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Blazing Cat Fur’s horrific experience with single-payer health care in Toronto

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I spotted this story from Blazing Cat Fur while browsing at The Blog of Walker.

Excerpt:

I suppose I should have been tipped off by the fact that the surgeon who performed my Mom’s angioplasty last Friday couldn’t be bothered to check up on her afterward. This same surgeon discharged her Saturday morning from TGH, Toronto General Hospital – by phone.

Tuesday afternoon my Mother suffered a “False Aneurysm“, this it was explained, is a fairly common side effect caused by the anti-clotting medication she has been prescribed. However the Brit’s inform me that “The most common cause of pseudoaneursym is femoral artery puncture during cardiac catheterisation.”

[…]She was scared, in a great deal of pain and very weak by the time she hit TGH’s ER, though commendably the paramedics had stabilized her – this was 6:20 PM. The paramedics stayed with her, monitoring her vitals and answering my questions as best they could until well after their shift ended at 7. At 8:30 PM, in order to release the paramedics my 84 year old Mother was officially admitted to TGH. Admission consisted of moving her from the ambulance gurney to a hospital gurney and pushing her 20 yards down the corridor, next to the homeless guy with the festering sores on his legs. The attentive care of the paramedics was replaced by – nothing.

We waited over an hour for a resident to finally stop by and inquire what the matter was. My shocked stare, which arose after she asked in all seriousness, if the angioplasty had been a success, caused her to retreat and summon the physician on duty. Wisely the attending doctor suggested that a physical examination was in order, she then disappeared with the resident in tow. A nurse was dispatched who informed us that my Mother would have to be undressed for the examination. Since this Angel of Mercy made no offer to assist I took it upon myself to undress my bedridden mother in a public corridor, in full view of the passing parade of visitors, patients and staff – truth be told the homeless guy was pretty discrete or at least preoccupied.

It goes on, and on, and on.

This is one of the saddest things I have ever read.

And it happens in England, too

Here is a Daily Mail story that I spotted over at The Western Experience. (And also ECM sent it)

Excerpt:

Thousands of women are having to give birth outside maternity wards because of a lack of midwives and hospital beds.

The lives of mothers and babies are being put at risk as births in locations ranging from lifts to toilets – even a caravan – went up 15 per cent last year to almost 4,000.

Health chiefs admit a lack of maternity beds is partly to blame for the crisis, with hundreds of women in labour being turned away from hospitals because they are full.

Latest figures show that over the past two years there were at least:

* 63 births in ambulances and 608 in transit to hospitals;

* 117 births in A&E departments, four in minor injury units and two in medical assessment areas;

* 115 births on other hospital wards and 36 in other unspecified areas including corridors;

* 399 in parts of maternity units other than labour beds, including postnatal and antenatal wards and reception areas.

Additionally, overstretched maternity units shut their doors to any more women in labour on 553 occasions last year.

The Western Experience also linked to the story of a man who had his appendix removed by the NHS – TWICE!

I knew that the left was concerned about the doomsday overpopulation myths, but this is ridiculous!

Further study

Learn more about health care policy from my previous posts on health care:

Commentary

Barack Obama wants to control whether you can pay for your own medical care

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Yes, privatized health care is such a bad, bad thing. Health care is so much better in Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam.

Really? Here is a post that begs to differ by Betsy McCaughey on National Review. (H/T Commenter ECM)

Here is a dose of reality, for those who voted for the Democrats:

President Obama pledges to provide health insurance for 46 million uninsured people and, at the same time, restrain the nation’s total health spending. Covering the uninsured is a worthy goal, but it will not save money: Once they are covered, they will use 70 percent more health services overall than before, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

So where will the promised savings come from? The truth is that Americans who already have insurance will get less care.

Well, I know this will come as shock to Democrats who based their vote for Obama on Michael Moore movies depicting health care in Cuba, but government-run heath care means skyrocketing costs and waiting lists for treatment.

Health spending is higher in the U.S. than in Europe not because the American medical profession is less efficient, but because Americans have higher incomes: “The more people have, the more of it they tend to spend on health care,” wrote David Blumenthal, a Harvard Medical School professor. Blumenthal was recently chosen by Pres. Barack Obama to be national coordinator of health information technology, a key position. In his academic writings, Blumenthal has long advocated government limits on how much health care you can get.

Patients will be dissatisfied, he admits. “Government controls on health care spending are associated with longer waits for elective procedures and reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices,” he conceded in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 2001.

