I am surprised by some people who support a National Health Care system who I believe should see it for what it is, the socialization of our health care industry. The health care system in the United States may need some tweaking but not a government take-over. As a matter of fact, the tweaking we need may be to get the government regulation and control out of the system we have now.
There aren’t many out there who believe the already existing national health care system we have is the best in the world. Think about it, is the Veteran’s Administration hospital system the best health care in the world? We formed that system to take care of those of us who were wounded in battle defending our country. And then we have the Medicare system that we designed to take care of our old people, after they have worked their whole life. How’s that working?
It’s not like we don’t have health care, we have the best private health care in the world, and we want to change that? Are we nuts or what? People from around the world come to the United States for the best health care in the world. The people in the U.S. don’t go to other countries and check in to the hospital because they can get better care. I’m guessing that since a national health care plan is better than what we have now our congressmen and senators will get the same health care they are planning for us. Don’t be silly they already have the best health care in the world and they know it. We’ll be allowed to keep ours also but we will have to pay our share of the health care tax to make Medicare solvent, after all we shouldn’t expect a national health care system for nothing.
But maybe we will lose our employer provided health care. A July 17 study by the Lewin Group that was commissioned by the Heritage Foundation projects that if the House bill becomes law, 83.4 million people—nearly half of those with private coverage—will lose private insurance as employers drop their plans. That means we will have the 47 million who supposedly don’t have health care now plus the 83 million who will have their employer bail on private insurance for a total of 130 million on the national health care rolls. That’s almost half of us folks.
Watching the President’s address on Wednesday night I was shocked when he said “end of life care” would be reduced in his plan. He said that we have to reduce the amount of money we spend at the end of one’s life. Will National Health Care encourage our parents to take their own lives? Do we get rid of nursing homes? Does it withhold medical care from the elderly based on a bureaucrat’s decision regarding “quality of life” issues? Does it encourage the rationing of medical services? The bottom line, is Euthanasia included in National Health Care Reform? Dr. Kevorkian, call your office.
While you are thinking about supporting national health care think about these facts from Scott W. Atlas, M.D., he is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at the Stanford University Medical Center:
Fact No. 1: Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the U.K. and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.
Fact No. 2: Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians. Breast cancer mortality is 9 percent higher, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher and colon cancer mortality among men is about 10 percent higher than in the United States.
Fact No. 3: Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries. Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit are taking statins, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease. By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons and 17 percent of Italians receive them.
Fact No. 4: Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians. Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate and colon cancer:
• Nine of 10 middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to less than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).
• Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a pap smear, compared to less than 90 percent of Canadians.
• More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a PSA test, compared to less than 1 in 6 Canadians (16 percent).
• Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with less than 1 in 20 Canadians (5 percent).
Fact No. 5: Lower income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report "excellent" health compared to Canadian seniors (11.7 percent versus 5.8 percent). Conversely, white Canadian young adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower income Americans to describe their health as "fair or poor."
Fact No. 6: Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the U.K. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long - sometimes more than a year - to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements or to get radiation treatment for cancer. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada. In England, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.
Fact No. 7: People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and British adults say their health system needs either "fundamental change" or "complete rebuilding."
Fact No. 8: Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians. When asked about their own health care instead of the "health care system," more than half of Americans (51.3 percent) are very satisfied with their health care services, compared to only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).
Fact No. 9: Americans have much better access to important new technologies like medical imaging than patients in Canada or the U.K. Maligned as a waste by economists and policymakers naïve to actual medical practice, an overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identified computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade. The United States has 34 CT scanners per million Americans, compared to 12 in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has nearly 27 MRI machines per million compared to about 6 per million in Canada and Britain.
Fact No. 10: Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations. The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single developed country. Since the mid-1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to American residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined. In only five of the past 34 years did a scientist living in America not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.
And we want to change this system, why?
