The Awful Truth about Healthcare Reform: Part 2-The Level of Care.

Yesterday, I touched on the likelihood of the average Americans’ insurance coverage changing. And actually, for those of you that do not like your current healthcare options, you may have found yesterday’s post a hopeful and encouraging sign of things to come.

I highly doubt that will be the case today.

Say what you want about the U.S. healthcare system, but no one can fairly question the high level of care available to American citizens.

For decades, the U.S. has been home to the finest hospitals in the world, served as the birthplace of limitless, medical innovation and provided its citizens with healthcare most people around the world could only dream of receiving.

If Obama and the Democrats get their way with healthcare reform, all of this will be a thing of the past.

When you hear liberals describe the virtues of socialized healthcare, you will hear them wax poetic about how wonderful it is to receive “free” healthcare (even though we all know that this is not the case) and how “everyone” has access to a myriad of medical procedures.

One thing they conveniently leave out is the quality of this “free” healthcare. They leave it out for good reason, as any discussion of the quality of socialized medicine should scare the hell out of any rational individual.

“Ration” and “Scarcity” are a couple of words you all should become rather familiar with as the nation’s healthcare discussion continues because medical options are going to be rationed due to the scarcity of healthcare resources.

The Obama administration has already been quite upfront that it is going to try to ration the use of new technology to control costs. Under the guise of "cost effectiveness" policies, the government will issue rules on when new health care treatments can be used. If your situation does not meet bureaucratic guidelines, then the newest test or treatment will not be available to you or your loved ones.

Would you like a sneak preview of this rationing? Take the “virtual colonoscopy”. The virtual colonoscopy is a newer, better version that works faster, is far cheaper and is more comfortable than its predecessor. With colon cancer being the second leading cause of U.S. cancer deaths (and one of the most preventable and treatable), you would think that this procedure would be a godsend for Medicare. Well, it was until budgetary issues arose. Back in May, Medicare (a program that will no doubt mirror the public option Obama is pushing) trustees reported a dramatic shortfall in budgetary resources. As a result, the program’s managers decided to deny payment for the virtual colonoscopy to those on Medicare.

From a budgetary standpoint, this may be the correct move, but from a care standpoint it clearly is not. I realize that those considerations need to be made at times, but it should be the decision of you, your family and your doctor, not the federal government.

Still don’t believe me? Think these are all a bunch of crazy conservative scare tactics?

Fine.

Let’s take a look at some stats from Great Britain and Canada, two nations that have socialized healthcare.

In Great Britain, at any one time, over 500,000 people are waiting to get into a British hospital. 38% of Brits have to wait four months or more for surgery (compared to 5% in the U.S.). British patients also wait months longer than their American counterparts for knee and hip replacement surgery, cataract surgery and radiation treatment. Additionally, cancer patients are regularly denied life saving drugs due to budget shortfalls in Merry Old England.

Even British officials hate their healthcare! The Chairman of the British Medical Association described the British government-controlled healthcare system as “the stifling of innovation by excessive, intrusive audits, the shackling of doctors by prescribing guidelines, referral guidelines and protocols, the suffocation of professional responsibility by target-setting and production line values that leave little room for the professional judgment of individual doctors or the needs of individual patients.”

How about Canada? Want to see a neurologist for a headache? Better sign up now as the wait is six months. Alright, how about an MRI? That’ll be another three and a half months, with a one-month wait for an ultrasound. Gotta go to the emergency room? Better bring your pajamas, as the average wait to get in is 23 hours.

More than 1.5 million Canadians say they cannot find a family doctor (this from a country with five million people less than California). Some towns even have sunk to lotteries to determine who gets to see a doctor. In Canada, 27% of people that have surgery wait four months or more.

Not only will this rationing restrict your access to care, it will also slow the development of new technologies, which need potentially broad new markets to be economically viable. The new technology that gets shelved could be the one that would save your life.

With the government setting prices and dictating what should be developed and for what price, this country will experience a sharp drop in medical breakthroughs. After all, the private sector fuels innovation and experimentation, not the public sector.

Why? It’s simple, profits.

Therefore, we will not only be getting less care, we will be getting outdated care. Would you want 2010 level care in the year 2050? I would wager no more than you would want 1969 level care today.

Columnist Scott Atlas and Nils Wilking from Stockholm's Karolinska Institute explain this point very well. Wilking, an author of a widely reported publication that compares international cancer survivals, recently explained that nearly half the improvement in cancer survival rates in the United States in the 1990s was due to "the introduction of new oncology drugs." He writes: "No country on the globe does as good a job overall as the United States. Thus, the U.S. government should focus on ensuring that all cancer patients receive timely care, rather than radically overhauling the current system."

With all of these innovations and medical miracles, President Obama still sees fit to radically transform our healthcare system, level of care be damned.

Well…I guess that is change, isn’t it? But not too much hope, if you ask me.

That’s all for now folks. Until next time, take care and be well.

-John