More truth on Canadian healthcare

From one of the very few intellectually honest people at ABC:

Stossel on Socialized Medicine

Rick Moran
ABC’s John Stossel has spent his career documenting government waste, fraud, and lies. He has exposed the political motivations behind many actions taken by government that are ostensibly done for our “health.”

Stossel has a winning column in RealClearPolitics today that demonstrates why our system – expensive and wasteful at times – nevertheless is far superior to Canada’s or Great Britain government run nightmare:

In America, people wait in emergency rooms, too, but it’s much worse in Canada. If you’re sick enough to be admitted, the average wait is 23 hours.

“We can’t send these patients to other hospitals. Dr. Eric Letovsky told us. “Every other emergency department in the country is just as packed as we are.”

More than a million and a half Canadians say they can’t find a family doctor. Some towns hold lotteries to determine who gets a doctor. 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.

It’s true that America’s partly profit-driven, partly bureaucratic system is expensive, and sometimes wasteful, but the pursuit of profit reduces waste and costs and gives the world the improvements in medicine that ease pain and save lives.

Polls show Canadians like their government run system. But Stossel points out most people aren’t sick when responding to the pollsters questions. And the world is almost totally dependent on American medical innovations for things like drugs and new technology because  a government run system discourages it.

But here’s the kicker; in Canada, there are patients who do indeed get immediate tests and no waiting to see the doctor:

[W]e did find one area of medicine that offers easy access to cutting-edge technology — CT scan, endoscopy, thoracoscopy, laparoscopy, etc. It was open 24/7.

Patients didn’t have to wait. But you have to bark or meow to get that kind of treatment. Animal care is the one area of medicine that hasn’t been taken over by the government. Dogs can get a CT scan in one day. For people, the waiting list is a month.

Better start practicing your Deputy Dawg imitation.

Maybe a clue

In recent weeks as the members of Congress have piled one spending program on top of another and now are beginning the inevitable tax increases to cover them, my wife has repeatedly asked me, “Why are they doing this? Don’t they realize what they are doing to the ordinary, hard working people who are struggling to get by?”

I have responded to that question several times by pointing out that most of what they are doing will not affect them… they conveniently exempt themselves from these burdens they keep imposing on the rest of us!
Then I ran across the following, from Rich Galen, which condenses it to a nutshell:

How much do Members of the U.S. House and Senate make? Are they suffering as are regular people? Do they feel the pain of tax increases and new regulations?

In reverse order: No. No. And $174,000 per year.

In addition Members of Congress get a tax break on their housing, have health care completely paid for by you and me, and have a pretty good retirement system although the other benefits are so good you can’t get them to retire much before their 113th birthday, on average.

That $174,000 is for the rank-and-file, show-up-for-work four-days-a-week members of the House and Senate. You want to be really aggravated? The Speaker of the House, who happens to be Nancy Pelosi, and who happens to be one of the wealthiest members of Congress, makes $223,500.

And she gets to fly home on an Air Force jet which the rank-and-file, show-up-for-work four-days-a-week members of the House and Senate do not get to do.

So these “representatives of the people” get paid about 6 times as much as I do, only work a 4 day week (instead of the 5 or 6 the rest of us put in) and only work about 30 weeks a year.  In addition, they have all kinds of perks from provided cars/drivers, free office space and supplies, free postage and on and on and on and…………

This might be a clue as why so many in Congress are sooooooooo arrogant and out of touch with the people they claim to represent.   Just wondering…..

Brazen lies on health care – Part 2

More “inconvenient” facts on the coming health care bill…straight from the just released draft of the Senate version being pushed by Ted Kennedy and the Messiah Himself:

• This bill establishes “Shared Responsibility Payments” — surely the greatest euphemism ever for a far uglier word: “Tax.” Pages 104 and 105 amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, such that anyone lacking “qualifying coverage” for any month in any tax year will face “tax liability” of “an amount equal to an amount” that the HHS secretary decrees is “the minimum practicable amount that can accomplish the goal of enhancing participation in qualifying coverage.” Oddly enough, these new taxes would not apply to anyone “who is an enrolled member of a federally recognized Indian tribe (as defined in section 4 of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act).”

