Unhappy, Sick, Waiting Canadians
 We're hearing that Michael Moore, in his upcoming movie, interviews some happy Canadians who are satisfied with their health care system. This doesn't surprise. Most healthy people don't like to think about getting sick and like the idea that if and when they do - they will be taken care of (especially if they think that someone else is footing the bill).
However, when Canadians get older and need more medical care, they run up against the strict rationing imposed by their system. After paying a life time's worth of high taxes to support socialized medicine, they come face-to-face with its' realities.
It's safe to say that Mr. Moore never interviewed Mary Lou Frye who has had her urgent brain surgery cancelled six times:
In March 2006, Mary Lou Frye had a seizure and drove off the Fraser Highway into a ditch.
A CAT scan revealed a golf ball-sized tumour behind her left eye. She had surgery in May 2006, but bleeding cut the operation short, leaving part of the tumour.
She now has two tumours in her brain, but since January Frye has had her surgery postponed six times, the latest last Friday when four other neurosurgery cases were also postponed.
The previous day, four neurosurgery cases were postponed due to a lack of beds.
Meanwhile, Frye, 64, who raised three kids as a single mom, is failing. Doctors have declared her urgent because of headaches, loss of balance and walking difficulty.
But Ms. Frye is not alone. Canada's Fraser Institute, in its' report Waiting Your Turn, estimates that over 770,000 Canadians are currently on waiting lists.
Posted by Stuart Browning
30 May 2007 @ 5:17am
Medicare "Efficiency"
We hear ad nauseum from the single-payer left about the supposed administrative efficiency of Medicare and Medicaid. Since insurance companies must control waste and fraud in order to make a profit for shareholders they are deemed inefficient. However, government can draw from the seemingly bottomless well of tax revenues. Here's the result:
In what was described as one of the biggest healthcare fraud cases ever in South Florida, federal prosecutors on Friday accused a couple of leading a billing company that bilked Medicare out of $56 million over a six-year stretch.
Mabel and Abner Diaz were accused of operating All-Med Billing Corp. of Miami Lakes in a scheme that used 29 durable medical equipment firms to submit false claims to Medicare.
"This is one of the most important cases ever filed by our office,'' U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta said. "This is our money which could have been used to treat patients rather than line the pockets of the accused."
Posted by Stuart Browning
29 May 2007 @ 6:41am
Friday, May 25
Just last week it was 45 million uninsured. Now, according to Michael Moore, it's 50 million!
How long, I wonder, before the number of uninsured exceeds the entire population of the U.S?
David Hogberg has some good commentary this morning on his blog about the inevitable results of community rating mandates:
The result of community rating is that younger, healthier people tend to decline insurance, since the average price they are charged is higher than what they would pay in an unregulated market. Those [who] do purchase it tend to be older and sicker, which drives the price of insurance higher.
FYI: Hillary Clinton is advocating community rating nationwide.
I've been meaning to comment all week about a particularly ignorant and erroneous (I'm being nice) health care op-ed in the New York Times this week by Nicholas Kristoff. Perhaps Mr. Kristoff should stick to covering Darfur rather than carrying water for the socialists at the PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Plan). Well, David Catron - at this excellent blog Health Care BS - beat me to the punch:
A New York Times journalist with a health care stat is like a toddler with a loaded pistol. The combination of intellectual underdevelopment and sophisticated weaponry is a recipe for mayhem. Anyone doubting this should read Nicholas Kristof's recent column ...
Posted by Stuart Browning
25 May 2007 @ 10:20am
Reeducation Camp
 Stanley Kurtz at the National Review has a new, in-depth review of our new feature-length film Indoctrinate U:
One of the virtues of Indoctrinate U, Evan Coyne Maloney's powerful new documentary, is that it helps us answer the "isolated anecdote" argument - both intellectually, and at a gut level.
