August, 2019, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Failure of Single Payer Health Care Systems Around the World, Continued

Most months for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care. To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

Four posts ago we reviewed the many, many failures and disasters of Obama Care, probably the worst piece of legislation ever passed when it comes to comparing it to its objectives and its promises. This was the Federal government’s most recent and deepest attempt to try and control the healthcare of Americans and it has ended badly. 

In our previous three posts, we showed the numbers and realities around the world of how single payer healthcare systems always fail to provide effective and efficient health care to its citizens. Despite these realities, many Democratic candidates for President want to implement a failed system like this in this country. Today we will continue that discussion of failed single payer healthcare systems from other countries, further proof that this approach to healthcare is a bad, bad idea.

We continue that discussion today, the failures of the single payer healthcare model:

1) Let’s start up in Canada today. The Fraser Institute has completed a research report on the Canadian healthcare system called, "Waiting Your Turn." It found that:

• A Canadian citizen has to wait about 18.2 weeks on average to see a specialist doctor in Canada if they need specific medical care, i.e. more than four months.
• This average wait time of 18.2 weeks up from 9.3 weeks in 1993, i.e. the wait times are getting far worse over time.
• And this is the median average amount of wait time, which means half of those Canadians needing specific medical help wait more than four months to see a health care specialist
• Canada "rations" healthcare through long waiting times and limited access, according to Dr. Roger Stark, a healthcare policy expert at the Washington Policy Center who told The Heartland Institute: "These long waits would not be acceptable to Americans, who are rightly accustomed to timely healthcare."
• And the wait times vary significantly across Canada with the New Brunswick median wait time being 37.3 weeks, (an astonishing nine months plus) to Ontario where the median wait time is 14.1 weeks, still over three months.
• Wait times also vary greatly according to what type of specialist you need to see with the median wait time for orthopedic surgery being 42.2 weeks, neurology patients median wait time is an average of 31.2 weeks, and the wait for radiation oncology is 4.2 weeks.
• Think about this last statement: if you are fighting cancer, on average you have to wait over a month to get radiation treatment, four weeks where your cancer continues to spread.
• Canadians are waiting 3.8 weeks for a CT scan, 8.7 weeks for an MRI scan, and 3.3 weeks for an ultrasound.
• Extensive wait times can have serious consequences, Fraser report co-author Bacchus Barua points out: "For example, they may force some patients to endure months of physical pain and mental anguish, they may result in lower worker productivity and [forgone] wages, they can sometimes result in a potentially treatable illness being transformed into a debilitating permanent condition, and in the worst cases, they may result in death."
• Barua goes on to claim that the extensive wait times are not due to lack of funding and resources since Canadian healthcare expenditures per person have gone up by 50%, adjusting for inflation, since 1993.
• Thus, he claims the likely underlying causes of these gross waiting times are the government monopoly on the financing and delivery of medical services and the lack of appropriate incentives for providers.
• "This is indirect rationing," said Dr. Dale Dunn, a policy adviser to The Heartland Institute. "Almost 30 years ago I started seeing doctors leaving Canada because they were disgusted with the system because it prevented them from treating patients."

Steadily increasing costs for steadily decreasing quality, a fatal combination in many cases.

2) Despite these blatant disasters of the single payer model around the world, our politicians continue to ignore reality and continue to push for a single payer system in this country:

• The New York State Assembly's Health Committee actually held a hearing on a proposed legislative bill to adopt single-payer healthcare in the state of New York, proving again there is no cure for stupid.
• Bernie Sanders’ single payer proposal for us is estimated to cost $32 TRILLION just in the first ten years.
• This would be about $3.2 TRILLION a year, equal about 80% of the entire Federal government budget today.
• This $32 TRILLION would require an annual average tax increase of $24,000 for every American household.
• The state of Vermont looked at a single payer system for their state in 2014 and gave up when the estimated costs would require a state tax increase of 160%, about $27,500 per Vermont household per year.
• In California, the estimated cost of their entry into a single payer system was a whopping $440 billion a year, a sum greater than the entire state government budget.
• The $440 billion came out to a per household annual cost of $26,500.
• As we discussed in yesterday’s post, in Canada, a country that has had a single payer system for a long time, a whopping three quarters of Canadians also see fit to purchase supplemental health insurance to cover prescription drugs, ambulance costs, dentistry, and other services not fully covered by the single payer system, which kind of defeats the whole concept of a single payer system which is supposed to cover “all” medical costs.
• And even if a liberal thinks these astronomical costs are manageable, keep in mind that no government program has ever come in under budget so the $32 TRILLION estimate is probably too low by orders of magnitude.

Astronomical costs for low quality healthcare, rife with long wait times for treatment, again, a fatal combination. More single payer failures to follow.

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http://www.reason.com
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http://www.conventionofstates.com
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