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.
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.
Two 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 post,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.
1) Before we go into the more general aspect of single payer failures, I actually have awareness of a personal story of someone who was failed by such a system in England. I have a friend whose brother moved to England decades ago, ended up marrying a British subject and living under England’s single payer system. In the fall of 2016, he became ill and was told he had cancer that was working its way through his body.
One year later, in October of 2017, he was finally scheduled for and received surgery in which the doctors removed more than one bodily organ and the parts of another organ. Fortunately, he has so far survived.
But as always with a single payer system, it rations and delays treatment way out into the future. How much easier, how much less suffering, how much less expensive, and how much higher would his survival rate had been if he had not had to wait over a year to get treatment for cancer?
It is no secret that survival rates from cancer and other treatments in England is much lower than elsewhere in the world. This example shows why.
2) Canada has had a single payer government controlled health care system for a long time. Keeping that in mind, consider the fact Angela Johnson, president of Medical Confidence, Inc., just written a book entitled “Step by Step Guide to Navigating your way through Canada’s Health Care System and Minimizing Your Wait Time.” The book is billed as “a first of its kind and must read for Canadians, providing them with 14 valuable tips to overcome these issues and "minimize their wait times.” If you have to read a book in order to understand and cope with medical wait times, maybe the single payer system is not the most efficient way to deliver health care.
3) Let’s stay with Canada’s single payer system. In Canada’s capital, Ottawa, that “1,195 children and youth are waiting for mental health outpatient and outreach services at CHEO and the Royal, up 10 per cent from 1,082 a year ago,” according to an article in the Ottawa Citizen. The wait time for mental health treatment Canada could be up to a year. Not a good situation when our mental health needs might go a year before being addressed, never mind cured.
4) As previously discussed,England also has a single payer system, the National Health Service (NHS). The NHS recommends that no cancer patient in Great Britain should wait more than 62 days to start their cancer treatment. That does not mean you will be treated within 62 days, the 62 days is just a recommendation.
However, the Daily Mail recently reported just over 9,900 British cancer patients waited longer than that in the first six months of 2014. Like the mental health patients in Canada, waiting for cancer treatments is never a good thing since according to a recent article in the journal, Radiotherapy and Oncology, where the researchers assert that for breast cancer there is an “increase in the risk of recurrence of 1.0% per month of delay” and for head and neck cancer there is an “increase in the risk of recurrence of 3.7% per month of delay.”
5) Staying in Great Britain, the Daily Mail reported last August that the “number of patients languishing on NHS waiting lists for operations is at its highest for six years…There are 3.2 million people awaiting surgery – a rise of 700,000 compared with 2010.” Not only are their 3.2 million people on the wait list for surgery, 809,000 patients were waiting for a diagnostic test and 15,600 operations were cancelled at the last minute in the second quarter of 2014. And these numbers may be an under count due to errors and incomplete records. Delays, cancelled tests, sounds just like our own government’s mistreatment of our veterans.
6) Some final points for today’s discussion relative to Canada’s single payer system:
- Every year it is estimated that between 30,000 and 40,000 Canadians come to the United States to have their dire health conditions treated since enduring the long wait times for treatment in Canada, even for simple diagnostic tests such as an MRI, could be fatal.
- And while advocates of single payer systems in the Democratic Party claim often that healthcare in Canada is free, the reality is nothing is free in this world, “free” healthcare is paid for by high Canadian taxation levels.
- And the single payer system in Canada is not comprehensive in that the basic single payer coverage does not cover dental, eye care, and some aspects of sickness which means that Canadians have to buy extra healthcare insurance to cover these uncovered needs.
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