Tag Archives: Payer

MUST-SEE: Steven Crowder’s undercover expose of single-payer health care in Canada!

UPDATE: Welcome Canadian visitors from Blazing Cat Fur! Thanks for the link! I am going to tell you all straight – I have seen Canadian Football and it is twice as exciting as American Football. Please allow us to have CFL teams (again)!

Hilarious, and totally un-scripted, totally undercover!

How long must you wait for FREE HEALTH CARE in Canada?

You can leave a comment at his blog here. (H/T IMAO.us)

Hot Air summarizes the lessons of the video:

The big lesson from Steven Crowder’s undercover look at the single-payer health-care system in Canada? “Don’t get sick on Sunday.” Actually, we can probably narrow that to, “Don’t get sick,” because Steven demonstrates that the only thing reliably covered in CanadaCare is the bill.

What would Obamacare do to us?

Check out this assessment by Chapman university law professor Hugh Hewitt. (H/T The Heritage Foundation)

Some of my law firm’s clients and some executives in my broadcast audience are quietly preparing for the necessary analysis that will follow the passage of Obamacare by asking their personnel departments the obvious question: Will it make economic sense to discontinue health care coverage for my employees and instead push them into the government plan?

These employers –manufacturers, builders, entrepeneuers of all sorts– cannot yet get an answer to this question because they don’t have any specifics about costs from which they can make an informed decision.

But they all know they will have to “do the math” if the “government option/public plan” makes it into law. They cannot not do so for they owe shareholders and investors an objective assessment of what will improve their bottom lines.

If the “government option/public plan” costs $300 per employee per month and private sector insurance costs $350 per employee per month, the choice to push their workforce into the waiting arms of President Obama’s new bureaucracy will make itself.

Under Obamacare, your employer will decide whether you are on the private or public option – by dumping everyone that costs them too much. That’s Obama’s public option – it’s not your option.

Obamacare will run huge deficits

The latest report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is out. (H/T The Heritage Foundation)

Excerpt:

For the past half-century, federal spending has averaged about 20 percent of GDP, federal taxes about 18 percent of GDP and the budget deficit 2 percent of GDP. The CBO’s projection for 2020 — which assumes the economy has returned to “full employment” — puts spending at 26 percent of GDP, taxes at a bit less than 19 percent of GDP and a deficit above 7 percent of GDP. Future spending and deficit figures continue to grow.

[T]he major causes of the budget blowout are well-known: an aging population and rapid increases in health spending. In 2000, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — the main programs providing income and health care for those 65 and over — totaled nearly 8 percent of GDP. In 2020, CBO projects that will reach almost 12 percent of GDP. But the deeper source of our predicament is a self-indulgent political culture that avoids a rigorous discussion of government’s role.

…Obama would make matters worse. He talks about controlling “entitlement” spending (mainly Social Security and Medicare) but hasn’t done so. He’s proposing just the opposite. His health-care proposal would increase federal spending. He says he will “pay for” the added outlays with tax increases or other spending cuts, but what people forget is that every penny of this “payment” could be used (and should be) to close the long-term deficit — not raise future spending and taxes.

As if we were not already spending too much!

Previous posts on health care

Verum Serum has more Canadian horror stories:

Canadian visitors, please leave a comment with your worst health care story so that we can understand what you are going through.

UPDATE: Gateway Pundit reports that Obamacare will provide taxpayer funding for abortion just as polls show that the country is more pro-life than ever.

UPDATE: But there’s hope! Obama’s teleprompter has been smashed! Perhaps this will be an end of Obamacare now that the evil genius is no more.

Understanding the effects of government-run health care

Previous health care posts

Before we see today’s post, here are some of my previous posts on health care.

Socialized medicine by the numbers

I was having a nice chat today with a friend about whether we should expect government-run health care to work as well as private health care. I asked to him to reflect on how incompetent government offices are for services like driver’s licenses, vehicle titles, immigration, postal services, etc. Then I asked him how satisfied he was shopping online from Amazo.com or in person at Wal-mart. A private seller in the free market needs to meet your needs better than other competitors, so you will get good service – because you have a free choice. But what happens when you have only one option?

Hot Air has a post by DirectorBlue that analyzes government-run health care.

Here are just a few of his numbers related to waiting times:

14: The percentage of all patients in Britain who wait more than one (1) year to receive treatment after a referral by a general practitioner. Half of all National Health Care patients in Britain wait between 18 and 52 weeks for treatment.

90: Number of days, on average, each Canadian patient must wait for an MRI under the Canadian government-run health care system.

750: The estimated number of people waiting in line (in the pouring rain) at Britain’s Bury Office attempting to register for dental care.

10,000: Number of Canadian breast cancer patients to file a class action lawsuit against Quebec’s hospitals because, on average, they were forced to wait 60 days to begin post-operative radiation treatments.

443,849: The number of British patients of the National Healthcare Service (NHS) who waited four or more weeks for inpatient admittance into a hospital (Excel file) in May of 2009 (more than 75% of all patients).

1,500,000: The number of Canadians who do not have — and cannot find — a general practitioner/primary care physician due to shortages in medical staff: “In Norwood, Ontario, 20/20 videotaped a town clerk pulling the names of the lucky winners out of a lottery box. The losers must wait to see a doctor… Shirley Healy, like many sick Canadians, came to America for surgery. Her doctor in British Columbia told her she had only a few weeks to live because a blocked artery kept her from digesting food. Yet Canadian officials called her surgery ‘elective.’ …’The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live,’ she said.”

The article also discusses the costs of socialized medicine, patient outcomes, illegal immigrants, fraud, waste, etc.

Needless to say, this is a MUST-READ. Send it to all your friends!

Obamacare exposed: rationing for thee but not for me

Previous health care posts

We need to learn from what goes on in other countries.

The latest news

All communists are the same. They only want YOUR wealth to be redistributed, not theirs. In Obama’s socialist America, all the people are equal, but Obama is more equal than the others.

Check out this story from Hot Air. (H/T ECM)

President Obama struggled to explain today whether his health care reform proposals would force normal Americans to make sacrifices that wealthier, more powerful people — like the president himself — wouldn’t face.

The probing questions came from two skeptical neurologists during ABC News’ special on health care reform, “Questions for the President: Prescription for America,” anchored from the White House by Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson.

Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it’s not provided by insurance.

Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn’t seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he’s proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.

The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if “it’s my family member, if it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.[“]

The video is here at RealClearPolitics.

Read the whole thing, and remember what single-payer health care means, more demand, less supply, waiting lists, rationing and denials of service. But only for you plebians – NOT for Obama and his family.