Professor Enigma's Official Site

Liberals:

Drunk off Big Government

I had a short debate with myself on whether I should just write an essay on the liberal kingpin of all big-government power-grabs–universal health care. Whether it be a Canadian-style single-payer system or a hybrid thereof in the UK, getting the federal government more involved in health care is a horrendous idea. With that said, I’ll just supply you, the reader, with a plethora of links to numerous stories demonstrating the silliness of socialized medicine. It’s a train wreck just waiting to happen.

Rather than write an essay on a subject that is so voluminous, I’ll provide all the links and at times give a short synopsis of the article (emphasis mine unless stated otherwise), the rest is up to you.

U.S. States rejecting, mulling,

or already implementing

socialized medicine

***NJ, NM, WA, CT, WI (2), IL, HI (2, 3), CA (2), MA (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

Take a look at the massive spending increases these programs would’ve implemented on the respective states that these health care plans were considered. For example, universal health scare schemes were scrapped in WI and CT because they were; by themselves, larger than the entire state budget. The Wall Street Journal said it best, "But then, you have to understand the Kremlinology of liberal health-care reform: This effort has as much to do with politics as public policy."

Current federal government plans

to implement socialized medicine

***Sen. Allard proposes an amendment that would enact many of Sen. Obama’s universal health care plans. Obama voted against that amendment. Take a look at the costs, absolutely outrageous!

***S.B.334 "The Healthy Americans Act." "S. 334 includes an ‘individual mandate,’ or legal requirement that every individual purchase at least a minimum amount of coverage, though enforcement is left up to the States, which are directed to come up with a means of ensuring that the uninsured are penalized."

***Obama’s Health Care Plan: Another large roll of bureaucratic red tape.

***Dr. Obama’s Snake Oil: Same garbage, different garbage bag.

***The Crushing Costs of Addressing the Crushing Cost of Health Care: Remember Obama’s plan to implement electronic records to save our health care system a chunk of change that can be then used to pay for these massive social program expansions? It’s not as much as a cost-saver as you’d think. The UK tried this and fell flat on its face.

"In 2002, Tony Blair ordered Britain’s National Health Service to participate in the National Programme for IT, and thus launched an ambitious attempt to computerize the entire Service. The initial projected cost: 2.3 billion pounds. It was widely described as the largest IT project in the history of the world. Fast forward to late 2008. Costs had risen to a minimum of 12.7 billion pounds, and since the system was 4 years late – and counting – its final cost, actual full in-service date, and even whether it would ever work at all remained up in the air. The Financial Times described it as exhibiting an unhealthy level of ‘Great Leap Forward Syndrome.’ So what went wrong? Where to start. There was the crass malignancy of the government’s attitude to its suppliers. The official responsible for delivering the system compared the project to a sled team and failing suppliers to dogs who would be shot and fed to the survivors to motivate them. A year later, he abruptly quit the project after one key firm was accused of accounting irregularities and another major contractor dropped out and threatened to sue the government to escape from the affair. Then there was the incompetence of the Department of Health. The 2007 ‘competence review’ of the Department by the Cabinet Office is richly amusing. Of the 12 assessed areas, the Department got a green light in zero of them. The ‘Base Choices on Evidence’ area was described, for instance, as an ‘Urgent Development Area.’ "

***Obama-Daschle "reform" will cripple American health care: Tom Daschle is thankfully out of the picture because he can’t pay burdensome taxes he expects everyone else to, but don’t expect Obama to cease in his quest to make everyone a ward of the state.

"Obama and Daschle want to prohibit insurers from charging different premiums to different applicants. These ‘community rating’ regulations would ensure that a 55-year-old man with emphysema would pay the same amount for his health insurance as a 22-year-old non-smoker. That may sound fair, but it ignores several facts about health care. Younger people tend to be healthier and therefore do not use the healthcare system as much as older people, who generally have more medical problems. Insurers take this reality into account when calculating premiums, which is why young people pay lower insurance rates than the elderly. But if insurers must charge both young and old the same rates, premiums for everyone will be in the stratosphere. Many of the young and healthy would not purchase insurance -- until they got sick, when they'd take advantage of the plan’s ‘guaranteed issue’ provision to get a policy. This cycle would continue until the only people left in the pool were the desperately ill."

"Rather than cutting costs and expanding coverage, guaranteed issue and community rating will likely increase costs and cast more Americans into the ranks of the uninsured. Obama-Daschle's answer for this problem is a government-run health insurance program to insure those who fall through the cracks, which will soon be everybody. In Critical, Dasche says the government-run insurance program ‘will be modeled after Medicare, a proven and popular program.’ Medicare is popular with its elderly beneficiaries. Medicare and its cousin Medicaid are far from popular with healthcare providers, who are usually reimbursed at below-market rates for their work. Doctors must devote valuable time to mountains of confusing paperwork to perform the most basic of medical tasks. Daschle's own book relates the stories of people who were arbitrarily cut off from government benefits or turned away by doctors who were no longer willing or able to work with the poorly run government insurance programs. And yet somehow he concludes that these failing programs must be expanded. Go figure."

***National Grocery Reform: Richard Ralston’s tongue-in-cheek criticism of nationalized health care. Let’s have government-run grocery stores because "America spends more on food than any other nation. Many political leaders are now calling for urgent reform to bring spending on food under control. Even worse, while the result of this uncontrolled spending includes the fact that many Americans are overweight, some Americans do not have enough to eat."

***Health Insurance is Not Health Care: The difference between countries who have "universal health insurance" but still do without health care at times–with fatal consequences. Many talking heads on the Democrat side like to point out all these European countries with "universal" coverage and think everyone’s stupid enough to believe that de facto means they have health care at all times. Only a fool would believe such nonsense.

***Another Bit Of "Unbiased" Reporting On the U.S. Health Care System: On the recent World Health Organization report stating the U.S. "rank[s] only 15th in overall health care for chronic disease sufferers." This is bunk and David Hogberg dispenses with it in short fashion.

"Of course, any statistic coming from the WHO has to be taken with a grain of salt the size of Mount McKinley. Remember, this is the same organization that in 2000 released a report that ranked the U.S. health care system 37th in the world, behind the health care powerhouses of Colombia, Morocco, Dominica and Costa Rica."

"The WHO defines chronic diseases as cardiovascular diseases, mainly heart disease and stroke; cancer; chronic respiratory diseases; and diabetes (see page 35 of this WHO report). I constructed two tables using data available at this WHO webpage. I compared the twenty most developed nations in the world and created tables based on total deaths from chronic diseases and those from diabetes...."

"The problem, though, is that the statistic is ‘age standardized death rate per 100,000.’ In other words, the death rate is adjusted only for age of the population, not for any other factor. That matters because the U.S. has a much higher population of people of African descent than those other nations, a population that is at much higher risk (see here and here) of diabetes and heart disease than the white population. Were the different racial makeup of these nations accounted for, the numbers would probably look much different."

Why are costs so high?:

It’s mandates stupid!

***All Could Be Well: Mandates have led to decreased competition and competition is what we need to lower health care costs.

"The solution to the health care problems in this country is not more of what caused the problem — a growing third-party-payer system — but competition. In markets where the procedures aren't typically covered by insurance or some other third party, and patients are responsible for paying their own bills, the providers, according to Devon M. Herrick of the National Center for Policy Analysis, ‘almost always compete on the basis of price and quality. And because they are not trapped in a system that pays for predetermined tasks at predetermined rates,’ Herrick writes in an NCPA report, ‘providers are free to repackage and reprice their services — just like vendors in other markets’... Herrick looked at the markets in cosmetic surgery, laser eye surgery, laboratory and diagnostic testing, prescription drugs, walk-in clinics, telephone consultations and concierge medical services. He found that entrepreneurs competing for patients' business offer ‘greater convenience, lower prices and innovative services unavailable in traditional clinical settings.’ Herrick also observed that access to health care is increased where there is competition. Advocates for the uninsured won't be persuaded because their goal is not increasing competition but forcing the public into a government-run health care system. But their biases do not diminish Herrick's findings. Of course, the public knows little about these markets. Mainstream media, in partnership with the politicians and special interests, are obsessed with the government health care systems in Britain and Canada. In those countries, the third-party-payer arrangements have run up costs, caused artificial shortages, led to rationing of care and cut into quality — deep-seated problems that only competition can root out."

***Six Fixes For Health Care Costs: Again, more competition in certain markets has led to lower prices. I’ll cover a few of the highlights and let you read the rest for yourself."Over the past decade, overall healthcare costs have risen between 8 and 10 percent each year. But laser corrective eye surgery has become 40% more affordable, dropping from about $2,200 to $1,350 per eye. The reason? Competition. Because laser eye surgery is rarely covered by insurance, patients can shop around for the best deal. And because they're spending their own money, they tend to drive a hard bargain. Applying the discipline of the marketplace to other health services would force prices down. Allow the purchase of health insurance across state lines. You can buy just about anything you want from any state in the union -- except health insurance. Consumers are captive to the policies laden with expensive regulations imposed by their state governments. Differing levels of regulation lead to huge disparities in the cost of insurance. For instance, a 25-year-old male in New Jersey shells out $5,580 per year for a standard policy. But in Kentucky, which imposes fewer regulations, he would pay only $906 for the same coverage. If lawmakers let Americans shop around for health insurance, millions more would be able to afford it. Competition would also drive down prices for those who already have insurance."

***Why Health Insurance Costs Are Higher For Small Businesses: Again, it’s the mandates.

"According to the Council on Affordable Health Insurance, there are more than 1,961 state-mandated benefits that insurance companies are required to offer in their health plans, adding to the cost of small group health insurance: Mental health parity is one of the most expensive and pervasive mandates — 47 states require insurers to cover mental health conditions, adding 3 percent to 5 percent to premiums, according to CAHI estimates. Forty-six states require coverage for chiropractors, 11 states mandate acupuncturists and four require coverage for massage therapy. Four states require coverage of naturopaths, who utilize food and herbal remedies to complement (and sometimes in place of) surgery or drugs. In Massachusetts, the Division of Health Care Finance and Policy reported that 13 cents of every dollar spent on health care goes to cover mandated benefits. CAHI estimates that these mandates add 20 to 50 percent more to the cost of insurance, depending on the state."

***Insurers Pressed To Pay More For Prostheses

***Mandate Update: "Although there were only a handful of state mandates in the 1960s, CAHI's just released ‘Health Insurance Mandates in the States, 2008' has identified 1,961 nationwide -- up from 1,901 a year ago." Give something away for free and people will take it. Go read about some of the ridiculous treatments states mandate that providers cover.

***Lose the Mandates: "There were only seven state- mandated benefits in 1965; today there are nearly 1,000. While many mandates cover basic providers and services, others require coverage for such non-medical expenses as hairpieces, treatment for drug and alcohol abuse, pastoral and marriage counseling. Overall, 12 of the most common mandates can increase the cost of insurance by as much as 30 percent. The NCPA predicted almost 10 years ago that the real threat behind the Congress's newfound interest in mandating health insurance benefits is incremental rather than immediate. One or two federal mandates may not increase the cost of health insurance significantly but, as in the states, once the door is open every special interest will hurry through to besiege the legislature."

***Eliminating Government Mandates: "The average state has 36 mandates on an individual health insurance policy. With each mandate, the cost to the consumer goes up; these mandates often stand in the way of making health insurance more affordable in the first place... In Massachusetts, estimates now show that the monthly costs for an individual will be $380, almost double what the designers predicted. A movement to exempt those earning up to three times the federal poverty line or $60,000 per year for a family of four is already gaining momentum."

***The Market and Its Medicine: Solving the health-care "crisis" means not more government involvement but less. Didn’t I just say, "Give something away for free and people will pay for it?"

"Dr. Gratzer cites a remarkable Rand Corp. study that tracked health-care spending by 2,000 families over eight years. The families who got free health care spent 40% more than the families with cost-sharing arrangements. And yet the health outcomes for the two groups were the same. The lesson: Market-based health insurance systems, such as health savings accounts, cut out inefficiencies and lower costs without compromising quality."

***Health Care Reform: The Economics of "Pay or Play" Employer Mandates: A massive detail-oriented article demonstrating how mandates actually hurt the working poor and increase costs. More government involvement in health care equals inflated costs.

"Over the last two decades, the extent of privately provided health insurance coverage in the United States has fallen from 70 to 63 percent of the non-aged population."

***Hillarycare’s Sickening For Our National Soul: "About half of health care expenditures in 1960 were directly controlled by consumers; today, it's about 15 percent. Over the same period in which consumers have relinquished control, per capita health care spending has quintupled."

***Montana Paper Documents Failures of Socialized Medicine on Indian Reservations: Enough said–if the entire country was run like this, we'd look a lot like Europe. Free government-run health care takes it on the chin again.

European, Canadian, et al.

experiments with

socialized medicine

***Single-Payer Blues: "Advocates of the single-payer system often cite Canada as the paragon of virtue. But there is a slight catch-22. The Canadian social structure is on the verge of collapse... Health-care costs would consume 50 percent of Alberta's budget by 2016 (according to the Fraser Institute) or 2017 (according to Aon Consulting, a firm hired by the Alberta government). Health care would devour 100 percent of the provincial budget by 2030, if present trends continue."

***Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada: "Total waiting time between referral from a general practitioner and treatment, averaged across all 12 specialties and 10 provinces surveyed, increased from 17.7 weeks in 2005 to 17.8 weeks in 2006. This small nationwide deterioration in access reflects waiting-time increases in 7 provinces, while concealing decreases in waiting time in Alberta, Ontario, and Newfoundland."

"Compared to 1993, waiting time in 2006 is 91 percent longer. Moreover, academic studies of waiting time have found that Canadians wait longer than Americans, Germans, and Swedes (sometimes) for cardiac care, although not as long as New Zealanders or the British.... The extent of Canada’s health system dysfunction was documented in a 2000 Fraser Institute study that examined the impact of increases in government health spending. The study’s analysis revealed that provinces spending more on health care per person had neither shorter (nor longer) total waiting times than those spending less. In addition, those provinces spending more had no higher rates of surgical specialist services (consultations plus procedures) and had lower rates of procedures and major surgeries... A follow-up study in 2003 found that increased spending was actually correlated with increases in waiting times unless those increases in spending were targeted to physicians or pharmaceuticals."

***Supposedly free health care in Germany is very costly: " ‘Free’ health care comes with a big bill that, for the average German, eats up around 14.2% of gross pay, about half of it covered by the employer... In Germany, such punishing payroll taxes make companies less willing to hire and contribute to double-digit unemployment, currently at 10.2%. Perniciously, a rise in joblessness drives up payroll taxes to cover those on the dole, making it harder in turn for companies to hire... As Germans have already forked out so much through their taxes for usually zero-deductible plans, patients have no incentive to keep costs down by going to the doctor selectively. Britain's NHS is plagued by long waiting lines and regular hospital visits for the common cold. Inefficiencies plague other parts of the German system... About 12,000 doctors have found jobs abroad, some of them also in the U.S."

***Beware the "Fix" of Universal Health Care: "Ireland boasts the richest economy in Western Europe, but in a country of about 4 million people, there are 17 neurologists and it takes up to a year to get an appointment to see one for the initial visit. It takes about four months to get an MRI scan, about 14 weeks for diagnostic ultrasound and surgical cases are put on waiting lists.

Canadians pay roughly a 50 percent income tax to help support their national health-care system. In Ontario, most Canadians who can afford it purchase private extended health coverage rather than relying upon the government-sponsored programs to avoid similar problems."

***U.S. #1 On Health:

"A favorite statistic of critics is life expectancy at birth. The US rate is fair to middling among developed countries, despite our much higher health care spending. However, doctors don't control our overeating, overdrinking, overdosing, overspeeding and assault weapon shootouts in the hood... The study, published in Lancet Oncology, found that the five-year survival rate for all types of cancer among both men and women is higher in America than in any European country. Further, US survival rates are higher than the European average for 13 of 16 specific cancer types. In a separate NBER study, June and Dave O'Neill found that Canadian survival rates also lag behind the US rates."

***Cuba Has Better Health Care Than U.S.?

"[The Fat Man Michael] Moore claims Cubans live longer than Americans. It's true that a U.N. report claims that. But the United Nations didn't gather any data. ‘The United Nations simply reports whatever the government in Cuba reports, so we have no objective way to know what the real statistics are,’ [Dr. Jose] Carro says... Cuba claims it has low infant mortality, but doctors tell us that Cuban obstetricians abort a fetus when they think there might be a problem. Dr. Julio Alfonso told us he used to do 70-80 abortions a day. And here's an even more devious way of distorting infant-mortality data: Some doctors tell us that if a baby dies within a few hours of birth, Cuban doctors don't count him or her as ever having lived."

***Propaganda Hides Cuban Suffering:

"In all nations with high emigration rates, longevity rates skew high; this occurs because the birth is recorded but the death gets recorded in the nation migrated to, so it seems like fewer people die. Naturally, the opposite effect appears in nations with a large influx of immigrants; the death is recorded but the birth was recorded in the nation immigrated from. So generally speaking, a nation with high longevity but known to hemorrhage its people has little to boast about with regard to longevity figures; all they're proving is that theirs is a miserable place to live and from which massive numbers of people flee..."

"The mortality rate of Cuban children aged one to four years is 34 percent higher than the United States (11.8 versus 8.8 per 1,000). But these don't figure into United Nations (UN) and World Health Organization spotlighted ‘infant-mortality rates’ because those figures only follow death during the first year, allowing doctors to falsify figures to make death look like it happened after the first year. In addition, Cuba's infant mortality rate is also kept artificially low by an abortion rate of 0.71 abortions per live birth -- the hemisphere's highest by far, which ‘terminates’ any pregnancy that even hints at trouble."

***"Sicko" Presents False View of Cuba's Health System: "Even the most commonly available pharmaceutical items in the U.S., such as Aspirin and rubbing alcohol, are conspicuously absent [in Cuba]... Antibiotics... are in extremely short supply and available only on the black market. Aspirin can be purchased only at government-run dollar stores, which carry common medications at a huge markup in U.S. dollars... This puts them out of reach of most Cubans, who are paid little and in pesos."

This article also focuses briefly on how Castro’s oil-for-doctors program with Venezuela has caused a major shortage of physicians in Cuba.

***Michael Moore's Shticko: A detail-oriented article (with over a dozen links) debunking Michael Moore’s fallacious portrayal of European health care.

***Sicko’s Shortcuts: "Roberta Gianfortoni, a dean at the Harvard School of Public Health, says doctors in Cuba know how to do many procedures but that doesn't mean those procedures are actually available. As Moore reports, the government only spends $250 per person on health -- not much room in there for things like major surgery. It doesn't seem to cross Moore's mind that when you confiscate a nation's private property that, yes, you can provide free dental care for public relations purposes." Cuban health scare.

***Lines For Swedish Care Grow Longer: "Waiting times for care, long a problem in Sweden and too often deadly wherever they're found, are now the longest on the Continent. While Sweden excels at medical outcomes, it is really bad (and worsening!) at accessibility and service... Swedes are accustomed to cradle-to-grave care provided by the state. But rather than deal with long waits, they're opting for private care, which got a boost from limited reform in the 1990s. In private care, patients self-regulate and put less stress on the system."

In contrast, Swiss voters loved socialized medicine so much they rejected it.

***Moore’s Film Irksome In Canada: "In 2006, the average wait time from seeing a primary-care doctor to getting treatment by a specialist was over four months. Out of a population of 32 million, there are about 3.2 million Canadians trying to get a primary-care doctor. Today, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canada ranks 24th out of 28 countries in doctors per thousand people."

Moore used the majority of his movie to blast anyone and everyone who makes a buck off of health care (as if he hasn’t made millions off the garbage he’s churned out for decades) but he ignores a few major points that Sally Pipes makes light of:

"Some 85 percent of hospital beds in the United States are in nonprofit hospitals. Almost half of U.S. citizens with private plans get insurance from nonprofit providers. Moreover, Kaiser Permanente (a health care provider), which Moore demonizes, is also a nonprofit."

***The Preemie Problem: On infant mortality rates. Moore and his minions have beaten this dead horse... well to death. One of the reasons the U.S. has a relatively high infant mortality rate is because many woman are waiting well into their 30s to have children and numerous premature births, which modern medicine can do little about at this point.

One last point: "According to a 2006 Institute of Medicine report, the numbers of women using assistive reproductive technology doubled from 1996 to 2002. At least half of their pregnancies culminated in multiple births (twins or more), which are at high risk of premature delivery."

***Where Michael Moore is Wrong: John Stossel takes Fat Boy behind the woodshed again. It doesn’t focus much on health care per se, more of a private sector vs. big government battle.

***Debunking Socialized Medicine:

"The percent of middle-aged Canadian women who have never had a mammogram is double the U.S. rate. The percent of Canadian women who have never had a pap smear is triple the U.S. rate. More than 8 in 10 Canadian men have never had a PSA test, compared with less than half of U.S. men. More than 9 in 10 Canadians have never had a colonoscopy, compared with 7 in 10 in the United States..."

"The mortality rate for breast cancer is 25 percent higher in Canada. The mortality rate for prostate cancer is 18 percent higher in Canada. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among Canadian men and women is about 13 percent higher than in the United States... Among senior citizens, the fraction of Canadians with asthma, hypertension, and diabetes who are not getting care is twice the rate in the United States. The fraction of Canadian seniors with coronary heart disease who are not being treated is nearly three times the U.S. rate."

But it’s run by the be-all-end-all government, how could this be happening? It’s "free" too, don’t forget that.

***Edwards and Organ Transplants: Need an organ transplant? Better hope you reside in the U.S.

"Some of the best data pits the U.S. against the U.K. and its National Health Service. A study published in 2004 in the journal Liver Transplantation compared the relative severity of liver disease in transplant recipients in the U.S. and U.K. The results were striking. No patient in the U.K. was in intensive care before transplantation, one marker for how sick patients are, compared with 19.3% of recipients in the U.S. Additionally, the median for a score used to assess how advanced someone's liver disease is, the ‘MELD’ score, was 10.9 in the U.K. compared with 16.1 in the U.S. -- a marked gap, with higher scores for more severe conditions. Both facts suggest even the sickest patients are getting access to new organs in the U.S."

"On the whole, the U.S. also performs more transplants per capita, giving patients better odds of getting new organs. Doctors here do far more partial liver transplants from living, related donors, but also more cadaveric transplants (where the organ comes from a deceased donor). In 2002 -- a year comparative data is available -- U.S. doctors performed 18.5 liver transplants per one million Americans. This is significantly more than in the U.K. or in single-payer France, which performed 4.6 per million citizens, or in Canada, which performed 10 per million..."

"One recent study found that patients' five-year mortality after transplants for acute liver failure, the type from which Ms. Sarkisyan presumably suffered, was about 5% higher in the U.K. and Irleand (sic) than the U.S. The same study also found that in the period right after surgery, death rates were as much as 27% higher in the U.K. and Ireland than in the U.S., although differences in longer-term outcomes equilibrated once patients survived the first year of their transplant..."

"A study in the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation compared statistics on heart transplants over the mid 1990s. It found patients were more likely to receive hearts in the U.S., even when they were older and sicker. The rate was 8.8 transplants per one million people, compared to 5.4 in the U.K. Over the same period, about 15% of patients died while waiting for new hearts in the U.K. compared to 12% in the U.S. In 2006, there were 28,931 transplants of all organ types in the U.S., 96.8 transplants for every one million Americans. There were 2,999 total organ transplants in the U.K., 49.5 transplants for every one million British citizens."

***Bed Medicine: Need a dentist? "Since April 2006, one in every 10 dentists have stopped offering treatment under Great Britain's national health care system. Who can blame them -- the government changed its contract with 21,000 dentists almost two years ago and the result was more work for the dentists and limits on their earnings. Because of the shortage, 2.7 million Britons have gone nearly two years without dental work."

***An Unstable System: As Canadian spending on health care rises they’re getting poorer service.

"Health spending has been growing at an unsustainable pace in 9 of 10 provinces. Government health spending in 6 of 10 provinces is on pace to consume more than half of total revenue from all sources by 2035. Averaged nationally across all provinces, health spending has risen by 7.3 percent over a 10-year period, while the national average growth rate of total available provincial revenue has only been 5.9 percent. Moreover, health spending has grown faster than provincial gross domestic product (GDP), which average only a 5.6 percent growth annual across provinces in the same period."

Can you say "bankrupt?"

***NHS Patients told to Treat Themselves: "Monitor their own heart activity, blood pressure and lung capacity using equipment installed in the home. Report medical information to doctors remotely by telephone or computer. Administer their own drugs and other treatment to ‘manage pain’ and assessing the significance of changes in their condition. Use relaxation techniques to relieve stress and avoid ‘panic’ visits to emergency wards." More here.

***Beyond Those Health Care Numbers: "For men in their 20s, mortality rates are more than 50 percent higher in the United States than in Canada, but accidents and homicides account for most of that gap. Americans are also more likely to be obese, which often involve lifestyle choices, as well as our system of food delivery; not U.S. health care. As for infant mortality, the rate of teenage motherhood is almost three times higher in the United States than it is in Canada, which could lead to lower birth weights and more deaths."

We have some undeniable cultural (not health care) problems thanks to the MTV generation. As an aside, the article also touches briefly on the myth of 47 million Americans without health insurance.

***UK Among Europe’s Worst For Cancer Funding:

"Just £80 (about U.S. $165) per head of population is spent on cancer in England, compared to £121 (about U.S. $249) per head in France and £143 (about U.S. $295) per head in Germany. Just 5.6 per cent of the total health budget is spent on cancer compared to 7.7 percent in France, 9.2 percent in the United States and 9.6 percent in Germany..."

"The United Kingdom ranks 22nd out of 28 European countries for mortality rates among women with cancer, and is ninth for mortality among men. The figures from 2006 show women in Estonia, Slovakia, Lithuania and Slovenia are all more likely to survive cancer than women in the United Kingdom. For men in the United Kingdom, mortality rates are better than in Eastern Europe but still lag behind Iceland, Sweden, Malta, Finland, Cyprus, Switzerland, Norway and Germany. Spending on cancer has increased by 27 percent over the last three years in the United Kingdom, making it the third-highest funded disease behind mental health and circulatory disease -- despite being the biggest killer."

***U.S. Cancer Care is Number One: "American women have a 63 percent chance of living at least five years after a cancer diagnosis, compared to 56 percent for European women. American men have a five-year survival rate of 66 percent -- compared to only 47 percent for European men. Among European countries, only Sweden has an overall survival rate for men of more than 60 percent. For women, only three European countries (Sweden, Belgium and Switzerland) have an overall survival rate of more than 60 percent."

***The Madness of Feeding this Ravenous NHS: Got money? Not if you live in the UK, they’re taking it all for "free" health care.

"New taxes passed on small business seemed unwise but also wholly avoidable, had the NHS been awarded the 3 to 3.5 per cent spending settlement that was expected. But a 4 percent annual rise for the NHS, raising its budget from £90 billion (about U.S. $183 billion) to almost £110 billion (about U.S. $224 billion) by 2010, seemed to have become a political imperative."