• While touting health-care reform as a vital measure to which every American has a God-given right, Kennedy’s elaborate new medical scheme includes a trap door through which members of Congress may slither away after dark. On page 114, it defines “qualified individuals” who must obey this law. Among them are those ineligible for the generous and choice-rich Federal Employee Health Benefits Program. This excludes current and retired members of Congress. How convenient!

Self-important Democrats handle Americans the way dog owners treat their pets — steak for Daddy and Alpo for Duke — only without the underlying love.

• Page 118 targets $33.95 billion to treat the “special medically underserved population,” including the homeless, public-housing residents, and “migratory and seasonal agricultural workers.” How much of this money will wind up treating illegal aliens?

• Page 353 calls for a new Prevention and Public Health Investment Fund budgeted at $10 billion per year through “fiscal year 2020, and each fiscal year thereafter.” Moreover, these sums “shall not be taken into account for purposes of any budget enforcement procedures including allocations under section 302(a) and (b) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act and budget resolutions for fiscal years during which appropriations are made from the Investment Fund.” In short, this creates yet another off-budget item that cannot be cut, and with no attendant revenue source. The proposed Retiree Reserve Trust Fund and CLASS Independence Fund also would sit “off budget” as brand-new, untouchable, unfunded liabilities. Fiscal responsibility be damned!

exerpted from Deroy Murdock

Yes, this is what we are told is going to solve all the current problems with health care coverage. Giving more and more power to federal bureaucrats to dictate how your health care will be run… and exempting themselves from it all – natch… This is going to “fix” everything?? If you believe this, I got some land south of Miami to sell you!

Brazen lies on health care

Now that the dust has settled a little bit from the week long full court press which the White House and it’s sycophants at ABC have subjected us all to, perhaps it’s time to step back and examine the facts behind the rhetoric. Despite the Messiah’s repeated assertions that “if you like your healthcare, the government will not force you to switch”, this is a distinction without a difference and the One has to know it:

This is exceptionally brazen sophistry. Private insurers are at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the federal government because they don’t have the power of the government to dictate prices to doctors and hospitals. That’s what Medicare does, and why it pays less for health services than private insurers.

Surely Obama understands the competitive advantage that this confers on the government. If the public option in ObamaCare underpays providers in a similar fashion, it will charge cheaper premiums than private insurance. Employers will dump their employees into the public plan, and a massive “crowding out” will occur. The respected health-care research firm The Lewin Group estimates as many as 119 million people could migrate from private insurance to the government plan, whether Obama considers it logical or not.

Since Medicare doesn’t pay hospitals enough to cover costs, they have to make up the expense by charging more to private insurers. According to Lewin, as Medicare hospital payments declined from 95 percent of costs in 2003 to 91 percent of costs in 2007, private-payer rates steadily increased. A massive new government plan that doesn’t pay its own way will augment this cost shift, making private insurance more expensive still and sending ever more people into the arms of the government plan.

ObamaCare, then, could unravel the entire private system very quickly. And in Obama’s telling, it all would have been a strange accident of fate. All he wanted to do was reduce health-care costs, and lo and behold, he ended up with the Canada-style system no one thought politically possible. What dumb luck.                       Rich Lowry

Ah, yes… the Canadian system… the progressive Left’s 30 year wet dream!  The one that results in 3 month waits to see general practicioner, 6 months or more to see a specialist… not too bad if you have severe acne but a bit more of a problem if you have cancer or a heart condition.   The system that hasn’t collapsed under its own weight yet for one single reason: it has the US as a readily available safety valve.  Can’t get treated in Toronto? No problem… just drive an hour or so to top specialists in Buffalo or Syracuse.   Even a 4 hour drive to Detroit or Cleveland is better than a 6 month wait to see an oncologist!

No, the government isn’t going to force you into such a system.  It will just set up the conditions so that your employer will find it cheaper to dump you into the system than to continue to provide coverage at an ever increasing cost.  The end result will be exactly the same…. the Messiah will just have your company do the dirty work for him.   As I said, a distinction without a difference!

Follow the diagram

How to create the progressive utopia

As told in pictures by Andrew Thomas.

