, Canada is reforming its system in the opposite direction. In 2005, Canada’s supreme court struck down key laws in Quebec that established a government monopoly of health services. Claude Castonguay, who headed the Quebec government commission that recommended the creation of its public health-care system in the 1960s, also has second thoughts. Last year, after completing another review, he declared the system in “crisis” and suggested a massive expansion of private services — even advocating that public hospitals rent facilities to physicians in off-hours. And the medical establishment? Dr. Brian Day, an orthopedic surgeon, grew increasingly frustrated by government cutbacks that reduced his access to an operating room and increased the number of patients on his hospital waiting list. He built a private hospital in Vancouver in the 1990s. Last year, he completed a term as the president of the Canadian Medical Association and was succeeded by a Quebec radiologist who owns several private clinics. In Canada, private-sector health care is growing. Dr. Day estimates that 50,000 people are seen at private clinics every year in British Columbia. According to the New York Times, a private clinic opens at a rate of about one a week across the country. Public-private partnerships, once a taboo topic, are embraced by provincial governments. In the United Kingdom, where socialized medicine was established after World War II through the National Health Service, the present Labour government has introduced a choice in surgeries by allowing patients to choose among facilities, often including private ones. Even in Sweden, the government has turned over services to the private sector. Americans need to ask a basic question: Why are they rushing into a system of government-dominated health care when the very countries that have experienced it for so long are backing away?

You can access the complete column on-line here:

Canada’s ObamaCare Precedent
Dr. David Gratzer
Wall Street Journal
June 9, 2009

Another Look At Socialized Medicine From A Canadian Doctor

I find it interesting that the Dems are all about looking to other nations when it comes to interpreting American law, but when it comes to socialized medicine, they want to ignore the experiences of other nations.

The Wall Street Journal has a column by Canadian-born physician Dr. David Gratzer concerning socialized medicine in his home country.

Here is what he has to say:

Born and raised in Canada, I once believed that government health care is compassionate and equitable. It is neither. My views changed in medical school. Yes, everyone in Canada is covered by a “single payer” — the government. But Canadians wait for practically any procedure or diagnostic test or specialist consultation in the public system.

Not just in Canada, but in Great Britain as well and any other country that practices socialized medicine. And the waiting is extremely detrimental to patients who need care as soon as possible:

The problems were brought home when a relative had difficulty walking. He was in chronic pain. His doctor suggested a referral to a neurologist; an MRI would need to be done, then possibly a referral to another specialist. The wait would have stretched to roughly a year. If surgery was needed, the wait would be months more. Not wanting to stay confined to his house, he had the surgery done in the U.S., at the Mayo Clinic, and paid for it himself. Such stories are common. For example, Sylvia de Vries, an Ontario woman, had a 40-pound fluid-filled tumor removed from her abdomen by an American surgeon in 2006. Her Michigan doctor estimated that she was within weeks of dying, but she was still on a wait list for a Canadian specialist. Indeed, Canada’s provincial governments themselves rely on American medicine. Between 2006 and 2008, Ontario sent more than 160 patients to New York and Michigan for emergency neurosurgery — described by the Globe and Mail newspaper as “broken necks, burst aneurysms and other types of bleeding in or around the brain.”

Why would we want to move to a system that is so inefficient and so low-quality? The failures of socialized medicine are myriad:

Only half of ER patients are treated in a timely manner by national and international standards, according to a government study. The physician shortage is so severe that some towns hold lotteries, with the winners gaining access to the local doc. Overall, according to a study published in Lancet Oncology last year, five-year cancer survival rates are higher in the U.S. than those in Canada. Based on data from the Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health (done by Statistics Canada and the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics), Americans have greater access to preventive screening tests and have higher treatment rates for chronic illnesses. No wonder: To limit the growth in health spending, governments restrict the supply of health care by rationing it through waiting. The same survey data show, as June and Paul O’Neill note in a paper published in 2007 in the Forum for Health Economics & Policy, that the poor under socialized medicine seem to be less healthy relative to the nonpoor than their American counterparts.

Rationing. That’s what socialized medicine comes down to. The government will decide who gets what treatment and when. That is the main reason why cancer survival rates are lower in places like Canada and Great Britain. Delayed detection and delayed treatment allows cancer to spread and grow in a patient until, in many cases, the treatment comes too late and the government then decrees that the patient is now a “hopeless diagnosis” and should be left to die.

But, it seems as though the people of Canada have learned their lesson. Dr. Gratzer asks a very profound question while presenting some good evidence that privatized medicine is the way to go. Make sure to read the following excerpt all the way through:

Ironically, as the U.S. is on the verge of rushing toward government health care, Canada is reforming its system in the opposite direction. In 2005, Canada’s supreme court struck down key laws in Quebec that established a government monopoly of health services. Claude Castonguay, who headed the Quebec government commission that recommended the creation of its public health-care system in the 1960s, also has second thoughts. Last year, after completing another review, he declared the system in “crisis” and suggested a massive expansion of private services — even advocating that public hospitals rent facilities to physicians in off-hours. And the medical establishment? Dr. Brian Day, an orthopedic surgeon, grew increasingly frustrated by government cutbacks that reduced his access to an operating room and increased the number of patients on his hospital waiting list. He built a private hospital in Vancouver in the 1990s. Last year, he completed a term as the president of the Canadian Medical Association and was succeeded by a Quebec radiologist who owns several private clinics. In Canada, private-sector health care is growing. Dr. Day estimates that 50,000 people are seen at private clinics every year in British Columbia. According to the New York Times, a private clinic opens at a rate of about one a week across the country. Public-private partnerships, once a taboo topic, are embraced by provincial governments. In the United Kingdom, where socialized medicine was established after World War II through the National Health Service, the present Labour government has introduced a choice in surgeries by allowing patients to choose among facilities, often including private ones. Even in Sweden, the government has turned over services to the private sector. Americans need to ask a basic question: Why are they rushing into a system of government-dominated health care when the very countries that have experienced it for so long are backing away?

You can access the complete column on-line here:

Canada’s ObamaCare Precedent
Dr. David Gratzer
Wall Street Journal
June 9, 2009