Exposing the lies of universal health care
This is an absolute must-read from Thomas Sowell. First, pointing out the most obvious.
The most basic fact is that it is cheaper to remain sick than to get medical treatment. What is cheapest of all is to die instead of getting life-saving medications and treatment, which can be very expensive.
Okay, so I doubt that anyone is going to be trying to ram that through Congress (although if the unions wanted it, I wouldn’t put it past the current ship of fools running this country). But enough with the funnies, here’s the part that every American must read.
We don’t hear about more than 4,000 expectant mothers who gave birth inside a hospital, but not in the maternity ward, in Britain in just one year. They had their babies in hallways, bathrooms and even elevators.
British newspapers have for years carried stories about the neglect of patients under the National Health Service, of which this is just one. When nurses don’t get around to taking a pregnant woman to the maternity ward in time, the baby doesn’t wait.
But the American media don’t tell you about such things when they are gushing over the wonders of “universal health care” that will “bring down the cost of medical care.”
Instead, the media spin is that various countries with government-run medical systems have life expectancies that are as long as ours, or longer. That is very clever as media spin, if you don’t bother to stop and think about it.
Author Sally Pipes did bother to stop and think about it in her book, “The Truth About ObamaCare.” She points out that medical care is just one of the factors in life expectancy.
She cites a study by Professors Ohsfeldt and Schneider at the University of Iowa, which shows that, if you leave out people who are victims of homicide or who die in automobile accidents, Americans live longer than people in any other Western country.
Doctors do not prevent homicides or car crashes. In the things that doctors can affect, such as the survival rates of cancer patients, the United States leads the world.
Americans get the latest pharmaceutical drugs, sometimes years before those drugs are available to people in Britain or in other countries where the government runs the medical system. Why? Because the latest drugs cost more and it is cheaper to let people die.
The media have often said that we have higher infant mortality rates than other countries with government medical care systems. But we count every baby that dies and other countries do not. If the media don’t tell you that, so much the better for ObamaCare.
The left continues to beat the drum that European systems are not only cheaper, but that they’re actually better. As Thomas points out, this is just simply not true. Much of the impetus for passing health care reform, in fact, is quite frankly just fabricated. They weren’t just lying about what’s wrong with our system or what they think is right about European systems, they lied about the problem of the uninsured living in the United States.
Unfortunately, Obamacare is the law of the land now. As much as I would like to see it repealed, I’m not holding my breath. Not only do I think that this would procedurally be very difficult to do (especially with the threat of a Presidential veto looming large), but I don’t see the current field of Republican candidates having the stones to do something like that.
No, what is far more likely is that the problem will be made infinitely worse by “tweaking” Obamacare in an effort to make it better. While this will be done with the best of intentions, it will have disastrous consequences. Politically, government involvement in the health care decisions of Americans will become a foregone conclusion, something that everyone just accepts as necessary to varying degrees. From a policy standpoint, while their may initially be attempts to peel back some of Obamacare, this will be yet another entitlement program that will do what they all do: grow, and grow, and grow.
And it’s all based on lies and half-truths. Democracy. Ain’t it great?
