First, listen to Canadian Sally C. Pipes for explaining the myths of American health care. (9 minutes)
The debate!
Milt Rosenberg talks to James Milam and Canadian David Gratzer about the problems surrounding American healthcare.
Here is the MP3. (86 minutes, commercial-free)
The bad guy isn’t all that bad – he likes HSAs and high-deductible plans.
Learn more
Understand the right way to reform health care… with short podcasts!
Found on Newsbusters via Granite Grok, sent to me by the indomitable ECM. (Lots of comments on Hot Air)
Video:
As President Obama repeatedly tells America that his plan for healthcare reform will not lead to the elimination of private health insurance, statements he made in 2007 and 2003 tell a different story altogether.
In shocking video uncovered by our good friends at Naked Emperor News, Obama, speaking at the SEIU Health Care Forum on March 24, 2007, said, “My commitment is to make sure that we have universal healthcare for all Americans by the end of my first term as President.”
I would hope that we set up a system that allows those who can go through their employer to access a federal system or a state pool of some sort. But I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out or fifteen years out or 20 out.
The video also features clips of other Democrats advocating for universal, government-run, single-payer health care.
If only the left-wing media had done its job – instead of talking about Sarah Palin’s clothes for 8 weeks – we would have found out about this before the election.
UPDATE: Over in the left-wing stronghold of Oregon, Stop the ACLU (via ECM) reports that a patient can have funding for an assisted suicide, but no funding for actual medical care!
UPDATE: Meanwhile, the natives are getting restless. (H/T ECM)
Commenter LCB sent me this very popular article from the UK Telegraph. This article is their most popular article as of Sunday. (ECM also sent it)
The title is “Patients forced to live in agony after NHS refuses to pay for painkilling injections”.
Excerpt:
The Government’s drug rationing watchdog says “therapeutic” injections of steroids, such as cortisone, which are used to reduce inflammation, should no longer be offered to patients suffering from persistent lower back pain when the cause is not known.
Instead the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is ordering doctors to offer patients remedies like acupuncture and osteopathy.
Specialists fear tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as £500 each for private treatment.
The NHS currently issues more than 60,000 treatments of steroid injections every year. NICE said in its guidance it wants to cut this to just 3,000 treatments a year, a move which would save the NHS £33 million.
Why did the government decide that accupuncture and osteopathy were more effective than painkillers? Was it because of research findings? Or was it due to the influence of alternative medicine lobbyists?
The NICE guidelines admit that evidence was limited for many back pain treatments, including those it recommended. Where scientific proof was lacking, advice was instead taken from its expert group. But specialists are furious that while the group included practitioners of alternative therapies, there was no one with expertise in conventional pain relief medicine to argue against a decision to significantly restrict its use.
Doctors don’t like it at all, but government-run health care means government-run health care.
Dr Jonathan Richardson, a consultant pain specialist from Bradford Hospitals Trust, is among more than 50 medics who have written to NICE urging the body to reconsider its decision, which was taken in May.
He said: “The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients. It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive, and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate.”
…Anger among medics has reached such levels that Dr Paul Watson, a physiotherapist who helped draft the guidelines, was last week forced to resign as President of the British Pain Society.
So much for the “public” option. It should be called the “rationing” option.
WINTERY KNIGHT 