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May 7, 2008

Canadian Invasion Due To Failings Of Socialized Medicine

Topics: Political News and commentaries

This is what awaits us if the Dems have their way:

More than 100 Canadian women with high-risk pregnancies have been sent to United States hospitals over the past year--in what a doctors' group attributes to the lack of a national birthing plan.

The problem has peaked, with British Columbia and Ontario each sending a record number of women to U.S. neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Specifically, 80 B.C. women have been sent to U.S. hospitals since April 1, 2007; in Ontario, 28 have been sent since January of 2007, according to figures from the respective health ministries.

André Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, said the problem is due to bed closings that took place almost a decade ago, the absence of a national birthing initiative and too few staff.

"Neonatologists are very stretched right now," Dr. Lalonde said in a telephone interview from Ottawa. "We're so stretched, it's kind of dangerous."

The grass always look greener until the facts get in the way. Hillary-care and the Obama equivalent sound great to the naive and uninformed voters likely to listen, but they fail to disclose the tradeoffs: ( 1 ) substandard, untimely, and rationed care and ( 2 ) only those who can afford care get any non-emergent care at all.

Neither picture is as rosy as proponents make it, and under the current health system in the U.S. we can innovate and adapt quickly since we operate on market principles. America still has the best health care in the world.

As pointed out at Jay Reding.com:

Universal health care has a basic and fatal flaw, you can't simultaneously reduce the cost of a service and increase access to it. If you have universal access, you have to find a way of paying for people to get that access, which raises costs. If you want to keep costs down you can only economize so far before you have to restrict access. Universal health care is a bit like a perpetual motion machine--it would be wonderful in theory, but it can't actually exist in reality.

America has the best medical care in the world, as evidenced by the fact that eople come here from around the world to take advantage of our outstanding medicine and state-of-the-art treatments. Our health care may not be perfect, and much can be done to improve it. But unless we want to end up with problems like the Canadians have, we best think twice about socialized medicine and work on a free-market cure for US healthcare system.

Posted by Abdul at May 7, 2008 10:12 AM

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