Indoctrinate U explores the Kafkaesque nightmares that befall students and professors who run up against the P.C. behemoth: A woman with two brothers - one an adopted Guatemalan orphan - writes a letter to her school paper saying she wouldn't want to see one brother favored over the other because of skin color. A professor questions the fairness of a panel on which all seven speakers favor reparations for slavery. A representative of the College Republicans posts a flier at the campus multi-cultural center advertising a lecture by a conservative black speaker. A student writes a column complaining that the school's "issues committee" invites only left-leaning speakers to campus. A professor is accidentally revealed to be a Republican. A student from Kuwait writes an essay praising the role of the United States in world affairs. Everyone knows that such actions fly in the face of campus orthodoxy, yet few will be prepared for the enormity of the punishment these nonconformists face.
Read it all.
Posted by Stuart Browning
24 May 2007 @ 9:21am
We Need Single-Payer ... Like a Hole in the Head
 Waited a Year for Skull Surgery
And ... if we did have a hole in our head, we might wait a very long time to get surgery for it if we adopted a system like the one in Canada.
Maybe, Michael Moore should have interviewed Canadian David Malleau who has endured a year-long wait for skull surgery after an accident:
David Malleau awoke in hospital with a gaping hole in his skull.
The 44-year-old Hamilton truck driver had suffered a devastating car accident in 2004 that forced doctors at Hamilton General Hospital to remove a fist-sized piece of bone from his skull to relieve pressure on his brain.
Once the swelling subsided and he was ready for surgery in March 2005, Malleau was sent home and placed on a waiting list.
Three months passed. Then six. He waited at home, a prisoner unable to leave the house for fear something would hit the exposed side of his brain - for him a potentially fatal incident. In the end, it took nearly a year before he could get skull replacement surgery.
[...]
Malleau, after finally getting his skull replacement surgery in January of last year, is paralyzed on his right side and his speech is only now beginning to return.
"I've pretty much had to fight for everything," says his wife Pat, a former bookkeeper.
"We were taxpayers. Owned our own home. We went from having our jobs, being in the middle class, to nothing."
Posted by Stuart Browning
23 May 2007 @ 6:13am
Waiting After Cancelled Surgery
 Bob WarrenDefenders of government-run medicine usually downplay waits for medical treatment by focusing on only one part of a multi-part wait process: the wait for scheduled surgery. They ignore the long waits to see a specialist and to get diagnostic tests. Further, they pretend as though the phenomenon of cancelled surgeries does not exist. But it does - and it is an expected occurance with real human consequences as this New Zealand story shows:
A Tuatapere man's 69th birthday celebrations turned sour last week when his hand operation at Southland Hospital was cancelled.
Retired mechanic Bob Warren was told his operation was cancelled because a surgeon had not performed the procedure for a long time, his wife said.
And of course, stories like this are everywhere in the English-language press of countries like Canada, Britain, New Zealand amd Australia - but not here in the U.S.
Here's a typical example from the U.K:
Cancelled Operations is No Joke
A CHIROPODIST whose operation was put back until April because of an embargo on non-urgent surgery, then fell victim to hospital staffing problems when she arrived to have it carried out.
Madeline Pavey, of Gillian Avenue, St Albans, saw her consultant in November about an hernia operation but was told that it could not be done until the beginning of April because the local Primary Care Trust had decided no non-urgent work would be carried out until the beginning of the new financial year.
But when Mrs Pavey got to Hemel Hempstead Hospital for the morning-scheduled operation on Monday, April 2, she soon realised something was wrong as time ticked away and there was no sign of the surgery being carried out.
Eventually she and the others who were waiting were told that there was no anaesthetist available and the hospital was trying to find one. Mrs Pavey said: "I almost fell off my chair. I thought it was a bit of a joke."
Posted by Stuart Browning
22 May 2007 @ 6:28am
Great Moments in Socialized Medicine (continued)
 An Australian granny suffers 82 hours of agony:
AN 81-year-old great-grandmother endured 82 hours of agony in a Perth hospital.
She lay immobilised on trolleys and in "holding pens'' before finally getting urgently-needed hip surgery in Royal Perth Hospital on Saturday.
Rita Robins' son Peter wants WA's besieged Health Minister Jim McGinty to explain why his fragile, elderly mum experienced days of fasting and constant surgery cancellations before she could get the operation for her seriously fractured left hip.
