Tag Archives: Single-Payer

How do governments control costs in a single-payer health care systems?

Take a look at what a new study shows about UK’s National Health Service. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Financial pressures may mean junior doctors are not given training posts within the NHS and the overall number of places at medical school could drop, a report has said.

This is despite extra burdens on the health service, including European rules limiting doctors’ hours, more hospital admissions and people living longer than ever before, according to the study from the UK Royal Colleges of Physicians (RCP).

Those specialties dedicated to looking after very ill people are facing particular strain, it said.

Dr Andrew Goddard, RCP director of medical workforce, said the combination of factors was ‘adding further stress to a system which may reach breaking point within the next few years’.

In 2009, the number of consultant posts created across the UK increased by 10.2 per cent.

However, financial pressures on the NHS mean that rise may not continue and there are ‘growing fears’ of a lack of training posts for young doctors.

Dr Goddard said: “We have already seen a drop in the number of new posts being advertised in 2010, and although we have enough doctors in training to develop a consultant-delivered NHS, these doctors need to have jobs to go into if this service is to be realised.”

The latest study comes after the RCP in England warned last week of patients being left in the hands of junior doctors because of inadequate consultant cover on weekends.

And here’s how it works out in Canada, which is a pure single-payer system – the kind that Democrats want to enact here in the USA.

Excerpt:

It’s no surprise to Thelma Lee that emergency room wait times are not meeting provincial targets.

Lee said her 41-year-old daughter, Marlene Stephens, died Saturday after waiting nearly 90 minutes at the William Osler Health Centre’s Etobicoke campus emergency room with breathing problems.

Lee feels her daughter was not seen fast enough by medical staff.

“They didn’t touch her,” said the grieving Lee. “She was crying out, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe’. . . Nobody attended to my daughter.”

On Monday, Auditor General Jim McCarter released his annual report which found that despite putting an extra $200 million into shortening emergency room wait times over the last two years, “significant province-wide progress has not yet been made.”

“Complaints about overcrowding and delays in hospital emergency rooms have persisted for years,” McCarter told a news conference on Monday.

Emergency room waits for people with serious conditions sometimes reached 12 hours or more, the report said. That is far greater than the province’s 8-hour wait time target, the report found.

And for emergency patients who need a hospital bed, they waited on average for about 10 hours but some waited 26 hours or more, according to the 2010 Annual Report.

“Our audit found that wait times for patients with less serious ailments have been reduced somewhat,” McCarter said. “However, there has been only minimal progress in reducing wait times for patients with more serious conditions.”

If this woman had offered to BUY her own health care in Canada, she would have been ARRESTED. That’s “equality” in a socialist system. Everyone has an equal right to scream in agony while waiting in line for a doctor. And the most productive people have the additional joy of shoveling half of their salaries into the coffers of bureaucrats to waste on expensive family vacations at taxpayer expense.

In fact, the provincial government of Ontario is very busy right now trying to push a gay rights curriculum onto grade 1 students (and up) in public and private schools – that’s what they do with the money that Canadians are forced to pay them – they BUY VOTES FROM LIBERAL SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS SO THEY CAN GET RE-ELECTED. They don’t have money for health care. They have their hands full with social engineering.

When you give the government your money, it’s theirs to spend on whatever they want – while you die on an emergency room floor. When you keep your money in your own pocket, you get to use it to buy whatever you want – including life-saving medical care.

And do you know where the Liberal Ontario bureaucrats go when they need health care? The United States of America! Dying is for the plebians – the elites go to the capitalist health care system down south. Equality for thee, not for me.

Do not vote for secular leftists – if you value your life – DO NOT DO IT.

Tom Daschle explains what socialized medicine really means

ECM found this video on Health Care BS.

The thing you need to understand about socialized medicine is this:

  • If you don’t work then you don’t pay into the system
  • If you do work then you do pay into the system
  • If you are young and still voting, then you get treatment
  • If you are old and not still voting, then you get no treatment

So basically, if you collect welfare for your whole life, and choose to sleep with strangers, and then get an STD, then the abortion is FREEEE!

But, if you are old but have worked all your life, and get need surgery for a brain tumor, through no fault of your own, then you get DEAAADDDD!

That’s socialized medicine in a nutshell. And NO, you cannot pay for any treatment over the counter – in a single payer system the GOVERNMENT decides whether you will be treated and when. You pay into the system your whole life based on your income level, and the government treats other people who make free choices to indulge in risky lifestyle decisions. When you finally retire and get sick due to no fault of your own, you can get in line behind the people who want sex changes and IVF. Everyone has an equal life outcome regardless of their willingness to work or make responsible decisions about what is moral/immoral and safe/unsafe.

And what are the incentives in a socialized medicine system? There is no incentive to work. But there is an incentive to be irresponsible and risky with your health. People who spend the day working instead of skiing will pay for people who break their legs skiing instead of working. That’s socialized medicine. That’s “equality”. There is no personal responsibility or accountability in a socialist system.

In Alberta, tens of thousands of patients are waiting for surgery

From Global TV (in Regina). (H/T Jojo)

Excerpt:

As the Alberta Health Services Board gathers to determine the fate of its CEO, tens of thousands of Albertans are still waiting for surgery while complete operating rooms sit empty.

“I was bed ridden for about three months,” says Michel Gosselin, who needs surgery on his back. “I’ve been in pain for a year and two months.”

Dr. Robert Hollingshead, an orthopaedic surgeon, says patients like Michel often wait upwards of a year once they’re finally booked for surgery. It’s a problem doctors and surgeons in all fields face because of a serious shortage of operating rooms in Alberta.

Despite pleas to the Province, little progress has been made even though a number of new operating rooms have been built, including six operating rooms that were originally used by the Health Resource Centre to perform 1,000 public hip, knee and ankle surgeries a year.

However, the Health Resource Centre is now defunct after AHS ended its relationship with the private surgical facility to in October, forcing it into creditor protection.

[…]…AHS opened the McCaig Tower at the Foothills Hospital, touting that it would offer 23 new operating rooms, 11 of which were already complete.

But one month later, less than 2 have been opened.

“It’s a travesty to open 11 state-of-the-art operating rooms in an almost $560-million facility and then open only 2 of them, and in fact, only run 1.4 – they’ve only staffed it for 1.4,” says Dr. Hollingshead.

Fifteen functional operating rooms sit empty in Calgary alone while the health system is so busy that new surgeons will likely have no place to operate.

Dr. Hollingshead predicts if the situation doesn’t improve Alberta could lose as many as 30 graduating surgeons over the next 5 years.

Singple-payer health care in Canada is not as good as the left wants you to believe.