If nothing changes--if we continue down the road to a national consolidation of power--there will be many unforeseen changes to our country: God still has a plan for us, so the power-hungry won't have it all their way. But one thing I believe will happen like night following day is that within ten years or so we will have a "national" healthcare plan. Obamacare is flawed from the start–who knows–maybe that was intentional. So as soon as it is in full swing messing people up, they will cry for change. And the Statists will be there with a beautiful, simple, attractive "single payer" system of government healthcare. And we will love it.
At least the majority will love it, and that's all that matters in a democracy, right? Specifically, following the clear patterns of the Canadian and British healthcare plans, the majority of people in their 20s through 50s will be enamored of it--after a few years we won't know what we did without it. So easy! You just show your card when you go to the doctor or hospital and they take care of you. We also won't remember paying less than 50% of our income in taxes of one form or another (we're not that far away from that now) but at least we don't have to worry about paperwork or changing policies with changing jobs.
So about 75% of us will be happy with it. And who won't? Those who actually use the services to a significant extent--the old and the ill--the weakest members of society. Lest you think I'm just shooting from the hip here, I'll provide you with some hard data and some sad stories.
Currently in the U.S.A. our organ transplantation rates are TWICE those of Europe. Why is that significant? Organ transplant is something that is very expensive to do, and the person is frequently not able to return to an active, productive life but always has some limitations including being on costly medicine for the rest of her life. From a Social Darwinist viewpoint (like is prominent in atheistic Europe), it's not good for society: we can't spend a lot of our communal resources (money) on any one person, especially if that person is not able to re-enter the workforce. So we ration. Instead of calling it "socialized medicine" we should call it "rationed medicine" because that is what happens in every country that it is tried in. Organ transplants are already rationed by the nature of them, since there are only so many spare organs to go around. So to have this procedure be twice as common in the US is a solid indicator of the fact that we value human life in this country and try to preserve it at least twice as much as folks across the pond.
My friend Cheri Thiriot lived in England for 20+ years, and she's not happy to see Obamacare being rolled out (who cares about how rocky the rollout is--it's coming). She said that in Britain if you get cancer and try to get treated, you may be told "Sorry, the drug that you need is not available in this district--our quota has been used up." Rationing! Despite the propaganda-fest at the Opening Ceremonies of the London Olympics (I thought it was so creepy--didn't you?) Britains don't trust the NHS.
"A 2007 survey of almost 1,000 physicians by Doctors’ Magazine found that two-thirds said they had been told by their local NHS trust not to prescribe certain drugs, and one in five doctors knew patients who had suffered as a result of treatment rationing. The study cited one physician who characterized the NHS as 'a lottery.' A new study this year by GP magazine...found that 90 percent of NHS trusts were rationing care."
And Canada is no better: it is common to wait a year for a knee replacement. My brother-in-law is married to a Canadian, and when we went up to Toronto for the wedding we chatted with her grandmother . She told us that her son was diagnosed with Marfan's syndrome after his heart stopped one day and he was resuscitated. After being stabilized he was SENT HOME--there was no availability for a date with the cardiac surgeon for the next six months. So he waited, knowing each moment that his heart could stop again and next time he might not be so lucky. In the US he'd have been in the OR by the next day!
And what about here? In the US there are laws in place that mandate that people can get treatment for medical emergencies regardless of ability to pay–yes, they’ll bill you later and try to get you on Medicaid, etc. but that can’t hold up your ability to access treatment. My cousin is an anesthesiologist in a Texas hospital close to the border of Mexico. He says that every day the ER is packed with Mexicans who have crossed illegally to try to obtain medical care. So they treat them, but it is such an overwhelming problem that the treatment is often along the lines of "Oh, your arm is off? Here’s a band-aid." There are certainly no heart valve replacements (like the Canadian waited six months for) or long-term dialysis. Maybe they’ll take out an appendix, or stitch you up a bit, or give you some pills. And send you on your way. This is what rationing looks like here–insufficient funds or will to treat all the demand, so you just pretend to treat it. And that is very easy to do in medicine, since few people have a good grasp on pathophysiology, pharmacology, and all their treatment options (the internet is helping with that). More on this in Part 4 "The Creeping Culture of Euthanasia"
No comments:
Post a Comment