[...]
Mr Robins' wife Dianne said it broke her heart to see the suffering of her kind-hearted mother-in-law - who is a great-grandmother of five, grandmother of nine and a mother of four.
"I don't think you would do this to an animal,'' Mrs Robins said.
It's an amazing story of the brutality of health care rationing ...
... read it all.
But as government-medicine-advocate Matthew Holt might say ...
... maybe it was time for her to go!
Posted by Stuart Browning
21 May 2007 @ 9:06am
Documenting Academic Thuggery
Evan and I were interviewed by the Weekly Standard this week about our new film Indoctrinate U. Excerpt:
The free-wheeling film first documents the rise of the "campus free speech movement" in the 1960s and '70s, then cuts to examples of modern-day conservatives being shouted down and otherwise intimidated on college campuses. Ward Connerly is verbally assaulted for daring to disagree with campus orthodoxy on the issue of affirmative action and black professors like John McWhorter, formerly of UC-Berkeley, Carol Swain of Vanderbilt University's Law School, and Temple's Lewis Gordon all express their dismay with the current state of the academy, and the suppression of intellectual diversity therein.
Posted by Stuart Browning
18 May 2007 @ 9:17am
Tuesday, May 15
KrugmanFor anyone harbouring doubts that health care reformers are more concerned with income redistribution than actual health care, Paul Krugman's op-ed in yesterday's New York Times is worth reading. Ostensibly a column on trade policy, Krugman comes back to his favorite theme in the last paragraph:
... if Democrats really want to help American workers, they'll have to do it with a pro-labor policy that relies on better tools than trade policy. Universal health care, paid for by taxing the economy's winners, would be a good place to start.
HogbergNational Center website, David Hogberg has a new, well-researched paper on the Swedish health care system:
While Sweden is a first world country, its health care system - at least in regards to access - is closer to the third world. Because the health care system is heavily-funded and operated by the government, the system is plagued with waiting lists for surgery. Those waiting lists increase patients' anxiety, pain and risk of death.
Go here to read the whole thing.
The CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) is going to start cracking down on "inefficient" doctors:
CMS has the data and computer capacity to identify physicians who are inefficient compared with their colleagues and as early as mid-2008 might begin to contact those physicians and ask them to become more efficient, Herbert Kuhn, acting deputy administrator of the agency testified on Thursday at a House subcommittee hearing, CQ HealthBeat reports. At a House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health hearing, Kuhn said that identification of inefficient physicians, or "profiling," would involve a comparison of the number of tests ordered by physicians for certain types of patients with the number ordered by colleagues in cases that have the same outcome.
Shouldn't be hard to see where this is going.
Posted by Stuart Browning
15 May 2007 @ 10:28am
Waiting for Elective Surgery in the U.K.
Nearly blind after 3 year wait
for cataract operationElderly people go blind waiting for cataract operations in nations with socialized health systems:
"IT'S nice, isn't it?" says Richard Adams pointing to his widescreen television. "But it's pointless me having it because I can't see anything."
Richard, 85, is blind in both eyes as a result of cataracts, but spends all his time in front of the television, listening to documentaries or the news.
Wheelchair-user Richard started losing his sight three years ago, but for the past six months has been almost completely blind in both eyes and feels trapped in the one room of his home in Ealing, west London.
However, he has keen insight into the incentives inherent in socialized medicine:
"I've been waiting for three years but they don't seem to care. I think they're just waiting for me to die or something."
Posted by Stuart Browning
14 May 2007 @ 9:31am
A Health Care Tsunami in Illinois
Blagojevich More evidence that much health-care "reform" has nothing to do with health care for the poor and everything to do with state power and political ambition:
Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, a second-term Democrat, decided months ago to push a new health care initiative that would be among the most comprehensive in the country. It would offer not only insurance to everyone in Illinois, but also wellness training, special attention to chronic disease and streamlined administration.
Unlike efforts in other states, the plan would not simply shift or borrow money from existing programs but would be financed largely by a new tax on gross business receipts.
[...]
