Government-run health care ain’t all that great
ByAug 7 2009
Imagine that your two best friends are British and Canadian tobacco addicts. The Brit battles lung cancer. The Canadian endures emphysema and wheezes as he walks around with clanging oxygen canisters. You probably would not think: "Maybe I should pick up smoking."
While that response would be highly irrational, the fact that America even is considering government medicine is equally wacky. The state guides healthcare for our two closest allies: Great Britain and Canada. Like us, these are prosperous, industrial, Anglophone democracies. Nevertheless, compared to America, they suffer higher death rates for diseases, their patients experience severe pain, and they ration medical services.
Look what you’re missing in the U.K.:
– Breast cancer kills 25 percent of its American victims. In Great Britain, the Vatican of single-payer medicine, breast cancer extinguishes 46 percent of its targets.
– Prostate cancer is fatal to 19 percent of its American patients. The National Center for Policy Analysis reports that it kills 57 percent of Britons it strikes.
– Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show that the UK’s 2005 heart-attack fatality rate was 19.5 percent higher than America’s. This may correspond to angioplasties, which were only 21.3 percent as common there as here.
– The UK’s National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) just announced plans to cut its 60,000 annual steroid injections for severe back-pain sufferers to just 3,000. "The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients," Dr. Jonathan Richardson of Bradford Hospitals Trust told London’s Daily Telegraph. "It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate."
Things don’t look much better up north, under Canadian socialized medicine.
– Canada has one third fewer doctors than the OECD average. "The doctor shortage is a direct result of government rationing, since provinces intervened to restrict class sizes in major Canadian medical schools in the 1990s," Dr. David Gratzer, a Canadian physician and Manhattan Institute scholar, told the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee on June 24. Some towns address the doctor dearth with lotteries in which citizens compete for rare medical appointments.
– "In 2008, the average Canadian waited 17.3 weeks from the time his general practitioner referred him to a specialist until he actually received treatment," Pacific Research Institute president Sally Pipes, a Canadian native, wrote in the July 2 Investor’s Business Daily. "That’s 86 percent longer than the wait in 1993, when the (Fraser) Institute first started quantifying the problem."
– Such sloth includes a median 9.7-week wait for an MRI exam, 31.7 weeks to see a neurosurgeon, and 36.7 weeks to visit an orthopedic surgeon.
Thus, Canadian Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps wrote in her 2005 majority opinion in Chaoulli v. Quebec, "…this case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care."
A public option is just the opening bid for eventual nationalization of American medicine. As House Banking Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D — Mass.) told SinglepayerAction.Org on July 27: "The best way we’re going to get single payer, the only way, is to have a public option to demonstrate its strength and its power."
President Obama seconds that emotion.
"I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately," Obama told a March 24, 2007 Service Employees International Union healthcare forum. "There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision (single payer) a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out." As he told the AFL-CIO in 2003: "I happen to be a proponent of single payer, universal health care coverage … That’s what I’d like to see."
Government medicine has proved an excruciating disaster in the U.K. and Canada. Our allies’ experiences with this dreadful idea should horrify rather than inspire everyday Americans, not to mention seemingly blind Democratic politicians.
(Deroy Murdock is a columnist and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. E-mail him at deroy.Murdock(at)gmail.com)
Well countries like US, Canada spent a big deal on medical facilities but If you are not able to get the proper treatment and at proper time then such medical services just fail to deliver their motives. Apart from that various new cancer treatment have come up and we should not ignore the bad effects and just raise for the benefit of health services.
According to the CIA World Factbook, in the ranking of the life expectancies of UN member states, Canada is the tenth highest, the UK is number 26, and the US is number 30. Can it be that our friends are not as healthy with socialized medicine as we are, yet they actually live longer than we do?
Canada spends 9.4% GDP on health care, the U.S. spends 13.9%. Canada spends $3,173/pp, the U.S. $6,096. Canada spends about 16% on administration, leaving ~$2660 for care with 100% of the population covered. The U.S. spends 31% on administrative costs, leaving $4200 for care, not adjusting for the tens of millions who are uninsured.
It is not surprising that for a number of illnesses, the outcomes are better in the U.S.: more cash is thrown at the problem and that money is spread over fewer people. The significantly higher expenditures in the U.S. do lead to some nice facilities. However, look at other measures: infant mortality is higher in the U.S., higher even than Cuba. This is often taken as a measure for basic, broad care. As already noted, Canadians and Britons live longer, even with the binge drinking and obesity problems in the U.K.
The U.S. is (I think) the only first-world example of profit-governed medicine. Occasionally the private component of Canada’s health care industry advocates more “anti-social” medical measures. The U.S. outcomes and costs serve as an example that pretty much shuts down the debate here before it gets started.