You need to understand that people who voted Democrat did so from a position of total ignorance about how the world actually works. They think money grows on trees. They think that “greed” is the only reason why the world isn’t a utopia of equalized of outcomes, regardless of individual choices. Unfortunately, government-run health care is a done deal in the USA.

Legislators slipped the framework for top-down government controls into the stimulus package passed in February. One provision called for computer technology that will “guide” doctors’ decisions about what care is “cost-effective.” Beginning in 2014, Medicare and other federal programs will impose financial penalties on doctors and hospitals who are not “meaningful users” of this system. Private insurers historically have followed Medicare’s lead.

That’s right. Your doctor will be coerced by the federal government to prevent you from spending your own money on your own health care. Instead, the government has decided that your money would be better spent on more valuable things like sex changes, because those are for a Democract special interest group, and you’re not in that group. You’re just a taxpayer, not a victim. No health care for you!

How much leeway will your doctor have to order tests and treatments? It’s hard to say, because the government can make the standard of compliance “more stringent” over time. Blumenthal says his job is not about “just putting machinery in offices.” In fact, it’s about control. In a New England Journal of Medicine article published April 9, just after his appointment to the Obama administration was announced, Blumenthal explained that if electronic technology is to save money, doctors will have to take advantage of “clinical decision support,” a term of art for computers telling doctors what to do. He predicted that “many physicians and hospitals may rebel, petitioning Congress to change the law or just resigning themselves to . . . penalties.”

Yes, I know this is hard for your People-magazine-reading Democrats to believe, but socialism leads to a loss of liberty. Yes! Isn’t that crazy? If you voted for Obama, you voted for fascism! You voted for the values of the state, as expressed by the ruling elite, to be imposed on the individuals who actually provide the state with capital for their schemes. Surprise!

Government controls on health expenditures will reduce the availability of medical technology, such as MRIs, and cause waits for treatment. Blumenthal says it’s “debatable” whether the timely care Americans currently receive is worth the added price. Ask a cancer patient about waiting, and you’ll get a different answer. Delays lower your chance of survival. For example, women in the U.S are more likely to have regular mammograms than are women elsewhere, according to data from the Commonwealth Fund. Their breast cancer is detected sooner. They are also treated faster and have higher survival rates than women in any other developed country, according to the CONCORD study published in 2008 in Lancet Oncology. These statistics include all American women, not just those with insurance.

Treating cancer is costly. Nancy-Ann De Parle, newly appointed director of the White House Office of Health Reform, said on March 23, “we have to get to a system of keeping people well, rather than treating the sickness.” That would make sense if all disease were preventable. But many cancers and other diseases are linked to genetics or unknown causes. De Parle’s pronouncement echoes the chilling explanation offered by Sir Michael Rawlins, head of Britain’s National Institute of Clinical Effectiveness (NICE), for his nation’s low cancer survival rates. The British National Health Service, he is quoted as saying in the NEJM last November, has to be fair to all patients, “not just the patients with macular degeneration or breast cancer or renal cancer. If we spend a lot of money on a few patients, we have less money to spend on everyone else.”

Isn’t that great? You pay into the system based on the amount of money you earn, and then left-wing activists with degrees in Marxist Studies decide when, or even IF, you will be treated. That is what we have in this country now. And we got it by our incredible ignorance about the way the world works.

And do you know what else gets reduced or eliminated in government-run health care?

Also, built into the U.S. health-care tab is research for cures. Five hospitals in the U.S. do more clinical trials than any entire country in Europe, including the U.K., the McKinsey Global Institute reported in December. If someone in your family has an incurable disease, you start each day hoping for a breakthrough. Yet in his writings, Blumenthal identifies innovation as a culprit driving up health spending.

The health provisions in the stimulus legislation were rushed through without discussion. “Speed is essential,” Blumenthal wrote in the NEJM last November. “Bill Clinton waited for nine months to introduce his Health Security Act in 1993, which allowed his opposition to mobilize and defeat him.” This time, he added, a “savvy health advisor” will warn the president, “Hurry up, we’re almost out of time for health reform.”

Now ask yourself. What is the point of producing wealth in a country where your money is confiscated to pay for other people who live risky lives and never pay anything into the system. Is work worth it? Is prudent living worth it? Only the suckers produce wealth and live clean, in Obama’s socialist utopia. Ignorance of economics is going to mean death for many Americans. And Democrats don’t care. They want everyone to be “equal”, regardless of individual choices.

UPDATE: John Lott posts that Obama thinks that US taxpayers should give up 63 billion dollars to pay for health care abroad.