The proposed tax would apply to the gross receipts of businesses that make more than $2 million a year, and would range from 0.08 percent for businesses like retailers or wholesalers to 1.95 percent for service businesses.
However, even acclaimed friend of free markets and liberty Jesse Jackson thinks he's going too far:
"It would come through the small-business community like a tsunami," he said in an interview. "For a substantial number of small businesses and many of our established businesses, the tax would be higher than the profit. That is the real problem with it."
I'm thinking that if Blagojevich could target only white-owned businesses for taxation, he could possibly get Jackson on board.
Posted by Stuart Browning
10 May 2007 @ 7:56am
More on Elective Surgery
It's always amusing to hear single-payer advocates defend the Canadian health care system's long waits for surgery by cherry-picking the data, ignoring the long waits to see specialists just to get a diagnosis - and intentionally confusing the meaning of the term "elective surgery":
Canada has no abnormal waiting times for emergency treatment, and some evidence shows Canadians get it quicker. The problems come in elective treatments, like joint replacements. - Ezra Klein Feb 27, 2006
Mr. Klein would have you believe that serious, life-threatening conditions are treated quickly. But that would not be the case:
Joe MacPherson has been waiting almost eight months for heart surgery in Halifax and still doesn't have a date scheduled.
[...]
He has been unable to work as a painter since having his first angina attack last August. Tests in September showed blockages in three arteries and he was soon put on a list for surgery.
He's exhausted employment insurance and finds the wait stressful "You put your life on hold," Mr. MacPherson said. "When you're diagnosed with angina, it's nothing to kid with."
Move along folks - no waiting for surgery here.
Posted by Stuart Browning
10 May 2007 @ 7:31am
David Hogberg is Better Than Ezra
HogbergOne of the health-care-left's most prolific prevaricators, Ezra Klein (at his eponymous website), has made a habit of stating that:
- Canadians do not wait inordinate lengths of time for health care.
- Since Canadians only wait for elective surgery, their system is not so bad.
- There are 45 million Americans who lack health insurance - and thus health care.
- The U.S health care system is the #37th best system in the world right after Costa Rica.
All of these assertions are false and each has been addressed at some point on this blog (although I may revisit these fallacious arguments soon).
However, Mr. Klein recently suggested that anyone who denies the validity of the "45 million uninsured" trope is intellectually dishonest and beyond the pale. Fortunately, David Hogberg, at his fantastic new blog Health Hog, is helping to neutralize young collectivist Klein's single-payer propaganda. Now would be a good time to bookmark his site.
David Catron and Michael Cannon at Cato have also taken Mr. Klein to task.
Posted by Stuart Browning
8 May 2007 @ 9:31am
An Attempt To Roll Back Socialized Medicine in Canada
 The plight of Lindsay McCreith of Ontario, Canada was popularized by my video A Short Course in Brain Surgery which told the story of his struggle to get timely medical attention under a system which severely rations health care. Now, the Canadian Constitution Foundation has announced its support for Mr. McCreith's constitutional challenge to Ontario's unjust centralized system:
Lindsay McCreith says he was almost killed by Ontario's health care monopoly. Now he hopes to get even with a constitutional challenge that, if successful, will pave the way for private care in a province dead set against it.
After suffering a seizure in January 2006, the 66-year-old retired Newmarket autobody-shop owner was told he likely had a malignant brain tumour. But he had to wait four-and-a-half months for an MRI to verify that diagnosis.
Mr. McCreith, unwilling to risk the wait and suspecting the growth was cancerous, got an MRI across the border in Buffalo, New York the next day. The scan confirmed his fears -- the tumour was malignant.
Even with this diagnosis, the Ontario system still refused to provide timely treatment, so Mr. McCreith had surgery in Buffalo to remove the growth.
His best friend and employee for 30-plus years wasn't so lucky. Don Stanley died last year waiting for triple bypass heart surgery, Mr. McCreith says. He had been turned away from a scheduled procedure because of a lack of beds at a downtown Toronto hospital.
Read it All.
Posted by Stuart Browning
7 May 2007 @ 4:57am
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