Writes commentator Deroy Murdock:
Imagine that your two best friends are British and Canadian
tobacco addicts. The Brit battles lung cancer. The Canadian
endures emphysema and wheezes as he walks around with clanging
oxygen canisters. You probably would not think: "Maybe I should
pick up smoking."
The fact that America is even considering government medicine
is equally wacky. The state guides health care for our two
closest allies: Great Britain and Canada. Like us, these are
prosperous, industrial, Anglophone democracies. Nevertheless,
compared to America, they suffer higher death rates for
diseases, their patients experience severe pain, and they
ration medical services.
Look what you're missing in the U.K.:
* Breast cancer kills 25 percent of its American victims. In
Great Britain, the Vatican of single-payer medicine, breast
cancer extinguishes 46 percent of its targets.
* Prostate cancer is fatal to 19 percent of its American
patients. The National Center for Policy Analysis reports that
it kills 57 percent of Britons it strikes.
* Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
data show that the U.K.'s 2005 heart-attack fatality rate
was 19.5 percent higher than America's. This may correspond to
angioplasties, which were only 21.3 percent as common there as
here.
* The U.K.'s National Institute of Health and Clinical
Excellence (NICE) just announced plans to cut its 60,000 annual
steroid injections for severe back-pain sufferers to just
3,000. This should save the government 33 million pounds (about
$55 million). "The consequences of the NICE decision will be
devastating for thousands of patients," Dr. Jonathan Richardson
of Bradford Hospitals Trust
told London's Daily Telegraph. "It will mean more people on
opiates, which are addictive, and kill 2,000 a year. It will
mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly
risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate."
* "Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside
hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government
targets," Daniel Martin wrote last year in London's Daily Mail.
"Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident
and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in
until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a
Labour [party] pledge. The hold-ups mean ambulances are not
available to answer fresh 911 calls. Doctors warned last night
that the practice of ‘patient-stacking' was putting patients'
health at risk."
Shouldn't "reform" make us better off?
