A Look At What's In Store For Us If We Adopt Socialized Medicine

Hundreds of horror stories about the absurdities and inadequacies of socialized health care are coming out of the United Kingdom and Canada. Well, we can add one more to the list.

This comes from David Altaner and Bruce Rule at Bloomberg:

Jack Rosser's doctor says taking Pfizer Inc.'s Sutent cancer drug may keep him alive long enough to see his 1-year-old daughter, Emma, enter primary school. The U.K.'s National Health Service says that's not worth the expense.

If you read that right, then you know that under a nationalized health care system like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton envisioned, doctor's would not be making decisions but government bureaucrats would. The above shows exactly how heartless such a nationalized system really is.

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The NHS, which provides health care to all Britons and is funded by tax revenue, is spending about 100 billion pounds this fiscal year, or more than double what it spent a decade ago, as the cost of treatments increase and the population ages. The higher costs are forcing the NHS to choose between buying expensive drugs for terminal patients and providing more services for a wider number of people. About 800 of 3,000 cancer patients lose their appeals for regulator-approved drugs each year because of cost, Canterbury- based charity Rarer Cancers Forum said. The U.K. is considering whether to make permanent a preliminary ruling that four medicines, including Sutent, are too expensive to be part of the government-funded treatment of advanced kidney cancer.

There is a reason why the U.K. is in last place among the industrialized nations for cancer survival rates. Delayed detection and delayed treatment of various diseases and conditions are part and parcel to a socialized health care system. Government run health care offers too little too late.

And this telling fact illustrates what people in the U.K. really feel about the NHS:

South Gloucestershire, the trust that includes Rosser's home, accepts applications for Sutent funding only for exceptional cases, said Ann Jarvis, director of commissioning at the trust, in an e-mail. "Unfortunately for very expensive drugs, if they are proven to only provide a small benefit we have to prioritize other treatments."

The people joke, "We don't have socialized health care, we have rationed health care."

Yes, they do. And we do not want it over here. It is a disaster.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Cancer Patients Lose Shot At Longer Life In U.K. Cuts
David Altaner and Bruce Rule
Bloomberg.com
November 18, 2008

And there is more information at the following website:

Big Government Health

And learn some not-so-well known facts about government run health care:

Learn The Facts