Excerpt from MSNBC:

The Obama administration wants the United States to spend $63 billion over the next six years to fight global diseases and provide more aid for prenatal and postnatal care, children’s health and fighting tropical diseases.

“We cannot fix every problem,” Obama said in a written statement Tuesday. “But we have a responsibility to protect the health of our people, while saving lives, reducing suffering, and supporting the health and dignity of people everywhere. America can make a significant difference in meeting these challenges and that is why my administration is committed to act.”

That is more than 10% the total cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in one fell swoop! At least we got good strategic value for the money spent on the wars! What can we expect from this? Obama’s enormous ego to become even more inflated while he spends other people’s money?

Commentary

An analysis of the Democrats socialist health care policies

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I would summarize the ideals of Democrats (socialists) as follows:

  1. There are unequal life outcomes in society
  2. Those who have little wealth are the victims of those who produce wealth
  3. We (democrats) must transfer wealth until everyone’s life outcomes are equal, regardless of their life choices
  4. We (democrats) must use government coercion to achieve this equality
  5. Since we (democrats) are so morally superior, we are not obligated to transfer our own wealth to anyone

Consider health care. Some risky lifestyle choices are more likely to require more health care services. The socialist’s goal is to make sure that no one is deterred from making these risky choices. Those who do not engage in these risks must be forced to pay for the health care of those who do choose to take on these risks. That way, everyone is equal in the end.

The way this is done is to make sure that people who don’t engage in risky behaviors cannot pay less for their health care than those who do engage in risky behaviors. Let me explain.

Suppose a safe person S knows that he only needs coverage for catastrophic care, since his lifestyle choices eliminate the need for elective treatments like abortions, birth control, STD medications, sex changes and drug addiction treatments. He can be covered for a very low premium.

Consider another irresponsible, risky person R who is engaged in all kinds of risky behavior. He can be covered for all of the medical services for a very high premium. His own choices expose him to risks that will require more medical services.

Democrats (socialists), solve this problem by forcing S to pay for mandatory health care with a very high premium that covers services he will never use. That way, he is really paying for his own health care, and R’s health care, too.

Take a look at this article I found on Health Care BS. In the article, they cite Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, who analyzes the health care policies that may be included in the Democrats’ health care reform bill.

This is the one I want to draw your attention to, because this is what single-payer countries like Canada have that causes them so many problems:

An Individual Mandate. Every American will be required to buy an insurance policy that meets certain government requirements.  Even individuals who are currently insured — and happy with their insurance — will have to switch to insurance that meets the government’s definition of acceptable insurance, even if that insurance is more expensive or contains benefits that they do not want or need.

And here is another one that will force employers to lay off American workers because employers have to pay more for the same productivity.

An Employer Mandate. At a time of rising unemployment, the government will raise the cost of hiring workers by requiring all employers to provide health insurance to their workers or pay a fee (tax) to subsidize government coverage.

Yes, that’s right. Socialism attacks businesses. Attacking businesses causes unemployment.

And there’s more:

A Government-Run Plan, competing with private insurance.  Because such a plan is subsidized by taxpayers, it will have an unfair advantage, allowing it to squeeze out private insurance.  In addition, because government insurance plans traditionally under-reimburse providers, such costs are shifted to private insurance plans, driving up their premiums and making them even less competitive. The actuarial firm Lewin Associates estimates that, depending on how premiums, benefits, reimbursement rates, and subsidies were structured, as many as 118.5 million would shift from private to public coverage.   That would mean a nearly 60 percent reduction in the number of Americans with private insurance.  It is unlikely that any significant private insurance market could continue to exist under such circumstances, putting us on the road to a single-payer system.

When government controls your health care, you pay them at gunpoint and when you want care you get in line behind people who paid nothing into the system. That is socialized medicine, the dream of all Democratic socialists.

And there’s also redistribution of wealth:

Massive New Subsidies. This includes not just subsidies to help low-income people buy insurance, but expansions of government programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.

And remember what I said about the government needing to reducing costs when demand skyrockets for “free” care?

Government Playing Doctor.   Democrats agree that one goal of their reform plan is to push for “less use of aggressive treatments that raise costs but do not result in better outcomes.”  While no mechanism has yet been spelled out, it seems likely that the plan will use government-sponsored comparative effectiveness research to impose cost-effectiveness guidelines on medical care, initially in government programs, but eventually extending such restrictions to private insurance.

This is all caused by the good intentions of people who have no knowledge of economics, whatsoever. And it is important to note that it is this kind of naive, incompetent meddling in the free-market that leads to poverty and the loss of all of our liberties.

Further study

Here are some previous links that are relevant: