Socialized Medicine

[Anonymous]

While I'm one of the first to say that our present health care system has to be revamped (made more affordable), I don't want any parts of "Socialized" medicine.
"If you think things are expensive now, just wait til they are "free".

"The fact that the greatest, the best health care system in the world was not produced at the point of a gun, but in the context of individual freedom and liberty, this fact is evaded and ignored.
The health care system in Sweden is often used as a model of the alleged virtues of nationalized health care by the most zealous advocates of "health care reform" in the United States. For obvious reasons, the failures of the Swedish health care system are evaded. "

While dismissing the well known horrors of medicine in the former communist Soviet Union, the advocates of more state controls in medicine often portray socialized health care systems in the mixed economies of Europe as paradigms of virtue. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In Great Britain, the concept of state-enforced "universal coverage" has been a reality since 1946, and it has been a miserable failure. The cardinal feature of British medicine, as with any state-controlled health care system, is the "waiting list."

A prominent German newspaper this summer had a telling article titled "On the Waiting List Lurks Death" (1). The article describes the fate of a 38 year-old reporter and father of two who suffered from coronary artery disease and died while on the "waiting list" for seven months for a life saving coronary bypass operation.

A chairman of the medical staff at a famous British hospital has stated that overcrowding in British Hospitals has led to patient's dying at home before they can be admitted to the hospital, of patient's dying in the emergency department before receiving a hospital bed, of cancer patient's waiting up to six weeks for treatment while their tumors spread (2).

British orthopedic surgeons have admitted that an elderly person requiring a hip replacement will probably die before getting to the top of the "waiting list."

One major reason that the Labor Party won a majority in the British Parliament in 1997 was its promise to reduce the number of patients on the waiting list from over 1,000,000 down to 100,000 (3). To date this campaign promise is far from met.

In the nationalized health care system in Canada the government has shut down hospital wards that provided needed but expensive chemotherapy and radiology treatment for patients with cancer (4). Even if patients with cancer are willing to pay for these services, they are unable to obtain them. If they wish to live, they must seek health care in the United States where more freedom in medicine still exists.

Honest physicians in Sweden acknowledge the horrors of waiting lists under Sweden's socialized health care system. "Every Swede can inform a visitor," says Dr. Erik Brodin, a Swedish physician, "about the reality of waiting lists as part of Sweden's social medicine" (5).

In the famous Swedish University city of Malmo, for example, the waiting time for plastic surgery is seven years, for gall bladder operations the wait is three years. Diabetics in Sweden sometimes go blind while waiting two years to get an appointment at Swedish eye clinics (6).

The health care system in Sweden is often used as a model of the alleged virtues of nationalized health care by the most zealous advocates of "health care reform" in the United States. For obvious reasons, the failures of the Swedish health care system are evaded.

Between 1986 and 1990 the average five year survival (medical standard for "cure") for lung cancer in England was 6%; that of other European countries with less socialized health care systems was 10.5%; that of the United States which still has the freest health care system was 14.5%, more than double that of England. The same trend is evident for bowl and lung cancer and for breast cancer in women (7).

The correlation is clear: the freer (less government controls) the health care system, the higher the quality of care. Yet, these data are evaded and never reported by those who demand more regulation of the health care industry in America.

Waiting lines are the inescapable sign of price controls, in health care as well as in any other industry. A cardinal feature of any socialized health care system is that health care becomes a rationed commodity, and medical "waiting lists" are one of the earliest indications that the state's regulation of health care is bankrupt, morally and financially. Medical services go to those willing to wait the longest or those with the most political pull. In a free market system, health care goes to those who value them the most, not to those with the most influence and political pull (8).

A major motive of those who cry out for "universal coverage" is not the quality and availability of health care. If the quality and availability of health care were their concern, then an honest look at reality would end their advocacy of a system that has proven to produce the exact opposite of what they claim to be advocating.

A fundamental motive of those who demand more government intervention in medicine is the re-distribution of wealth. It is an attempt to sacrifice the productive to the non-productive, the healthy to the non-healthy. The chronically ill, the hypochondriac, the unproductive worker take out far more than they put in. The young, the healthy, and the productive worker bear the brunt of taxes (9).

The inefficiency of government bureaucracy has been proven time and time again, and medicine is certainly no exception. Yet the cry for more government intervention in the health care industry continues.

In Europe, the effect of replacing freedom with a bureaucrat's gun has been a diminishing supply of medicine, not only of quantity but also of quality (10). A state bureaucracy tends to grow and spread, not in the direction of more productivity but rather it shifts and consumes wealth to sustain its own non-productive existence.

When the judgment of bureaucrats make medical decisions, rather than the free and independent judgment of the individual patient and physician, the productive effort of the physician goes not to the patient, but to sustain the life of non-productive bureaucrats.

http://www.amatecon.com/etext/dosm/dosm-preface.html

The False Promise of Single-Payer Health Care
http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/s...ech_sally.html

Canada's Medical Nightmare
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=15524

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclop...lized-medicine

[DiscoMan]

Joisey - I hope you're prepared for the abuse, ridicule and denial that the libs will unleash on you for having the audacity to piss on their parade and expose them for what they are!

[Mixmachine]

But this is the great Outlaw Josey Wales, and he shoots from the hip with both pistols :lol: , he's used to ruffling the feathers of the ultra liberals around here and in the process destroying their wet dreams of perfect “Free Utopias”... :lol: :lol:

Hey Josey, And the majority of this brain watched socialist don't know the real facts behind the lefties’ "Darling" of Socialized Health systems, the one this so call "European intellectuals" types (more like useful fools) have been peddling around the world for the last 45 years, ‘Castro's Cuba Health system’, if they only knew the truth they would burry their head in the ground in shame, well, if they had any…