Fighting Obamacare

For my friend Shellie, who was accosted (at a public school event) by a member of Obama's army and felt she was lacking in talking points. The Obamacare advocate was asking for signatures on a petition, mostly likely in support of this:

I support President Obama's three principles for real health care reform, and I call on Congress to enact a plan upholding them in 2009:

• Reduce costs — Rising health care costs are crushing the budgets of governments, businesses, individuals, and families, and they must be brought under control
• Guarantee choice — Every American must have the freedom to choose their plan and doctor – including the choice of a public insurance option
• Ensure quality care for all — All Americans must have quality and affordable health care

Overuse of the L word makes one sound like a nutcase/crank. But sometimes there's no other way to say it: lies, all lies. Nationalized health care will be costlier, crummier, and controlled not by the vaunted "you and your doctor," but by Big Brother.

Here in affluent northern Virginia most people are pretty satisfied with the health coverage they get through their employers. So the Obamacare drone resorted to bemoaning the plight of the uninsured masses who have "no access to health care." Maybe now is the time to reprise, from last fall, the reason.tv video on those who are uninsured by choice. From the site:

Of people currently classified as uninsured, a conservative estimate says about 45 percent of them would be able to get health insurance right now if they wanted it,” says economist Glen Whitman. That estimate comes from a study headed by a Johns Hopkins University researcher, which separates those who could get insurance into one of two categories: Those who earn enough money to buy it, and those who qualify for existing government programs.

Karl Rove (h/t Hot Air) lays it all out. What's at stake:

If Democrats enact a public-option health-insurance program, America is on the way to becoming a European-style welfare state.

His five points:

1. It's unnecessary.
2. "a public option will undercut private insurers and pass the tab to taxpayers and health providers just as it does in existing government-run programs."
3. "government-run health insurance would crater the private insurance market, forcing most Americans onto the government plan."
4. it's way expensive.
5. the public option puts government firmly in the middle of the relationship between patients and their doctors. If you think insurance companies are bad, imagine what happens when government is the insurance carrier, with little or no competition and no concern you'll change to another company.

Read the whole thing. Whether we need to argue all these points is debatable. I think it depends on your audience. John Miller advocates sticking with the money argument which polls indicate is hitting home with Americans right now. For someone dealing with chronic illness, this from Mark Steyn might make an even more compelling (not to say urgent) argument:

In the Province of Quebec, patients suffering from serious incontinence - ie, they have to aller aux toilettes jusqu'à 12 fois par nuit (that's 12 times a night) - have to wait three years for a half-hour operation. That's 3 years times 365 nights times 12 trips to the bathroom.

There are only two urologists in the province who perform the operation, in part because hospital budgets are so tight they decline to buy the necessary "neurostimulator".

The central point about socialized medicine is that restricting access is the only means of controlling costs. And, when comparisons of health "costs" between nations are made, the time you spend in the bathroom each night and the subsequent impact on your work performance the following day are not factored in. [emphasis added]

Read the rest (not long).

*Updated to add more ammo from the Washington Examiner: two columns by Sally Pipes on access to health care in Canada, via Pundit, who tells me that the print versions contained some useful charts which don't seem to appear online. (Guys always love those charts and graphs.)

From Part 1:

When you finally go to the doctor and describe your symptoms, he orders an MRI to make sure your headaches aren’t a sign of something serious, like a tumor.

Of course, you won't learn the answer for quite awhile. Your doctor informs you that there's a ten-week wait for an MRI. Ten weeks of chronic headaches will be bad enough, you think, but not knowing what's wrong will be even worse because of the worry.

The doc attempts to lighten the mood by pointing out that you could have gone for an MRI in less than a week if you were a dog. Somehow that's not comforting.

Your doctor goes on to tell you that you'll have to wait another 19 weeks for a referral to a neurological specialist if the MRI reveals that something is wrong. "It's probably nothing," your doctor says, "so just relax and try to put it out of your mind."

Bottom line:

Just remember: Access to a waiting list is not access to health care.

Read the rest.

Part 2:

Canadians have significantly lower levels of access to several key medical technologies than citizens in other developed countries. Among member nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canada ranks a dismal 19th out of 26 for the number of CT scanners per million residents. It ranks 14th out of 25 for MRI scanners, and 19th out of 21 for lithotripters, which are used to treat kidney and gall stones.

Limited access to high-tech equipment has resulted in lengthy wait times for care. After visiting a primary care physician, the average Canadian has to wait more than a month to get a CT scan and more than two months to get an MRI.

According to Canada’s Fraser Institute, roughly 800,000 of Canada’s 33 million citizens are currently on a waiting list for some medical treatment. For 12 specialties across the country's 10 provinces, the average waiting period between referral from a general practitioner and actual treatment was nearly four and a half months in 2008. That’s double what the average wait time was 15 years ago.

Canadians face some of the longest lines for access to the advanced technologies essential to most major surgeries. The lag between a general practitioner’s referral and treatment by a specialist is eight months for neurosurgery and nine months for both orthopedic surgery and plastic surgery.

Once a Canadian patient finally makes it into the examination or operating room, there’s a good chance that his doctor is using antiquated equipment. The country’s healthcare system employs far too many old and potentially unreliable medical technologies. Many machines should have been junked years ago. Others will need to be replaced in the near future.

Read the rest. It's all bad.

Cross-posted in the Green Room.

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