Skip to main content

OK, time to cut the crap: what single-payer advocates won't tell you

Yeah, yeah, the McDowell plan will create instant nirvana in the First State, not only for the 105,000 people lacking insurance coverage right now, but also for all of us who will see the actual cost of health care decline while the quality goes up.

Damn blood-sucking insurance companies, the root of all evil. Let's turn it over the government bureaucrats, whose hearts are pure.

Just like in Canada.

Only not so fast. There is plenty to worry about in Canada, it turns out, where private insurance still pays for 30% of all medical bills, and waiting lists for an electrocardiogram can be so long that one hospital sends out form letters reading, "If the person named on this computer-generated letter is deceased, please accept our sincere apologies."

How about the recent Canadian Supreme Court decision that overturned in Quebec the ban on private medical insurance:

"For our government, it's a very strong indictment of the way they've handled the system," says Dr. Albert Schumacher, president of the Canadian Medical Association. "I hope it will move us forward in the debate. 'Private' has always been used by politicians as a very evil word, associated with America and for-profit. But it's not necessarily so."


Note the perspective of the Canadian Health Care Coalition on the whole thing:

"There is no political support for American-style healthcare," says Michael McBane, coordinator of the Canadian Health Coalition, a healthcare advocacy group. He says he hopes provinces will toughen laws to prevent private insurers from entering the market.

Allowing people to buy private health insurance violates fundamental rights, McBane says , because not everyone will be able to afford it.

"You can't discriminate based on the size of your wallet on something as important as healthcare," McBane says. "I would say this is an aberration and the democratic process will correct it."


So, according to McBane, nobody should get to purchase private health insurance because not everybody can afford it?

Did I forget to mention waiting times and the de facto rationing of treatment, especially surgery?

Check out the actual waiting times for procedures according to the Calgary Herald, which include 62 weeks for a hip replacement and 11 weeks for cardiac surgery.

More and more, according to the Toronto Star, people who can afford it are going abroad to have surgery, even if that means mortgaging their homes and risking bankruptcy.

Doctors and dentists in Canada appear to be bailing out, according to MSNBC and The Guardian. Wonder why?

Nor are all of these medical wonders limited to Canada.

How about a list of cutting edge cancer drugs that the British National Health Service won't pay for?

The Scottish Medicine Consortium joined its BIG BROTHER in denying similar drugs to 300 cancer victims.

And then there's Australia, where bureaucratic snafus and bizarre policies often keep hospital operating theaters from being used to capacity even when there are long waiting lists for surgery.

The scary part of this exercise is that I have been cherry-picking only a few of the hundreds of well-documented newspaper and specialist literature articles about what can and does go wrong under single-payer health systems.

These stories are representative, not exceptional.

And that's what Delaware's dedicated cadre of single-payer health care advocates is not telling you.

Comments

I'm curious what, if anything, any of the plans being critiqued/discussed would do about an anomaly in health care coverage for same sex couples where one partner is covered by the other's employer-provided coverage> The Williams Institute at UCLA Law School has published a study that summaries the issue:

Unequal Taxes on Equal Benefits:
The Taxation of Domestic Partner Benefits
By M.V. Lee Badgett

December 2007

Employer-provided health insurance is the backbone of health coverage for American families. Most people who have health insurance get it through their own employer or a family member’s employer. Public policy encourages employers to provide health insurance by exempting that form of compensation from taxation. As a result, married workers who get family health insurance benefits get a double benefit—they get health insurance coverage for their spouses and children and are not taxed on the value of that coverage. In sharp contrast, workers who have an unmarried domestic partner are doubly burdened: Their employers typically do not provide coverage for domestic partners; and even when partners are covered, the partner’s coverage is taxed as income to the employee. As a result, the taxation of domestic partner health care benefits sets up a two-tiered tax policy that costs many American families and their employers millions of dollars each year. This report estimates the financial impact of this extra tax on employees and employers.


This study was funded through a generous grant from Merrill Lynch.
Anonymous said…
Those drugs that are not "approved" would never have been developed if all countries adopted these single payer systems. What would be missed in medical research without the lure of riches? If we switch to single payer, without incentives to create new drugs and therapies, we will literally never know what might have been developed.

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?