U.S. health care versus socialism: Let anecdotes begin
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
It seems the organized left, through its Washington-centered “Health Care for America Now” group, is headed full tilt to shove Obamacare onto dubious Americans.
Our columnist Michelle Malkin reports today that this “grassroots” movement is planning a nationwide blitz to harvest personal anecdotes about alleged shortcomings of health care in America.
The truth is that our health care is light years ahead that of nations such as Canada and the Europeans. Our people are not scrambling to go to them. They come here.
Well, we like anecdotes too. Our suggested starting point, however, after admitting that U.S. health care, like any human endeavor, can be flawed, would be Europe and Canada.
The decades-long sorry record of shortcomings of Britain’s National Health Services has piled up a figurative mountain of health atrocity stories.
Every nation with government funded and carried out health care, Britain especially, contributes to the store of anecdotes about long, sometimes fatal waits, for care; about rundown facilities, often staffed in the main by bureaucratic lifers; about administrative bungling and larded expenses and about rationing, which gives faceless bureaucrats and actuaries the decision on who gets care and who does not.
Try waiting six weeks even to get an appointment for further diagnosis of a brain tumor, as one Canadian woman reported in our news media this week. That said nothing of a further, longer wait for having anything done about whatever was found. She came to the U.S.
If Britain has any advantage, it comes through its “loser pays” legal system, which holds the tort bar of voracious lawyers partially at bay. Completely frivolous lawsuits are far, far less common there than here.
As a contributor to anecdotes, this writer happened to be in London when a compelling story was headlined in the Sunday Times.
It seems the newspaper’s own chief medical writer told of the shocking treatment her son had just received in a National Health Service hospital. Filth and a lack of staff attention were her chief complaints. The woman, by the way, acknowledged in the same story that heretofore she had been an outspoken backer of socialized medicine. But no more.
As for Canada, it contributes hapless care-searcher stories such as the brain-tumor woman’s to an almost daily round of first-person accounts – citizens arriving or wanting to arrive in the United States – complaining of intolerable, potentially fatal, delays for key diagnosis and surgeries.
If government-run health care fixes itself on America, one wonders where the medically-downtrodden of the world will go? Certainly it won’t be to Mexico or to the oft-discredited “workers paradise” of Cuba.
President Obama seems to have the same blindside toward medicine that he has for business. This probably stems from his never having worked in, or close to, either. His bent seems to guide him to the familiar – organizing grievances a la his services to ACORN.
Suffice to say that if the president and the Democratic leadership in Congress get government scrambled into medicine in general and health care and/or insurance in particular, there will be a lot of grieving to organize.
It might seem presumptuous for the editor of a small business newspaper to make suggestions to the nation’s major media.
But how about their publishers sending well-funded teams of top reporters and photographers to Europe and Canada for extended on-the-spot dispatches about conditions. Just tell it like it is.
The model would be South Africa, where the world press fixed itself on apartheid and didn’t let go until the rotting system collapsed.
Some major prizes are to be won.
As for anecdotes, let the collecting begin, but don’t leave our socialism’s stories as well.
June 2009
