Posted by
Cecil Citizen on Friday, July 17, 2009 9:21:41 PM
The House of Representatives recently presented a 1000+ page bill which would nationalize health insurance. President Obama is pressuring house and senate members to speedily pass this legislation before the August recess. So if this legislation becomes law, how will it impact you?
When considering healthcare, it must be judged on the basis of choice (freedom), cost, and quality of care.
Choice (Freedom)
· Members of Congress and the very rich will have a choice in their health care, but you will not. According to Investor's Business Daily (IBD), there is a provision on page 16 of the current legislation which would outlaw private coverage.
· Penalties and taxes will be given to anyone who tries to go out of the system to get better care. (Note the recent headline in the Daily Mail about Britain’s health system: “Grandmother Dies after NHS [National Health Service] Cancer Treatment is Withdrawn Because she Paid Privately for Life-extending Drug”)
· According to the nonpartisan Lewin Group, 120 million Americans will be forced to give up their private coverage to enroll in a substandard public program.
Cost
· The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that National Health Care will cost 1.5 trillion dollars over the next 10 years.
· You will bear the burden of cost through taxes; all will be required to pay a “fair tax” to fund the program.
· Small businesses will bear the brunt of the burden by being taxed on their adjusted gross income, not their taxable earnings; this will result in more job losses as small businesses find it harder to stay afloat.
· While you will pay through taxes and higher prices on the things you buy, the federal government will determine how that money is spent.
· Because of the lack of competition, politicians will be able to fatten their pockets and power base while you will be left with less money and little control over your own body.
Quality of Care
· Social Security offices and your local Motor Vehicles Department show inefficiency of government-run facilities. When this translates into your healthcare, the result will be wait lists for needed medical procedures and denied access.
· Health coverage does not equal health care. In countries such as Canada and Britain, with so-called “universal coverage, , the unwillingness of government to pay for costly drugs and procedures has resulted in less access to preventative screenings such as MRIs or CT Scans as well as medications to treat chronic illnesses. Note this recent news headline in British news: “A 9-month Wait for Arthritis Treatment: Delay can Mean a Lifetime of Agony for Victims.”
· The wait for emergency care or cancer treatments is twice as long in Britain and Canada than in the U.S. As a result, the survival rate for cancer patients is much lower in countries with nationalized health care.
· In Canada, more than 1.5 million people do not have access to a family doctor, and in some areas, lotteries are held to determine who gets to see a doctor.
· Under a national health plan, a federal board will determine if in President Obama’s own words, a person with an illness “may be better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.”
· Long term care will also be affected, because new medical procedures or innovations will no longer be explored. Eight of the ten most important medical advancements made in the last decade were developed in the U.S. If our free market system is replaced by a government-run system, the new advancements that would have helped people with serious illnesses here and across the world will never be realized.
According to Canadian physician, Dr. David Gratzer, in Canada “People line up for care, and some of them die.” Is this the health “care” you want forced upon yourself and all Americans? There are many free market solutions to our health care issues. Let’s not turn our bodies over to politicians to let them make life or death decisions for us. It is not too late to act: Call your representatives today!
Sources of Information include: The National Center for Policy Analysis and John Stossel’s Report “There's No Such Thing as Free Health Care”.