Britain’s and Canada’s medical system isn’t perfect, we know that, but it is pretty good, especially for urgent care. Few people outside the U.S. want its health care system. Most Canadians consider the U.S. as an embarrassment to the country and a mistake no one else wants to duplicate.
Comparing the proposed plans to the UK, Canada, or France is dumb because those countries’ systems are totally unlike what anyone in Congress has proposed. Comparing to how things work in Germany and Switzerland makes more sense, since the proposed plans are very similar to those countries’ systems.
http://gulfstreamblues.cafebabel.com/en/post/2009/08/05/Germany,-and-Reason,-Ignored-in-US-Healthcare-Debate
–Jarrod
The Swiss do a good job (I’ve lived there) but again, there’s more money put into things. They spend 10.9% of GDP. 10% more money in the Canadian system, or a third again more money in the U.K. system would probably get similar results.
What this points out is what scares the hell out of me and that is that the bar will not be raised to my level (an excellent program) but be lowered to theirs. In the managed system the nanny state has taken over the decision making so I could end up with a death sentence thanks to a rubber stamp functionary.
If I have a problem with a physicians evaluation and wish a second or third opinion on a critical matter I get it. Remember the old joke: “What do they call someone who finished last in medical school?” Doctor.
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Sorry bogofree, but that’s a fear that the people taking that 31% administrative cost have propagated. Here in Canada I have consulted more than one health care professional about things. No problem. Unlike the profit-driven case, no single private interest can thwart care.
Keep drinking that Kool-Aid folks, just don’t forget who is doing the pouring.
Nationalized health insurance works in every country it’s been instituted in. No one is clamoring for a USA type system over there.
Do people come here to get procedures done?
Yes of course they do.
But HOW MANY?
Not as many as you think.
But guess who is traveling out of country to get medical procedures done in numbers large enough to support an entirely new industry (medical tourism to India)?
Yep, you guessed it…WE ARE.
How’s that greatest health care system on earth looking now?
Ahhh, found some numbers for you!
According to
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/03/27/india.medical.travel/index.html
SIX MILLION Americans will travel to India for medical procedures this year.
Number of people coming to the United States each year?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism#United_States
Sixty to eighty-five thousand.
Hmmmmmm, what’s that, Deroy?
Couldn’t hear ya mate.
Your mouth is full of ASTROTURF.
Well? Hello?
Tap tap tap…is this thing on???
You mean NOBODY is interested that America has created an entirely new industry in a foreign country?
No one thinks it’s significant that the folks calling our health care system “the greatest” are IGNORING the fact that six million people travel outside the country to get surgery and treatment?
What if it were THIRTY MILLION?
Would you like to take a poke at what the environmental
aspects of that much travel amounts to?
We’re OUTSOURCING our medical, it’s ridiculous.
This is a perfect example of how to lie with statistics. First of your numbers flat out wrong. Take for example breast cancer. According the “Cancer Journal For Clinicians,” the breast cancer death rate in Britain is 25% and 20% in the United States.
But the real problem is that you are assuming that the difference is caused by the health care system. If that were the case, then we should adopt the Mexican health care system because the breast cancer death rate there is only 8%. Or maybe we should adopt the Chinese system because the rate is only 6%. That’s right the Chinese system is three time better than ours.
The reality is that breast cancer death rates are highly effected by diet. It is dairy products and meat that cause the high death rates, not the health care system. The same thing applies to prostate cancer.
Everyone of your examples are disceptive. For example steroid injections have now been proved to be no more effective for back pain than palcebo.
Good work, elfish. I’ll add a personal experience to temper the article’s MRI stat for Canada: same day. There was cause for concern with a relative of mine and the MRI was available same day. When care is truly urgently required, you get it. No wallet triage… you just get treatment.
Found this quote the most interesting in the article.
Thus, Canadian Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps wrote in her 2005 majority opinion in Chaoulli v. Quebec, “…this case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care.”
And if you can’t get health care because you are one of the ~46 million American without it, what’s the outcome? Does care denied equate with care delayed or does it just not count, bogofree? If one of them die is that not the fault of the U.S. system because they were never part of it? Or is the point here that there is 100% survival rate of Americans not killed by lack of care?
I’ve already noted our imperfections up here. We study them, are open about them and with respect to wait times, Ontario has been tracking delays and improving.
As a follow up to my previous comment, I notice the way conservatives argue they are more interested in winning points than exploring the truth. It is obvious Murdock simply scanned articles looking for any statistic that might support his argument. In other words, the conclusion came first then he looked for data to prove the result.
Had he looked any further, he would have seen that breast cancer death rates are controlled by diet and seroid injects are being reduced because they don’t work, cost money and have side effects. It is a real diservice to the country when important issues are handled this way. The only people it helps are the vested interest who profit when the truth is hidden.