No Hillary/Obama Care

Well, at least Obama lets you choose to stay out out his health care system if you want to. I give him credit for that (though how long they would allow this is a good question). But a study of Britain’s NHS that Michael Moore praised in Sicko shows what a disaster it is in reality.

Before American voters embrace either Hillary Rodham Clinton’s universal-health scheme or Barack Obama’s single-payer proposal, they should consider the avoidable deaths that plague the mother of all state-run medical programs: Great Britain’s big-government National Health Service. Low-quality, taxpayer-funded health care killed more than 17,000 Britons in 2004, according to the TaxPayers’ Alliance in London.

The TPA examined the World Health Organization’s latest-available data to contrast the NHS with the Dutch, French, German and Spanish health systems, which are less government-dominated. Specifically, the pro-market group measured “mortality amenable to health care”—those deaths that a medical organization realistically should prevent.

While those four countries averaged a 106.6 amenable mortality rate, Britain was almost 29 percent deadlier, with its rate of 135.3. The TPA thus calculates that the NHS took the lives of 17,157 Britons who otherwise would have survived were they treated by doctors across the English Channel. This figure is more than two-and-a-half times Britain’s yearly alcohol-related deaths, and is quintuple its annual highway fatalities. Comparing 60 million Brits to 300 million Yanks, this is like a federally operated health agency eliminating 85,785 Americans in 2004.

And remember, the NHS forces everyone to pay into it, but is choosing not to take care of people over 70, smokers, drinkers and the “obese”. Those people still have to pay, they just won’t be served. 

Government run programs almost always suck. There are rare occasions when they don’t, but as they become more popular or mandatory, their services decline.

The American health care system was fine in the past until the government polluted it with Medicare money and caused doctors to stop making house calls and start charging more and more. Then the health insurance business got in the act and now the system is seriously dysfunctional. The last thing we need to do is adopt systems that are failing all over the world. 

My brother was born at home in 1953.  The doctor was paid in beer and a chicken which he had to catch himself.  But this was before the government and the insurance companies got involved.  Health care today simply isn’t in my budget.

Posted by  on  02/22  at  09:13 AM
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