Single-Payer Desperation
 Back to Serbia for Surgery!This one speaks volumes about the single-payer regime of our northern neighbor: Long wait forces cancer patient to buy operation in land he fled:
An Ontario cab driver was faced with this choice: Wait more than 14 weeks for cancer surgery, or travel outside of Canada and purchase the lifesaving operation he could not receive here quickly enough.
In the end, Branislav Djukic returned to the place he fled in 1995, the former Yugoslavia, seeking a better life in Canada. In Belgrade, he underwent surgery to remove a portion of his left kidney at a cost of $5,000.
[...]
"in a time of need for somebody in my dad's situation, Yugoslavia offered better and faster treatment. They could not understand that they would make you wait that long to treat a disease of such seriousness in a country such as Canada and neither could we."
In Mr. Djukic's case, he asked the Ontario government to fund a more timely cancer surgery out of the country after he was given a date in an Ontario hospital of Jan. 17, 2005 -- a wait of 14 weeks and three days.
However, if you read the whole story, you'll notice that the wait was actually much longer than 14 weeks - that was just for the surgery. From the time he noticed blood in his urine in April 2004, it was September 2004 before he was able to have all the tests necessary to make a definitive diagnosis.
Posted by Stuart Browning
31 Jan 2007 @ 5:28am
Socialist Quality Control
 The World Health Organization ranks the U.K's socialized health care system #18 in its politically inspired 2000 report which also ranks the U.S. system #37. However, how many times do you hear things like this happening in the U.S?
Growing numbers of operations are being cancelled because of a lack of sterile surgical instruments, newly released figures show.
Some Health Service trusts have seen an eight-fold increase since 2003 in the amount of patients turned away at the last minute.
Nationally 41 per cent more operations are being lost because dirty surgical instruments, or the wrong ones, are being sent to theatres.
Tory MP Grant Shapps, who uncovered the figures by using freedom of information laws, said: 'As the Government seeks ever more creative ways to dig itself out of the NHS funding crisis it has started to pressurise hospitals to cut costs by sharing instrument cleaning between hospitals.
'This is a false economy. These figures reveal a huge jump in cancelled operations simply because surgeons at the last minute are discovering that the surgical instruments still have blood on them.
'Apart from the financial cost, this new system is not working for patients who have prepared themselves to go under the knife, only then to find that their operations are cancelled at the 11th hour.'
In 2005/6 some 1,765 operations were cancelled because no sterile instruments were available at the 58 Health Service trusts who responded to requests for information.
Posted by Stuart Browning
30 Jan 2007 @ 7:21am
News from the World of Socialized Medicine
The usual bed blocking in Canada:
Hamilton General is cancelling more than 10 per cent of its surgeries because the city's hospitals are out of beds.
More than 90 seniors who should be in long-term care are "parked" in the hospitals because they can't get into nursing homes.
That leaves no beds for patients recovering from surgery, so hospitals have increasingly had to cancel operations over the last six months.
The majority have been heart and orthopedic surgeries.
... and death after a delayed operation in the UK:
THE daughter of a retired builder who died from cancer in his intestine has criticised University College Hospital (UCLH) for taking five days to operate on him.
St Pancras Coroner's Court was told yesterday (Thursday) that Manus Christopher McElhinney, 77, from Finsbury, died last August after his bowels blew up "like a balloon" five days after he was admitted to hospital.
His daughter, Linda Irvine, told the inquest: "Obviously, on Monday it was an emergency. His bowels were blocked, (the faeces) had nowhere to go. "His condition was quite serious and he was in extreme discomfort.
"I find it difficult to understand why my father ended up being tagged on the end of a list on Friday if it was known on Monday (that he needed surgery)." The inquest heard that the pensioner, from the St Luke's estate in Old Street, did not move his bowels for the three weeks leading up to his death.
A cancerous tumour the size of a small apple had grown in his colon and had caused a blockage, consultant Austin Obichere from UCLH told the court. He added: "Everything had blown up."
Posted by Stuart Browning
29 Jan 2007 @ 10:05am
The Rush to Collectivized Medicine (And Rationing)
 Let's call it Universal Health CareWhile the opponents of health care liberty line up in favor of government-run medicine - each with their own plan to coerce patients, doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and taxpayers into a collective system run by bureaucrats and tightly controlled through global health care budgets - the clear and inevitable results of rationing in single-payer Canada are ignored:
ICU beds are rationed in many Canadian hospitals, forcing surgeries to be cancelled at the last minute:
Royal University Hospital postponed 44 open-heart surgeries between April and December, the Saskatoon Health Region says.
Jackie Mann, the region's executive director of acute care, said as of November 2006, 15 per cent of open-heart surgeries, such as bypass procedures and heart valve replacements, had been postponed because no intensive-care unit (ICU) beds were available for the patients to recover in.
Canadian hospitals operating on fixed global budgets have no incentive to move bed blockers out to other lower cost facilities - because they prevent the admittance of higher-cost acute-care patients (like cancer patients!) who decimate the budget:
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre is cancelling dozens of operations, including those of cancer patients, as it struggles to cope with a problem faced by many hospitals across Canada: a bottleneck of patients it cannot move.
Consequently, emergency departments are overflowing, operations are being postponed and patients waiting for a bed to become available in a nursing home or rehabilitation hospital are finding that a spot is not always immediately available, worsening the logjam.
And so it goes ... Packed ERs, bed shortages create 'extreme' care crunch:
A high occupancy crisis in The Ottawa Hospital's emergency rooms is distressing patients and doctors and causing last-minute surgery cancellations.
In an e-mail sent to staff yesterday afternoon and obtained by the Citizen, the hospital's vice-president of medical affairs, quality and patient safety described the situation as "extreme."
"There have been daily meetings to manage this situation," Dr. J. R. Worthington wrote. "The surgical list for any given day and the day following are reviewed and surgeries have been cancelled."
"Cancellations have been very late and this has caused distress for the patients, their surgeons, the anesthetists and all other members of the team."
[...]
The problem means patients who have waited many months for elective surgery such as hip replacements, hernia and knee surgery, can show up at the hospital and find out their surgery has been cancelled.
"The most difficult situations for patients, which we have a great deal of empathy and sympathy (for) and understand, is when they come in to the hospital that day, they've made their arrangements and then we, effectively, because we've had so many admissions over night, we don't have a bed for them," Dr. Carruthers explained.
"That's very traumatic and it is very difficult for the patients."
Posted by Stuart Browning
26 Jan 2007 @ 9:23am
Health Care is not a "Right"
 We hold these truths ...Front Page Magazine has republished Leonard Peikoff's brilliant 1993 speech on the oft proclaimed "right" to health care. Here's an excerpt below (although I highly recommend reading the whole thing):
Most people who oppose socialized medicine do so on the grounds that it is moral and well-intentioned, but impractical; i.e., it is a noble idea--which just somehow does not work. I do not agree that socialized medicine is moral and well-intentioned, but impractical. Of course, it is impractical--it does not work--but I hold that it is impractical because it is immoral. This is not a case of noble in theory but a failure in practice; it is a case of vicious in theory and therefore a disaster in practice.
[...]
So long as people believe that socialized medicine is a noble plan, there is no way to fight it. You cannot stop a noble plan--not if it really is noble. The only way you can defeat it is to unmask it--to show that it is the very opposite of noble. Then at least you have a fighting chance.
What is morality in this context? The American concept of it is officially stated in the Declaration of Independence. It upholds man's unalienable, individual rights. The term "rights," note, is a moral (not just a political) term; it tells us that a certain course of behavior is right, sanctioned, proper, a prerogative to be respected by others, not interfered with--and that anyone who violates a man's rights is: wrong, morally wrong, unsanctioned, evil.
Now our only rights, the American viewpoint continues, are the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. That's all. According to the Founding Fathers, we are not born with a right to a trip to Disneyland, or a meal at Mcdonald's, or a kidney dialysis (nor with the 18th-century equivalent of these things). We have certain specific rights--and only these.
Why only these? Observe that all legitimate rights have one thing in common: they are rights to action, not to rewards from other people. The American rights impose no obligations on other people, merely the negative obligation to leave you alone. The system guarantees you the chance to work for what you want--not to be given it without effort by somebody else.
It's unfortunate that many republicans don't understand this.
Posted by Stuart Browning
25 Jan 2007 @ 12:56pm
Health Care Immigrants
 It's not just billionaires that come from europe to the U.S. for medical care, it's ordinary citizens too:
Two Metropolitan Police detectives have spoken of the struggle to save their youngest son's life by moving to New York to seek pioneering cancer treatment.
Five-year-old Jack Brown was given a one in five chance of survival by doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital after being diagnosed with a rare cancer - neuroblastoma - which attacks specialised nerve cells.
He underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy at the hospital which pushed the disease into remission, but specialists said Jack could only receive palliative care if his cancer returned.
Yvonne and Richard Brown, sergeants at Barnet police station, have moved to Manhattan where Jack is being treated with a new cancer antibody which is his only chance of survival.
"Jack fought so hard to beat this there was no point giving up in the UK," said Mr Brown, 40.
Apparently, all the propaganda about life expectancy and infant mortality rates (which have almost nothing to do with the quality of a health care system) and the silly World Health Organization (WHO) rankings which place the U.S. health care system at #37 don't sway them. They just want to save their son's life.
Posted by Stuart Browning
24 Jan 2007 @ 6:34am
Cancer Care Rationing in Ontario
 PET scannerIf you've got cancer, a PET scan (Positron emission tomography) can be essential to determining the location and the extent of the disease. PET scans play a big role in evaluating the effectiveness of a given treatment. For example, giving conclusive evidence about whether a course of chemotherapy is working - and thus helping doctors decide whether a different therapy might be more effective.
In the U.S., PET scanners are plentiful and are routinely used in the fight against cancer. In Ontario, Canada they are rationed so severely that doctors can't even get access for training purposes:
The use of crucial cancer-detecting PET machines is so restricted in Ontario that one university must send its medical residents to the United States and elsewhere for training.
The low number of cancer patients eligible for PET screening means University of Western Ontario residents cannot obtain the experience they require. St. Joseph's Health Care in London scans as few as four patients a week, sometimes none. The rest of the time it experiments on laboratory-bred dogs and pigs.
Posted by Stuart Browning
23 Jan 2007 @ 7:05am
Arnold's Folly II
More on TerminatorCare:
John Fund in The Wall Street Journal:
Many health-care analysts worry that Mr. Schwarzenegger's Rube Goldberg scheme of insurance mandates will create so many failures and frustrations that adoption of a single-payer government system will be inevitable.
Michael Cannon in The National Review:
Schwarzenegger would expand government programs for the poor, including California's version of Medicaid - i.e., Medi-Cal. In fact, he would expand these programs so much that they would cover many Californians who aren't poor at all. Families of four making $60,000 per year - including illegal immigrants - would be eligible.
That would be dangerous: Such programs discourage people from climbing the economic ladder, because recipients lose benefits if their income rises. Expanding programs like these ensnares middle-class families in what experts call a "low-wage trap." Such programs also tend to increase the cost of privately purchased medical care and insurance; expanding them would make private options even less affordable.
But the truly audacious part is that the governor wants non-Californians to pay for it all - or most of it, anyway - a fact that he and his advisors tried to disguise.
Posted by Stuart Browning
23 Jan 2007 @ 6:39am
Arnold's Folly
Sally Pipes is in the National Review explaining where plans like Romney's and Schwarzenegger's will inevitably lead:
There is no possible way this ends anyway but badly. Poor people will drop care, enroll on the taxpayer's dollar, and drive up costs. Employers will face new taxes, and therefore limit the size of firms, stunting economic growth while depressing cash wages. The high-deductible plans will appear to be raw deals to many, especially if it comes at a guaranteed-issue premium. People will refuse to sign up and dodge the tax. The politicians will not have the will to enforce the individual mandate - individuals, after all, vote, write letters to the editor, and appear on sob stories on the news. Instead, they will load up the mandated coverage with extra benefits, lower deductibles and co-pays, and demonize the insurance industry when it charges market prices.
The result: Employers will be paying higher taxes, employees earning lower wages, Medicaid will be subsidizing more people, and 10 to 20 percent of Californians will still be officially counted as uninsured. Next stop: single-payer health care for America.
Posted by Stuart Browning
22 Jan 2007 @ 3:05pm
Why Do Europe's Rich Come to the US for Health Care?
 Silvio Berlusconi Italy's richest man, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, just had surgery at the Cleveland Clinic in the U.S. to install a pacemaker. Hasn't he read the 2000 World Health Organization (WHO) health care rankings that put Italy's system at #2 in the world and the U.S. a dismal #37 behind Costa Rica?
Why would a billionaire fly thousands of miles to get surgery in a country whose health care system is rated so low by WHO when he could have had his surgery in any one of the socialized health care systems of Europe that WHO ranks so highly? Perhaps, because the WHO health care rankings have little to do with healing - and everything to do with politics - make that socialism.
The 2000 WHO report based 25% of its score on the "fairness" of a country's health care financing which is measured by how much more higher-income groups pay for health care than lower-income groups. We are constantly reminded by single-payer advocates that the U.S. spends more on health care than other nations and gets less as shown by our low ranking on the WHO report. Their circular argument seems to be "we need government-run medicine because reports show that we don't have enough government-run medicine".
Berlusconi did, however, have his criticisms of the Cleveland Clinic:
ITALY's richest man has two complaints about US hospitals: bad food and ugly nurses.
[...]
When the anaesthetist asked if he had any allergies, the Forza Italia leader quipped: "Only to communists." He was reassured: "There aren't any left here in the States."
Food and nurses aside, I wish they were right about the communists.
Posted by Stuart Browning
19 Jan 2007 @ 9:32am
The Road to National Health Care
Once again today over at the Wall Street Journal, John Fund is covering the Schwarzenegger universal health care proposal:
Ted Kennedy, the nation's most persistent backer of nationalized health care, must be smiling at the irony. Almost four decades after he first proposed the idea, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Kennedy relative by marriage, is touting his own version of universal coverage, and, if adopted, the idea could go nationwide quickly. It's no wonder critics are already dubbing the ostensibly Republican chief executive "Schwarzenkennedy."
This isn't the first time Mr. Kennedy has found a Republican to carry water for him. In 1971, after Medicare spending had increased by more than 70% in five years (although the number of people enrolled grew by only 6%), Richard Nixon declared a "health-care cost crisis" and worked with Mr. Kennedy to propose mandatory employer-provided health insurance. The idea foundered, but a modified version now has been revived by Mr. Schwarzenegger, who wants to require that every person buy health insurance, or be covered by an employer or the government.
[...]
He insists it doesn't raise taxes, despite billions in new charges on doctors, hospitals and employers. He prefers to call the new revenue "in-lieu fees" and "coverage dividends."
Posted by Stuart Browning
18 Jan 2007 @ 12:18pm
Schwarzenkennedy
The Wall Street Journal has another good editorial on the ill-advised Schwarzenegger universal health care plan:
The Governor is proposing that businesses with 10 or more employees be required to provide insurance, or else pay 4% of their taxable Social Security wages into a fund to subsidize insurance for the working uninsured. The likely reaction of many California businesses to this new and costly mandate: outsourcing to Nevada, or India.
Mr. Schwarzenegger goes far beyond the Romney plan in proposing to help pay for his scheme by taxing hospitals 4% and doctors 2% of their gross revenues. That's right, institutions operating at or near a loss would have to pay the tax. So California doctors could soon be spending more time with their accountants than with patients--assuming they can afford to keep their practices running at all.
I'm also hearing through the grapevine that the plan subsidizes health club memberships for Californians.
Posted by Stuart Browning
17 Jan 2007 @ 10:19am
Quote of The Day
 Ayn RandDoctors are not servants of their patients, they are traders like everyone else in a free society and they should bear that title proudly considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.
- Ayn Rand
Posted by Stuart Browning
16 Jan 2007 @ 11:11pm
Maybe, I Wouldn't Get that Colonoscopy Just Yet
I interviewed a doctor in British Columbia, Canada last week who complained that his hospital did not have a budget for vascular stents. The alternative, of course, is invasive bypass surgery under general anesthesia which can be much more dangerous for elderly patients in an already weakened state. So it doesn't surprise to read about obsolete endoscopic surgery equipment in Canada:
Dr. Ronald Witzke has withdrawn his surgical services from Brooks and expects other surgeons will be doing the same in the near future.
The reason he says is that surgeons have been working with outdated endoscopic surgery equipment and newly instituted patient records procedures that he says are inappropriate for a surgical clinic.
[..]
"The department of general surgeons for the region sent a letter to the Chief of Staff for the region in November with this specific concern," he said.
He said included in that letter was the fact that the Brooks endoscopy equipment was aged and hasn't been replaced despite numerous attempts.
Endoscopy is a diagnostic medical procedure used to evaluate the interior surfaces of an organ by inserting a small tube into the body.
"It is nine years old and four years past its expiry date. There have been a lot of technical advances in the field with high definition and various other additions to the equipment and it is time to upgrade," he said.
Posted by Stuart Browning
15 Jan 2007 @ 9:43am
Socialized Medicine News Roundup: UK Edition
 Terry Owsten
Beds crisis means patients spend all night on trolleys
PATIENTS at a Glasgow hospital have had to spend the night on trolleys because there are no beds for them anywhere in the city, staff claimed today.
One patient in his 90s was 13 hours on a trolley before a bed could be found, they said.
Doctors also fear patients waiting for promised operations could soon suffer if their surgery has to be cancelled due to lack of room.
"I weigh 34st and the NHS won't give me vital op"
WEIGHING 34 stone, Terry Owston hoped drastic stomach surgery could turn his life around.
But now the 55-year-old has joined those who have been thrown off the waiting list for obesity operations at York hospital.
Terry, from Rillington, near Malton, is the latest victim of a controversial decision by cash-strapped primary care trust bosses to suspend the surgery for patients across the county while it conducts a review.
Terry said he was desperate for the operation which was his final hope in rescuing him from a serious weight problem.
But now he has been told the surgery has been suspended and he has been removed from the waiting list he has been on since September.
"I'm absolutely heartbroken," said Terry.
NHS cuts cost York man life-saving surgery
THIS man fears he could be dead by 60 unless he gets life-saving obesity surgery, but health bosses have just knocked him off the waiting list.
Dad-of-two Philip Cooper, 40, from Woodthorpe, in York, has been waiting for a gastric band operation at York hospital for two years.
At 20 stone, he is clinically obese and also suffers from diabetes. A surgeon told him that, without the operation, Mr Cooper was unlikely to live to 60. But with it, he would have a chance of living another 15 or 20 years beyond that.
But now Mr Cooper has been hit with a devastating blow after receiving a letter telling him that the debt-ridden North Yorkshire and York Primary Care Trust (PCT) had suspended the operation he longs for - and that he would be removed from the waiting list.
He said: "I want it, I need it, I want to see my kids, I want to see my grand-kids," he said.
Hospital told to treat fewer patients
ONE of Essex's biggest hospitals has been ordered to see fewer patients because of the cash crisis in the NHS.
Colchester General Hospital has been told that the North East Essex Primary Care Trust (PCT) cannot afford to pay for it to continue treating people at the current rate.
More than 1,500 people will now be seen later than they could have been because the PCT has ruled that non-emergency patients must wait at least 16 weeks before going to the hospital.
Posted by Stuart Browning
12 Jan 2007 @ 1:56pm
Rationed Surgery in Canada
 Kelowna, British ColumbiaI'm currently traveling in the Great White Health Care Utopia of Canada interviewing suffering and waiting patients as well as their desperate and cynical doctors who would love to have what we have in the U.S.
Surgeons in Kelowna, B.C. spend much of their time here counseling patients who often wait years for treatment - rather than actually operating on them. The operating rooms at the Kelowna General Hospital close down at 3:30 in the afternoon.
According to a surgeon here that I talked to yesterday, Kelowna General also has "disruptive doctor" directives in place. If a surgeon persists in pressuring the hospital for OR time for one of his patients, he can find himself disciplined. How? By having his already-insufficient time in the operating room reduced further.
Posted by Stuart Browning
11 Jan 2007 @ 12:11pm
No Budget, No Surgery
 Government-run health care means global health care budgets. A global budget represents an arbitrary cut-off in health care spending either at the hospital or the regional health authority level. Quite different from a free market where individuals can spend more or less on a given good or service as they see fit, global budgets are the primary tool that governments use to ration health care. Currently, some UK residents are feeling the unpleasant effects of global budgets:
Patients are being denied basic operations, including treatments for varicose veins, wisdom teeth and bad backs, as hospitals try frantically to balance the books by the end of the financial year, The Times can reveal.
NHS trusts throughout the country are making sweeping cuts to services and delaying appointments in an attempt to address their debts before the end of March. Family doctors have been told to send fewer patients to hospital, A&E departments have been instructed to turn people away, and a wide range of routine procedures has been suspended.
In one example of the cash-saving strategies, seen by The Times, a primary care trust in Yorkshire has told hospitals that they will not be paid for some non-essential operations, while patients will not be given a hospital appointment in under eight weeks.
[...]
No patients will be given a hospital appointment in less than eight weeks, and none admitted for elective surgery unless they have waited a minimum of 12 to 16 weeks. Those treated quicker will not be paid for.
The trust also announced the immediate suspension of treatments for varicose veins, wisdom teeth, X-rays of the back, operations for carpal tunnel syndrome, bunions, arthroscopy of the knee, and grommets for the ear, among others. "We fully appreciate the difficulties that the introduction of these measures entail," Dr Soo-Chung's letter says. "However, the financial position of the PCT is such that there is absolutely no alternative to this programme if we are to avoid even more difficult decisions in the near future."
Posted by Stuart Browning
10 Jan 2007 @ 1:45am
The Uninsured "Crisis"
 Yesterday, we saw the results of the widespread perpetuation of a profound untruth: that there is a "crisis" created by the fact that many Americans don't have health insurance. A so-called moderate Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed forcing people to buy health insurance while imposing special taxes on doctors, hospitals, small businesses and everyone else. I'll have much more to say later about his proposal, however it's perhaps useful to consider some recent analysis by Devon Herrick of the National Center for Policy Analysis:
Despite claims that there is a health insurance crisis in the United States, the proportion of Americans without health coverage has changed little in the past decade. The increase in the number of uninsured is largely due to immigration and population growth.
It's two pages - read it all.
Posted by Stuart Browning
9 Jan 2007 @ 6:52am
No Surgery For Smokers?
Certainly, we can all agree that smoking is a very harmful habit and that smokers are intentionally damaging their own health. However, when government-run health care systems begin refusing medical care to smokers, important personal liberties are at stake. It doesn't take a big stretch of the imagination to foresee similar policies towards obesity, alcohol use or a host of other personal habits deemed "unhealthy" by the health care "czars". Consider this article from Science Daily:
Last year a primary care trust announced it would take smokers off waiting lists for surgery in an attempt to contain costs.
[...]
Denying operations is justified for specific conditions, argues Professor Matthew Peters from the Concord Repatriation General Hospital in Australia.
Professor Peters says that smoking up to the time of any surgery increases cardiac and pulmonary complications, impairs tissue healing, and is associated with more infections.
These effects increase the costs of care and also mean less opportunity to treat other patients, he writes. In healthcare systems with finite resources, preferring non-smokers over smokers for a limited number of procedures will therefore deliver greater clinical benefit to individuals and the community.
He believes that, as long as everything is done to help patients to stop smoking, it is both responsible and ethical to implement a policy that those unwilling or unable to stop should have low priority for, or be excluded from, certain elective procedures.
Posted by Stuart Browning
9 Jan 2007 @ 6:30am
Patients Wait as Dust Gathers in Unused Operating Room
 Princess Alexandra HospitalWhile thousands of people wait in surgery queues, the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, Australia has been allowing a new operating room to go unused for four years. Hospitals in Australia's government-run health care system have a disincentive to operate on patients. Because each patient represents a cost against a global budget provided by the government, an unused OR is no problem - unless you're the patient.
AN operating theatre in one of Queensland's busiest hospitals sits idle four years after being built, while waiting lists for surgery grow.
The purpose-built "E1" theatre has never been used since the new Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane was rebuilt in 2002. The State Government is considering a bid from the Australian Medical Association Queensland to set up a brokerage system to cut waiting lists by arranging for patients to have publicly-funded surgery at private hospitals.
Meanwhile, the operating theatre on the fourth floor of the hospital in Woolloongabba continues to gather dust. After being contacted by The Sunday Mail, a Princess Alexandra spokesman said the "E1" operating theatre would be brought into use next month. But Opposition health spokesman John-Paul Langbroek said it was "a travesty" that it had taken so long to begin operations in the theatre while thousands of people were on waiting lists.
Posted by Stuart Browning
7 Jan 2007 @ 5:11pm
Single-Payer in Action
 The TrabantRemember the Trabant? The pride of the communist East German auto industry? Introduced in 1959, it hardly changed in 30 years. Its noisy, smoky two-stroke engine was a poor performer. It had no fuel gauge - just a dipstick - and oil had to be added to the gas at every fueling. Once the Berlin Wall fell, it was history.
The Trabant was the product of a "single-payer" automotive industry. The East German government was the sole payer for its citizen's automobiles. There was no "wasteful duplication" in the form of competition. Administrative costs and paperwork were minimal. There were no advertising costs, no large salaries for CEOs - and no profits. Unnecessary and expensive new features that people didn't really need were not added. As a result, spending on automobiles as a percentage of GDP was kept very low.
If this sounds a lot like the "single-payer" propaganda that we continue to hear, it's no coincidence. The advocates of government-run health care are typically ignorant of economics - and in the case of the Trabant - history itself. Yet they are itching to have governmental control of our doctors and hospitals and to ration health care as they see fit.
Oh yea - and the wait for a Trabant? Up to 15 years!
Posted by Stuart Browning
5 Jan 2007 @ 8:19am
The Breck Girl Promises Government-Run Health Care
 John EdwardsDemocratic presidential candidate and poverty-pimp John Edwards thinks that "universal health care" will be a winning campaign issue. However, as Michael Bates at the Canada Free Press explains, we'd all be the losers.
We're close enough to easily see the experience of our friends to the north in Canada. And what an experience it has been.
Under Canada's Medicare, as it's called, there are no user fees for medical services. Everything is paid for with tax dollars. Moreover, it's against the law to privately pay for major services. So almost everyone has to stand in line.
The Fraser Institute, an independent public policy organization there, has done extensive research on the Canadian system. It's concluded that although the country spends more on health care than almost every other developed nation, Canadian citizens endure long waiting times to be treated and inferior access to both medical technology and physicians.
In October, the Fraser Institute turned out its sixteenth annual waiting list survey. The 2006 findings are dismal enough to make even Mr. Edwards' well coiffed hair stand on end.
The median waiting time between referral by a general practitioner and treatment for general surgery patients was over ten weeks. For gynecology it was 14 weeks and for ophthalmology it's 27 weeks. If you're an orthopedic surgery patient, you've got plenty of time to think about your upcoming procedure, more than 40 weeks. Radiation oncology patients have to wait five weeks.
Posted by Stuart Browning
4 Jan 2007 @ 10:02am
Profile of a Revolutionary
 Rick BakerCanadian medical broker Rick Baker, who is featured prominently in A Short Course in Brain Surgery was profiled in yesterday's Globe and Mail.
He isn't a doctor, and doesn't own a private clinic. What his one-room operation does do is connect patients who don't want to endure public waiting lists with facilities that can provide speedier care -- for a price.
Supporters call his medical brokerage service a life saver. Critics say such services threaten to end health care as we know it.
His company, Timely Medical Alternatives Inc., was at the centre of a swirl of controversy in the fall, after the public learned he was selling private bookings on publicly owned MRI machines at two Vancouver hospitals, allowing his clients to jump the health-care queue.
The British Columbia health ministry halted the practice in September and then earlier this month ordered that the two hospitals refund all the fees they had collected over several years. But Health Minister George Abbott stopped short of altogether banning medical brokers, saying that such firms don't necessarily violate the Canada Health Act.
However, Mr. Baker isn't shy about his intention to speed the emergence of two-tier health care, or his belief that his business does operate outside of the legal boundaries of medicare.
"I have no scruples whatsoever about breaking the Canada Health Act," he says. "It's a form of civil disobedience."
 Alice Edge, BC Health CoalitionMost amusing - and sad - are the illogical words of one Alice Edge who is quoted in the article:
The opponents of two-tier medicine say his altruistic notions are simply misguided. "Maybe his intentions are good, but it's that whole thing of making money off of other people's misery," says Alice Edge, co-chair of the BC Health Coalition.
Our course Ms. Edge benefits everyday from the self-interest of an array of businesses that provide her with a comfortable existence where food, shelter and transportation are within the easy grasp of most people. To think that health care is somehow different - that the laws of supply and demand do not apply to medicine as they do to every other human need - is incredible. The economic illiteracy of many on the political left is a well-known phenomenon - however, at a certain point, one has to question the motivations of people like Ms. Edge - and wonder whether it really is about health care at all.
Posted by Stuart Browning
3 Jan 2007 @ 7:42am
Video Update
The word about my latest viral video, A Short Course in Brain Surgery is spreading. Since its release on December 5, it has been viewed nearly 25 thousand times on YouTube alone - and since Christmas day, the video has been viewed there nearly 17 thousand times.
Thanks to Michelle Malkin who incorporated more than half of the video into her daily web cast on December 15, tens of thousands of other viewers - whose numbers I can't easily track - have seen the video. I'm also hearing that Walter Williams, who guest hosted the Rush Limbaugh show last Friday, mentioned our efforts here favorably. Thanks guys!
Looking forward to 2007, more viral videos on the way! As the enemies of freedom have become so emboldened that they are able to tell lies about our health care system without worry of exposure, expect to find a healthy dose of rationality and truth here.
Posted by Stuart Browning
1 Jan 2007 @ 8:52am
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