The above photo could only happen in this country – a family member is stricken by cancer, health insurance was either not affordable or available prior to diagnosis, and the family having to resort to selling off possessions and begging for charity to pay for treatment. After treatment, successful or not, the hospitals and doctors will come after them and take what they have, saddling them with overwhelming debt and forcing them into bankruptcy.
The concept of “death panels” was invented by some PR agency back in 2009 for the benefit of Tea Party sloganeering. It’s classic PR – short, emotional and memorable. It was mindlessly repeated to demonize the people who actually open up access to health care: government agencies. The real “death panels” are the people who roped off our health care system in order to charge exorbitant fees for admission – health insurance companies. Deep within their bowels are the faceless people who passed judgment on the poor schmuck for whose benefit the above family is having a garage sale.
This is purely anecdotal, but I’ve heard and read countless similar stories: I was listening to Nicole Sanders on the radio the other evening as I drove up the canyon on my way home. She’s a radio host in Florida who subs for Randi Rhodes (whom I studiously avoid). Apparently there is an outbreak of TB down there, and understaffed and underfunded public health agencies cannot handle it. They send most patients to one hospital in, as I recall, Jacksonville. A Ontario listener was quite concerned, having recently been in the Jacksonville are. She called in to say that fearing exposure, she had seen her doctor to be tested. (She’s fine.)
Sanders asked her how long it took to get in. She said that she called in the afternoon and was seen the next morning. Sanders asked about those horrible waiting periods Canadians have to endure – she said that certain provinces (I think “northern”) have had some issues, but otherwise that’s not the case. She also said that her husband had recently undergone major surgery of some sort, and that the only out-of-pocket cost they had to pay was $12 for TV in the room.
Of course, people often use the word “free” to describe such health services, and they are not. They are paid by taxpayers, with the provinces acting as single payers. The result is lower costs (in essence paying wholesale), easier access to care, elimination of both bureaucracy and death panels, and freedom from worry about bankruptcy.
There’s a myth out there, by the way, that our system is as good because anyone who does not have insurance is free to visit an emergency room for treatment.
One, for non-emergent conditions like, say, a lump on one’s breast or high blood pressure, emergency rooms are not suited for treatment. Their job is triage and stabilization. They are not an access point to the system, but rather a way station for extreme cases.
Two, it’s not “free” unless the patient is indigent, or as they say, “judgment-proof.” Hospitals are not shy anymore about vigorously pursuing ER patients via debt collection agencies.
The amazing thing about this country is that we share a border with Canada, and yet somehow our media manages to filter out the facts about their health care system. If indeed there is discussion about it, it is either Americans who don’t like the Canadian system, or Canadians who are dissatisfied. Since the vast majority of Canadians are happy with their system, and the vast majority of Americans unhappy with ours, it’s odd that we only hear the minority view. Thought control in our country is masterfully carried out even as we appear to have free access to information.
__________
PS: If you are thinking about commenting here that Canadians flock to the US for treatment, and do not provide evidence of studies to that effect (there are none), your comment will be highlighted and ridiculed.
Piece of Mindful 
I’m game.
“OTTAWA–Danny Williams’ decision to head south for heart surgery has sparked a furious debate on both sides of the border.
The premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, a former lawyer and millionaire businessman, left Monday for an unspecified cardiac surgical procedure at an undisclosed U.S. hospital. The move raised questions about whether he could have the operation in Canada.
Conservative Senator Wilbert Keon, a retired heart surgeon and professor emeritus at University of Ottawa, said Newfoundland does not have the special pumps and post-op technical support to allow all advanced complicated procedures to be performed there.”
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Ridiculous because:
1. It is anecdotal. You really don’t know why anecdotal evidence has little value, do you.
2. Canadian health care facilities will sometimes ship patients to outside facilities because it is cheaper to do so than to invest in the necessary equipment. Most times the other facility is in another city of province, occasionally it is ithe US.
3. You are avoiding the major points of the post – that all Canadians have access to basic health care; than no Canadians go bankrupt due to medical costs; that Canadian health care is much cheaper than here, and that talking points down here about waiting queues are nonsense.
Now, Mr. Jello-on-wall, address those specific points without use of anecdotal evidence and you might garner a little respect here. Otherwise, you asked for it, you got it.
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By the way, our aunt who lives in Connecticut got a hip replacement that turned out to have used a defective part not adequately tested by the company that sold it. Thousands of these hips were sold, and all of them put patients at risk. She is going to a specialist in NYC to get her hip repaired. She has to wait six months to see him.
That is an anecdote. But it is true. But you understand that because that anecdote is true, it does not condemn the American health care system? That takes large facts.
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And your little garage sale story isn’t anecdotal?
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I made bigger points. Everyone uses anecdotes, and they are a necessary part of writing when used as a means of illustrating larger points. But by themselves, they mean nothing.
If I put up a picture of that sign, and said “here you go, proof that our health system is bad”, then you might have a point.
Now deal with 2 and 3.
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BS.
I’ve shown you in previous post that Canada, England and other European countries are rationing.
Here’s several sources of Canadian wait times.
http://canadaonline.about.com/od/healthcarewaittimes/Wait_Times_for_Health_Care_in_Canada.htm
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I’m thinking they’ll be lots of garage sales in the UK if ya got lupis.
http://www.pharmatimes.com/Article/12-05-01/UK_patients_to_be_barred_from_first_new_lupus_drug_in_50_years.aspx
For black market purchases.
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I’ve told you again and again and again that all countries face rationing decisions in health care, but that only the US bases the decision on wealth. How can you look around you at 50+ million uninsured and say that health care is not rationed here?
How?
How?
How?
How? What kind of mental gymnastics causes such an illusion?
In Canada, if you need a minor procedure, say, a knee replacement while you are still ambulatory and relative free of pain, you might have to wait a while to get it. That is not because they ration (they do, as do we), but rather because they do population-wide triage, and attempt to devote critical resources to critical needs, working down from there, while offering basic care to everyone.
Now, deal with #2 and #3 please.
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2 and 3 don’t matter if ya got lupis Mark.
2 and 3 don’t matter if ya got some board making life or death decisions based on political correctness or balance sheets.
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2 and 3 don’t matter if ya got a large carbon footprint.
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Thursday, April 5, 2012
If you want to get a glimpse of what life will be like under Obamacare, just look to the UK, where government-run health care continues to produce ludicrous stories like this – a pensioner who had visited the same doctor’s practice for 30 years was told to find a new GP because of concerns over the “carbon footprint” of her 2 mile round trip.
After 83-year-old Avril Mulcahy complained about a doctor, she was told that the practice had a problem over her “green traveling issues” and ordered her to re-register at another practice.
The the West Road Surgery in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, wrote a letter to the pensioner stating, “Our greatest concern is for your health and convenience but also taking into consideration green travelling issues. Re: Carbon footprints and winter weather conditions, we feel it would be advisable for patients to register at surgeries nearer to where they live. We would be very grateful if you could make the necessary arrangements to re-register at another practice.”
“When I read through the letter, I found it absolutely ridiculous they were saying the reason was to decrease their carbon footprint,” Mulcahy told the London Telegraph. “I have been a patient at the practice for 30 years now, and there has never been any problem.”
Mulcahy added that the episode had caused stress and prompted worries that she would not be able to obtain her prescription medication.
In the UK, patients cannot seek private health care without first being referred by a National Health Service GP. This can often take weeks because it is like a lottery attempting to get an NHS appointment. Government-run health care in the United Kingdom is notoriously poor and horror stories about wrong legs being amputated and other medical nightmares are routinely in the news.
Given the fact that death panels, euphemistically called “Payment Advisory Boards,” are a part of Obamacare, expect to see health authorities in the U.S. think up similarly inventive ways to deny treatment to the elderly.
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Anecdotal. I’m done here. You’re impenetrable.
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We know carsinogens cause cancer and do little to prevent their spread into our air, water and food. By the time the insurance companies get their fangs into us we’ve been abused by hundreds of products, companies and regulatory agencies that just don’t give a damn about our health or the health of our biosphere. Our continued passivity keeps us all on death row until symptoms appear. We treat symptomes, don’t we, but don’t seem to be the least bit curious about the cause.
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Impenetrable? Perhaps, but I read this a few days ago and put you in the future loaded in the boxcar and me with explosives. Provided of course you’re not the one loading the trains.
“I find it ironic — but perfectly understandable given the propensity of all collectivists to embrace cognitive dissonance — that y’all spend so much effort defending the bureaucracy of federal law enforcement agencies just because they now temporarily serve the nominal commands of your Dear Leader (anybody remember COINTELPRO?). This puts the lie to your perception of yourselves as “defenders of civil liberties.” (They same goes for so-called neo-Cons.) Civil liberties for thee but not for me. I get it. What you don’t get is that if somebody decided to start making the trains run to “Arbeit Macht Frei” camps in a future America and fill them with Nancy Pelosi and her ilk (yea, even Media Matters’ uncomprehending and foul-mouthed mokes), it would be me and my despised friends who would be blowing up the tracks, cutting the wire and shooting the guards to free you. That is the cost of unbending principle.”
Unbending principle and Impenetrability seem to go hand in hand.
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Decent health care is a right in every other democratic country, where citizens are indeed freer, healthier, happier and wealthier than here. Your support of forced tribute to private corporations while at the same time decrying loyalty to “Dear Leader” is contradictory, but not at all unusual for you.
Also, I’m not a Democrat. I don’t salivate like you when I hear the word “Pelosi.” She’s just another tool.
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