Freedom Dies With Thunderous Applause: Democrats Shove Government Health Care Down Our Throats

The vote on a government takeover of Health Care last night was sickening. What was even more sickening was the fact that when the final tally was in, the Democrats stood up and gave themselves a standing ovation.

It reminded me of what Amadala said in Star Wars: Episode III: "So, this is how freedom dies. With thunderous applause."

If this bill is not killed in the courts for it's unconstitutionality, in addition to higher taxes, here is what we will be looking forward to:

Cruel And Neglectful Care Of One Million British Patients Exposed

Man Collapses With Ruptured Appendix ... Three Weeks After It Was Removed

More Reasons Why We Do Not Want Socialized Medicine

Statement From The American College Of Surgeons Regarding Disinformation Being Spread By Barack Obama

Oregon Woman Denied Medicine, Offered Assisted Suicide Instead

Another Look At Socialized Medicine From A Canadian Doctor

A Look At Socialized Medicine Through The Eyes Of A British Oncologist

Another Example Of The Horrors That Socialized Medicine Will Bring Us

Socialized Medicine: Enforcing Your Duty To Die

Another Example Of What Awaits Us In A Socialized Medicine System: Father Dies In Waiting Room While In Intense Pain

Kennedy Health Care Chart

Does anyone here really think that government run health care will be more efficient and help more people than private health care? The horror stories coming out of Canada and Great Britain are ample evidence that socialized medicine is a disaster.

But here, we can see one of the reasons why. Click on the following chart (requires Adobe reader):



Given all the new bureaucrats who will now be involved in your health care decisions, how long do you think it will take before certain treatments are approved? Do you think that if you or someone in your family needs urgent care that you will get it in a timely manner? That has not been the experience of people in Canada and Great Britain. And it won't be the experience of people here if we move towards this disastrous health care system.

Go to the following website and get the facts about patients' rights:

Conservatives For Patients' Rights

Another Look At Socialized Medicine From A Canadian Doctor

I find it interesting that the Dems are all about looking to other nations when it comes to interpreting American law, but when it comes to socialized medicine, they want to ignore the experiences of other nations.

The Wall Street Journal has a column by Canadian-born physician Dr. David Gratzer concerning socialized medicine in his home country.

Here is what he has to say:

Born and raised in Canada, I once believed that government health care is compassionate and equitable. It is neither. My views changed in medical school. Yes, everyone in Canada is covered by a "single payer" -- the government. But Canadians wait for practically any procedure or diagnostic test or specialist consultation in the public system.

Not just in Canada, but in Great Britain as well and any other country that practices socialized medicine. And the waiting is extremely detrimental to patients who need care as soon as possible:

The problems were brought home when a relative had difficulty walking. He was in chronic pain. His doctor suggested a referral to a neurologist; an MRI would need to be done, then possibly a referral to another specialist. The wait would have stretched to roughly a year. If surgery was needed, the wait would be months more. Not wanting to stay confined to his house, he had the surgery done in the U.S., at the Mayo Clinic, and paid for it himself. Such stories are common. For example, Sylvia de Vries, an Ontario woman, had a 40-pound fluid-filled tumor removed from her abdomen by an American surgeon in 2006. Her Michigan doctor estimated that she was within weeks of dying, but she was still on a wait list for a Canadian specialist. Indeed, Canada's provincial governments themselves rely on American medicine. Between 2006 and 2008, Ontario sent more than 160 patients to New York and Michigan for emergency neurosurgery -- described by the Globe and Mail newspaper as "broken necks, burst aneurysms and other types of bleeding in or around the brain."

