Socialized Medicine can be Ugly
Hi Martin. I see what you’re saying, and I think part of the problem is defining good outcomes. But good healthcare isn’t dependant on outcomes. If the U.S. has naturally unhealthy people because of bad genes in the average person, we may naturally have worse outcomes than every other country because of those genes, and not because of bad health care. This is hypothetical, but hopefully you see the point. The U.S. population is rather overweight, and you can’t necessarily blame bad outcomes caused by the environment or unhealthy lifestyles on our healthcare system.
But even if you do blame those things, outcomes aren’t everything. Sometimes quality of care means more than waiting one month for an important surgery in Canada because medicine is socialized there. While private medicine may be illegal in Canada, causing month plus wait times, partly based on what a bureaucrat deems important, private medicine for animals is perfectly legal with virtually no wait times. In Canada, my wife’s grandma had to live in the hall of a hospital (click the link below the top image for an example of this) because the hospital wasn’t ready for her. This is commonplace, and it might be getting worse.
My father-in-law, who is both a Canadian and U.S. citizen, says that socialized medicine was great in Canada when it first started, but it has since gone downhill. That’s probably because supply and demand dictated both the quality and quantity of healthcare in Canada until socialized medicine started. Since the quality and quantity of healthcare are now decoupled from basic economic forces like supply and demand, and since a bureaucrat now determines the quality and quantity of healthcare, huge problems are arising.
In Japan, doctors work under extreme stress and extreme hours because there are lower wages mandated by government, and fewer people want to be doctors because of those lower wages, all because of socialized medicine with “better outcomes”. So there are not enough doctors. Their current system is unsustainable and longer wait times and worse outcomes may be coming soon. Socialized anything (education, industry health care) tends to work this way: it seems great at first until the uncoupling of supply and demand from the sector eventually causes unintended, negative side effects.
If a bureaucrat is in charge of who gets what care, problems arise. This is the case in socialized medicine Canada. If the bureaucrats are focused on the best outcomes, they can empowered or encouraged to do a few disgusting things because of this mandate. Murdering unborn human babies (abortion) is 100% legal in all of Canada. That means that a bureaucrat could require pre-birth testing of all unborn children and also recommend abortion for any human that they think has minor or major genetic defect, or another birth defect. In my opinion, this is utterly immoral, it should be illegal, and it is sad and disgusting. It exemplifies the dark nature of our Earth at this present time. But a Canadian mandate to have the best health outcomes may encourage this behavior because a voluntary abortion isn’t considered a bad outcome in the statistics, which are the most important thing for the bureaucrat.
Since the Canadian government doesn’t see an unborn baby as a human (we know this because murder of any born human is illegal and considered murder in Canada, but not the unborn), no one has died (in their minds) when that baby is killed. But if the baby is born and later dies, that’s a bad outcome for the statistics, so the baby should be killed before it’s born and “before it’s a human”. The baby has human genes, so of course it’s a human.
Saying a baby, born or unborn, is not human is an absurd, mentally and morally disabled position. I feel bad for any unborn child in Canada, because their precious, virtually innocent life can legally be taken from them before they’ve had a chance to breath a single breath. Killing unborn or born babies in Canada, in the United States, or anywhere else is absolutely and utterly wrong and should be abolished.
If you don’t agree with my statements related to abortion please don’t even try to argue with me because you could just as easily be dead right now (and unable to argue or even think on this Earth) because your parents could have chosen to murder you before you were born, and it would have been perfectly legal under how you would like the law to be. But if you do try to argue against the logic I just presented, perhaps you’ve succumbed to the brainwashing and lies of liberals and much of the mainstream media. Perhaps you don’t value your life at all, or anyone else’s life, in which case, why would you value the “good outcomes” of socialized medicine? I don’t have much of an answer for that, but please, anyone, feel free to respond to this story to enlighten me.
I am at loss. I have never seen an issue as confused, complicated, and utterly taken into an opposite world as the simple issue of murdering unborn humans has been made by most self-described “liberals”. I would like to go on a rant against people who think that abortion is a “choice”, but instead I will bite my keyboard tongue and simply call you brainwashed. The truth is, killing an unborn, living human is a choice and always will be a choice, there is absolutely a choice. If pregnant, you will always have the choice to either murder an innocent child and bear the label of baby-murderer and a killer of your own child for the rest of your life, or you can choose not to murder your child.
Beyond this, Canadian bureaucrats get to prioritize the timing of care based on what they believe is best. It’s not about fairness, or simply waiting in a line first-come, first-serve, or about who can pay. It’s very similar to the death panels that people were so fearful of with Obamacare. In Canada, if a bureaucrat thinks you’re a very unhealthy person and might die soon anyway, they could put you to the end of the list for care where you have to wait 12 months for care. They might rather you die early to take that one hit to their health outcome statistical goal than to let a small problem fester in a healthy person, who could then die as well as the unhealthy person and hurt the stats even more. When someone else is defining the value of your life or your death, it’s hard to consider that quality healthcare.
If you are a millionaire in Canada, and you're diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that has a $200,000 treatment in the United States, you’ll probably go to the United States to get the treatment, especially if the treatment is not even available in Canada because of bureaucrats, or maybe there’s a one year waiting list for you. It “looks” in the statistics like the Canadian had a great outcome for the Canadian stats, because they were cured in the States but then went back to Canada. But if someone comes to the States for a rare procedure (and they often do) and die in the States because that was the only hope they could think of but they were already really sick and didn’t have a chance, that person who dies in the States goes against our stats.
If a bureaucrat has a friend or relative who needs care in Canada, they might just quietly bump that person to the top of the list.
Martin, please look beyond the statistics. In the U.S., our hospitals could focus on the people who have a good chance of thriving, but they typically care about every life. They’ll spend millions of dollars to save a homeless person’s life who’s never had a checkup in 40 years and just showed up in the E.R. with a rare problem… in Canada he might die because of the long triage or waiting list.
I don’t know where you’re from, but I dare you to become a citizen of another country and try out their healthcare system. You may not find it “quality”. THe reason is because in other countries you are put on a waiting list a paying for healthcare is illegal for THEIR people. But you can’t try this if you’re not a citizen, because if you’re not a citizen you can probably just pay cash or use insurance for healthcare, because it’s not illegal for non-citizens to buy healthcare in their country. So they’ll happily treat your sickness right away to get your cash instead of the measly government mandated fee that is is provided.
I think the U.S. pays for more of the research and development into healthcare than every other country, and yet those other countries get to see and benefit from that research. In many ways, the United State’s high healthcare costs are what make other countries healthcare so affordable.
Finally, healthcare is perhaps the most regulated industry in the United States, and in some ways it is socialized. I think that at least 90% of the issues with healthcare in the U.S. can be attributed to government interference, regulation, and involvement in healthcare. Government is the problem, and the Constitution is the simple solution.