***Canada’s Expectant Moms Heading to U.S. to Deliver: "About 1 out of every 7 Canadian physicians sends someone to the United States every year for treatment; neonatal intensive care units in Alberta and Ontario have also been stretched to capacity. The cost of these airlifts and treatments, paid to U.S. hospitals by the province under Canada's universal health care system, runs upwards of $1,000 a child."

***Canadian Surgery Wait Times Longest Yet: "The average wait between being referred to a specialist and receiving an elective operation was 18.3 weeks in 2006, up from 17.8 the year previous. Ontario had the shortest average surgery wait time, 15 weeks while Saskatchewan had the longest, at 27 weeks. The time between being referred by a general practitioner and seeing a specialist grew to 9.2 weeks from 8.8 weeks in 2006, while the second stage of waiting – between seeing the specialist and getting the operation -- edged up from nine to 9.1 weeks. Waits in the internal medicine specialty, gynecology, urology and radiation oncology were all up by varying amounts."

***The Plot Sickens: "According to a recent report in London's Telegraph, cancer survival rates aren't the highest in England, Scotland, Canada or Cuba. They're the highest in the United States." Go read the details for yourself.

***Canada Lags in Health Innovations: "Canada lags behind several other developed countries when it comes to health innovations, such as developing new prescription drugs and medical devices, according to a Conference Board of Canada report... Canada's performance is relatively low, despite being the third highest per capita spender on health care, behind the United States and Switzerland."

"Governments in Canada pump about C$92 billion (about U.S. $87 billion) into the health system annually and citizens spend another C$40 billion (about U.S. $38 billion) on out-of-pocket health care expenses."

***What is to Show for the Extra £43Billion spent on the NHS?: Not much. Despite massive spending increases the NHS continues to lag.

***Socialized Medicine Doesn’t Work: "For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. For esophageal carcinoma, the American survival rate is 12 percent; the European rate is just 6 percent. For prostate cancer, the American survival rate is 81.2 percent; in France, it is 61.7 percent; and in England, it is down to just 44.3 percent in England -- a striking variation."

***Costly ‘Affordable’ Health Care: "In Europe... More expensive drugs and treatments with fewer side effects are set aside for younger patients, while less expensive drugs are given to the elderly because of budgetary constraints in a system providing "free" health care. Studies of kidney dialysis show that more than a fifth of dialysis centers in Europe and almost half of those in England have refused to treat patients over 65 years of age. If governments continue these policies, euthanasia will soon be the price that the solidarity principle of the European welfare states imposes on the very old and the very sick... Elderly Americans are entitled to universal health coverage via the Medicare program. In America, the bulk of government health-care expenditure goes to those over 65 years old, while in Europe most of the government money is spent on those under 65.

In other words, try not to get old and sick in Europe, they’ll kill you off.

***Applying the Economic Way of Thinking to Health Policy:

"Bone marrow transplants per capita are one-third more frequent in the United States than in the United Kingdom. The rate at which the British provide coronary bypass surgery or angioplasty to heart patients is only one-fourth of the U.S. rate. Britain has only one-fourth as many CT scanners as the United States and one-third as many MRI scanners."

"The NHS hip replacement rate is only two-thirds of the U.S. rate. To provide the level of intensive care unit (ICU) services that US hospitals have, British hospitals would have to increase their spending by five fold. The population-adjusted treatment rate for kidney failure (dialysis or transplant) is five times higher in the United States for patients age 45 to 84 and nine times higher for patients 85 years of age or older."

***Cancer survival rates worst in western Europe: Patients in the UK are finding it difficult because they have don’t have the access to drugs that other nations enjoy.

"While more than half of patients in France, Spain, Germany and Italy have access to new treatments provided since 1985, the proportion in the UK is four out of 10. French women with cancer are 34 per cent more likely than those in the UK to still be alive five years after being diagnosed, while French male patients have a 23 per cent higher survival rate after the same period... The researchers, whose report is published in the journal Annals of Oncology, found that Austria, France, Switzerland and the US were leaders in using new cancer drugs."

***Who's Really 'Sicko': Need a new hip? If you live in Canada you might as well grab a Snickers, it’s going to be a while.

***London Times: "Nothing Quite Like It Has Been Witnessed Since Lord North Lost the American Colonies." Living in the UK will leave you waiting, and waiting, and waiting for health care. Less training for the doctors there, well that is for the doctors that are still there.

***Universal Health Care’s Dirty Little Secrets: "Britain's Department of Health reported in 2006 that at any given time, nearly 900,000 Britons are waiting for admission to National Health Service hospitals, and shortages force the cancellation of more than 50,000 operations each year. In Sweden, the wait for heart surgery can be as long as 25 weeks, and the average wait for hip replacement surgery is more than a year."

