Universal health care’: A deadly delusion

My wife’s dumbass relatives in Denmark can’t brag enough to me about their free healthcare, to which I say you pay 70% taxes, so it’s not free. They try to make America into Denmark and what sort of works for 5 million doesn’t translate to 330+ million. They don’t get it because they mostly want to trash the US. Plus, they are socialist and we’re not.

Well, here’s the facts. It doesn’t work, the doctors are crummy, you have to wait for months and you can’t sue for malpractice, which at least 4 of her relatives have received for healthcare and are now injured.

Now this story:

Advocates for “universal health care” love to use Finland as an example of a system that works. That is an absurd comparison. Finland has a culturally homogeneous population of 5.6 million; that is just over half the population of Los Angeles County (9.6 million).

Better examples are England and Canada.

England has government-funded “universal health care” in the form of the National Health Service. The population of England is around 57 million people. Wait times for nonemergency care average 14 to 18 weeks, and thousands of people have been waiting more than 18 months. As of June of this year, 7.5 million Brits were waiting for already scheduled procedures and surgeries requiring hospital stays, more than 300,000 of whom had been waiting for more than a year.

Keep in mind that these scheduled – and delayed – procedures include diagnostic tests and treatments for illnesses like cancer. Shortages of physicians and treatment facilities force cancer patients to wait weeks – or months – for radiation or chemotherapy.

These delays have life-and-death consequences. In 2009, British medical journal Lancet reported that 51.1% of British cancer patients were alive five years after their diagnosis. By contrast, 91.9% of American cancer patients were alive five years after their diagnosis.

England’s problems are not limited to cancer care. Last year, Bloomberg News published a report analyzing the NHS’s own data. The results were shocking. In most areas of England, medical care failed to meet government goals in things as basic as minimum wait times for an ambulance to arrive in an emergency (goal: 30 minutes; reality: up to three hours) or the availability of hospital beds.

In Canada – another country with “universal health care,” the situation is nearly as bad. Canada has a population of nearly 40 million. The average wait time for treatment in Canada for a condition requiring a specialist’s care is more than six months. But in some provinces and for some procedures – like orthopedic surgery or neurosurgery – the wait is closer to a year, or even longer. Canadians face long waits – six weeks to three months – even for simple but vital diagnostic procedures like MRIs, CT scans or ultrasounds.

By contrast, in the United States – a country with 330 million people – the average wait time for a nonemergency appointment with a specialist is only 26 days (a situation that medical journal STAT called “a public health crisis”). The median time between diagnosis of cancer and commencement of treatment is 27 days. The average wait time for an ambulance here is seven minutes.

there is more here if you care to read, but it’s pretty clear that Obamacare is the failure it looks like and it was a shot at Marxism, just what the US doesn’t need.