Bravo to the voters of Missouri who told Washington to stuff its government run healthcare mandate. Government healthcare is way worse than just expensive and inefficient. It’s dangerous.
So many countries now have government-run healthcare and it performs so badly that one could write about the healthcare atrocities almost non-stop. Those which are not tragic are almost comical. (Almost.) Some, like the recent story of the Swede forced to sew up his own leg, will make you wince. Others, like the Canadian mother who miscarried after three hours in a waiting room, will make you cry.
Britain is trying to reform and privatize parts of its humongous National Health Service, which some still refer to as the “envy of the world.” Brits I talked to joked that it’s the envy of the Third World. Europeans are amazed that we would copy their government model when their leaders come to America for treatment.
Government run healthcare may seem great if you have a cold, but I sat in the London office of one of Britain’s top cancer specialists who explained to me how dangerous the NHS is to cancer patients. He was whispering for fear of being overheard by his colleagues. The best cancer drugs are simply not available, he said, because they’re too expensive. Cancer patients are put in long queues for treatment that amount to death sentences. A woman named Katie Brickell told me how she developed terminal cervical cancer after being turned down for a pap smear by a bureaucrat.
When it comes to America’s healthcare system, Congress has acted like it needs a doctor. I liken what Congress has done to healthcare to Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a mental illness where the afflicted person acts as if another perfectly healthy person in their care, usually a child, has an illness. They may intentionally harm the healthy victim, perhaps injecting them with poison to make them sick. Not a perfect analogy, but Congress essentially made America’s healthcare system sick, or much sicker, through decades of the wrong regulations, driving up costs and making healthcare less accessible. Now, Congress and the President have come to fix the problems Washington itself either exacerbated or created by ramming Obamacare down our throats, when what is needed is less government meddling, and more market competition and tort reform to keep insurance costs down. But since trial lawyers are a major, major contributor to the Democrats, the stand-in villain became the insurance companies.
And unless Obamacare is reversed by the next Republican controlled Congress, the healthcare atrocities will happen here.