There are [insert liberal talking points memo

# here] million Americans

without health care

***Fewer Americans Uninsured: "The revised Census Bureau numbers show 44.8 million people were uninsured as of 2005 -- not 46.6 million as previously reported; yet that too likely overstates the chronically uninsured. For instance, a recent Congressional Budget Office report places the actual numbers of full-year uninsured at between 21 million and 31 million..."One-third of the uninsured live in households earning more than $50,000 per year.

12 million people qualify for government programs, like SCHIP and Medicaid, but have not bothered to enroll. An estimated 10 million are immigrants, many of whom are undocumented [read: illegal aliens]."

***Uninsured Aren’t the Cause of Hospital Overcrowding: Leftists like to use the "uninsured" (other than the bogus numbers they trot out) as a catalyst for socialized medicine because they’re driving up costs and crowding ER’s. Actually, that’s false.

"According to Devon Herrick, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis: It's not the uninsured who burden America's emergency rooms so much as it is people who are carrying government insurance policies. The low reimbursement rates offered doctors by government programs means very few will accept taxpayer-funded insurance any more, leaving those on government plans to visit ERs for care instead of primary care physicians. People carrying taxpayer-funded insurance are far more responsible for flagrant emergency room overuse than the uninsured, says Herrick. Emergency rooms have replaced primary care physicians for many Americans, in part because programs like SCHIP and Medicaid pay doctors so little that few will accept patients carrying those insurance policies. As a result, those patients have become accustomed to going to the ER."

***Debunking Myths of ER’s: More of the same, it’s typically those on government-funded health care programs such as Medicaid and Medicare who are using and abusing the ER, not the uninsured.

***University of Chicago Medical Center Emergency Room to Practice Rationing: This is partly because of the economy and because many people are going to the emergency room when they don’t need to.

***Why the U.S. Ranks Low on WHO’s Health-Care Study: "37 percent of that group [without health coverage] lives in households making more than $50,000 a year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 19 percent are in households making more than $75,000 a year; 20 percent are not citizens, and 33 percent are eligible for existing government programs but are not enrolled."

Stossel also takes WHO behind the woodshed for only looking at life-expectancy. This is a poor yardstick as it does not take into account people smoking 3 packs of cigarettes/day, drinking themselves into oblivion, eating like a pig and what not.

***Health Care Lie: '47 Million Uninsured Americans':

"Each of these people and media outlets incorrectly claimed the number of uninsured to be 40 to 50 million Americans. The actual total is open to debate. But there are millions of people who should be excluded from that tally, including: those who aren’t American citizens, people who can afford their own insurance, and people who already qualify for government coverage but haven’t signed up. Government statistics also show 45 percent of those without insurance will have insurance again within four months after job transitions..."

"The number of the uninsured who aren’t citizens is nearly 10 million on its own, invalidating all the claims of 40+ million ‘Americans’ without health insurance... according to the same Census report, there are 8.3 million uninsured people who make between $50,000 and $74,999 per year and 8.74 million who make more than $75,000 a year. That’s roughly 17 million people who ought to be able to ‘afford’ health insurance because they make substantially more than the median household income of $46,326."

***How is Health Care Being Financed?: If you want to know why health care costs have exploded, read this. The federal government is picking up a larger share of the tab, couple that with massive increases in mandates and there you have it. Government creating more "wards of the state" who rely on you to pay the bill.

"Three trends are clear. First, government - in particular the federal government - has moved to pick up a much larger share of health spending. While in 1960, government's share stood at 25 percent, with the private sector funding 75 percent; by 2006, the government's share had risen to 46.1 percent, with the private sector was down to 53.9 percent. The federal share went from 10.7 percent in 1960 (actually less than the state and local government share) to 33.5 percent in 2006. Second, private out-of-pocket payments for health spending have fallen most dramatically, from 46.4 percent in 1960 to a mere 12.2 percent in 2006. That means that one way or another, someone else - mainly, the government or private insurance - is paying 87.8 percent of the health spending tab in the U.S. Third, the level of spending has skyrocketed in recent times. On a per capita basis, national health spending increased by 4,442 percent between 1960 and 2006. At the same time, inflation registered 454 percent. Part of that dramatic rise in health spending was the result of positive changes in terms of patient care, including new and improved medicines, medical devices and other treatments. But costs also have been driven higher by the vast expansion in third-party payments."

It’s sad but we live in a "free lunch" society where there are a lot of people who could pay their own way but instead sit there with their hand out. In addition, there are plenty of people who think the world owes them something because they exist. The taxpayers owe you nothing schmuck, quit whining like a little girl and get it done yourself.

Keep in mind that the headline to this section is one of Michael Moore’s major talking points in Sicko. Now that it’s been debunked, his movie is about as effective as driving a car to work with 3 tires.

This is part of Topical Stuff.