From The American Thinker

Parallel universes of thought

An excellent article examining the way different schools of thought approach some of the major issues of our time…Universal Truth Depends on What Universe You Live In…. from The American Thinker

A tough balancing act

In one of the best responses to the ugly attacks in the media on Miss California for supporting genuine marriage,  David Stokes tries to balance the Christian’s twin responsibilities to be loving toward the sinner while actually standing up for righteousness. He makes a great point about the tendency to give up our principles in the name of “bridge building”:

In my opinion, many younger evangelicals like Jonathan Merritt, have determined to distance themselves from the “religious right-ism” of their parents’ generation, in much the same way as the children of the baby-boom rejected many of the ways of their “World War II” generation parents.  I have talked to many of them.  They have not abandoned the Bible or the faith; they just don’t want the main message to be about abortion and traditional moral values.  In fact, these younger evangelicals remain themselves largely pro-life and believe in heterosexual marriage and Biblical mores.

They just really, really believe they can practice their faith – even share it in love – while avoiding coming across as intolerant and shrill.  The idea is that they will reach others by not yelling at them.

What needs to be noted though is that in order to actually reach a person with the gospel, the acknowledgement of sin is essential.  So is repentance.  Confession comes from a Greek word meaning, “to agree with,” in this case agreeing with God. The Bible term repentance means, “to change the mind.”

Both concepts are essential components of Christian witness.  They require sin to be called sin and then to be turned from.  How Jesus dealt with the adulterous woman in John chapter eight is case in point.  He told her, after the condemnatory accusers had slithered away, “Neither do I condemn you.”  But he didn’t stop there – and nor should evangelicals.  He followed with: “Go and sin no more.”

Sin was still sin.  And it is very important for some idealist evangelicals to understand that people today who celebrate and glorify behaviors that are clearly labeled in the Bible as sinful, will never really take advantage of “avenues of dialogue” until and unless evangelicals are willing to concede that the Bible doesn’t say what it means and mean what it says.

Niceness is a nice try, but the punch – “sin must be acknowledged before grace can flow” – must eventually be thrown.  Build all the bridges you want; “they” will never use them.

In fact, “they” will usually blow them up.

While I might quibble with the use of quotation marks around “they”, I do think he makes a legitimate point.  It is always challenging to strike the right balance in such issues.

The real agenda becomes clear

The real agenda of  Obama and his cronies is starting to become clearer with the just released Homeland Security report on “right wing extremism”:

For eight years, we’ve been treated to hysterical rhetoric from Democrats, including Barack Obama, about the scourge of “domestic spying.” Now that the Obama administration is openly calling for domestic spying — the real thing, not the smear used against President Bush — they’re suddenly silent.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in coordination with the FBI, has issued an intelligence assessment on what it calls “Rightwing Extremism.” It is appalling. The nakedly political document announces itself as a “federal effort to influence domestic public opinion.” It proceeds, in what it acknowledges is the absence of any “specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence,” to speculate that “rightwing” political views might “drive” such violence — violence, it further surmises, that might be abetted by military veterans returning home after putting their lives on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan. And for good measure, in violation of both FBI guidelines and congressional statutes, the Obama administration promises scrutiny of ordinary Americans’ political views, speech, and assembly. –       Andrew McCarthy

In blatant violation of the Constitution in general and the 1st Amendment in particular, the Federal government publicly smears anyone who dares to express their views that Washington might be out of control in it’s grab for power and it’s completely unrestrained spending!

This is only a short step from what the Obama camp demonstrated during the presidential campaign in demanding that the Justice Dept open criminal investigations against those who made statements against Obama that his people claimed were false.

Yes… now we see that tactic again beginning to raise its ugly head again:  speak out against us, go to jail!  So much for “the post partisan healer”!  But then, many of us have known that from the beginning.

“Radical extremists”

Yeah, I guess that old Constitution thing is just a bit too radical for the Messiah and his cronies.  You know… freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition government for redress of grievances… all that “radical” stuff!

Quote of the day

“Every time the government steps in to solve a problem, it creates three new problems in its place.”
– Sen. Jim DeMint