From the Sydney Morning Herald. (H/T ECM)
Excerpt:
Westmead Hospital is cancelling surgery at four times the rate the Health Department considers acceptable, and waiting times are so long some surgeons are refusing to add new patients to their operating lists.
About 8 per cent of elective surgery patients at the flagship Sydney University teaching hospital had their operation cancelled on the day of surgery, due to a shortage of post-surgical beds.
[…]Those cancellations – which Professor Fletcher said affected up to half of patients for some types of surgery – were not formally recorded.
[…]Hospitals in western Sydney have suffered staff freezes and bed cuts due to debts that last year reached $26 million.
This is what happens when you take the profit motive out of health care. If there is no way to make money, then there is no free capital that flows into the industry. If there is no free capital, then the only way to expand is by raises taxes. If taxes are already too high, then the only way to control demand is by using waiting lists. And naturally the people in power will favor the special interest groups who vote for them with faster access to treatment.
Be effective and influential:
Story from the American Spectator. (H/T ECM)
Excerpt:
Democrats and President Obama have denied that the creation of a new government-run health care plan would be a Trojan Horse for single-payer health care, but a new report by the Lewin Group (comissioned by the Heritage Foundation) finds that the House Democrats’ health care bill would shift more 83.4 million Americans from private health care coverage to the government plan. To put that in perspective, that would mean that nearly half (48.4 percent) would lose their private health coverage. In all, the government plan would have 103.4 million members once implemented, according to the Lewin analysis. President Obama has repeated the mantra that anybody who likes their health insurance plan can keep it, but in reality about 63 percent of covered Americans get their health care through their employers, and if employers decide to drop their current health plans in favor of the government plan, workers won’t have any choice but to sign up.
The reason for the dramatic shift is that the Lewin Group has anticipated that with government setting lower reimbursement rates for doctors, hospitals and other health care providers, the government plan will offer lower premiums than private plans. However, the flip side is that the Congressional Budget Office estimates providers will lose $361.9 billion in revenue over the next decade if the House bill is passed. That will mean lower quality of care, shortages in doctors and hospitals, and/or increased shifting of costs on to those with private health care. Should further cost-shifting occur, it will then in turn erode private health care coverage even more dramatically.
He’s a socialist. He wanted single-payer health care. He wants to control whether you can buy medical services. He wants to confiscate your earned income that you want to use to pay for your prostate cancer treatment, and he wants to spend it on someone else’s elective abortion. Understand?
Be effective and influential:
…integrating Christian faith and knowledge in the public square
WINTERY KNIGHT 