Why would we want to move to a system that is so inefficient and so low-quality? The failures of socialized medicine are myriad:

Only half of ER patients are treated in a timely manner by national and international standards, according to a government study. The physician shortage is so severe that some towns hold lotteries, with the winners gaining access to the local doc. Overall, according to a study published in Lancet Oncology last year, five-year cancer survival rates are higher in the U.S. than those in Canada. Based on data from the Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health (done by Statistics Canada and the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics), Americans have greater access to preventive screening tests and have higher treatment rates for chronic illnesses. No wonder: To limit the growth in health spending, governments restrict the supply of health care by rationing it through waiting. The same survey data show, as June and Paul O'Neill note in a paper published in 2007 in the Forum for Health Economics & Policy, that the poor under socialized medicine seem to be less healthy relative to the nonpoor than their American counterparts.

Rationing. That's what socialized medicine comes down to. The government will decide who gets what treatment and when. That is the main reason why cancer survival rates are lower in places like Canada and Great Britain. Delayed detection and delayed treatment allows cancer to spread and grow in a patient until, in many cases, the treatment comes too late and the government then decrees that the patient is now a "hopeless diagnosis" and should be left to die.

But, it seems as though the people of Canada have learned their lesson. Dr. Gratzer asks a very profound question while presenting some good evidence that privatized medicine is the way to go. Make sure you read the following excerpt all the way through:

Ironically, as the U.S. is on the verge of rushing toward government health care, Canada is reforming its system in the opposite direction. In 2005, Canada's supreme court struck down key laws in Quebec that established a government monopoly of health services. Claude Castonguay, who headed the Quebec government commission that recommended the creation of its public health-care system in the 1960s, also has second thoughts. Last year, after completing another review, he declared the system in "crisis" and suggested a massive expansion of private services -- even advocating that public hospitals rent facilities to physicians in off-hours. And the medical establishment? Dr. Brian Day, an orthopedic surgeon, grew increasingly frustrated by government cutbacks that reduced his access to an operating room and increased the number of patients on his hospital waiting list. He built a private hospital in Vancouver in the 1990s. Last year, he completed a term as the president of the Canadian Medical Association and was succeeded by a Quebec radiologist who owns several private clinics. In Canada, private-sector health care is growing. Dr. Day estimates that 50,000 people are seen at private clinics every year in British Columbia. According to the New York Times, a private clinic opens at a rate of about one a week across the country. Public-private partnerships, once a taboo topic, are embraced by provincial governments. In the United Kingdom, where socialized medicine was established after World War II through the National Health Service, the present Labour government has introduced a choice in surgeries by allowing patients to choose among facilities, often including private ones. Even in Sweden, the government has turned over services to the private sector. Americans need to ask a basic question: Why are they rushing into a system of government-dominated health care when the very countries that have experienced it for so long are backing away?

You can access the complete column on-line here:

Canada's ObamaCare Precedent
Dr. David Gratzer
Wall Street Journal
June 9, 2009

A Look At Three Socialized Health Care Systems: Dr. Walter Williams Column

As the United States gears up to become the world's newest socialized health care provider, it would be a good idea to look at historical precedent and see how well socialized health care has worked for other countries and what the results were.

Dr. Walter Williams, writing for Town Hall, has come up with some very crisp, clear, concise examples and summarizes them nicely.

First, Great Britain:

A recent study by David Green and Laura Casper, "Delay, Denial and Dilution," written for the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, concludes that the NHS health care services are just about the worst in the developed world. The head of the World Health Organization calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care. Twelve percent of specialists surveyed admitted refusing kidney dialysis to patients suffering from kidney failure because of limits on cash. Waiting lists for medical treatment have become so long that there are now "waiting lists" for the waiting list.

And next, Canada:

Canada's government system isn't that different from Britain's. For example, after a Canadian has been referred to a specialist, the waiting list for gynecological surgery is four to 12 weeks, cataract removal 12 to 18 weeks, tonsillectomy three to 36 weeks and neurosurgery five to 30 weeks. Toronto-area hospitals, concerned about lawsuits, ask patients to sign a legal release accepting that while delays in treatment may jeopardize their health, they nevertheless hold the hospital blameless. Canadians have an option Britainers don't: close proximity of American hospitals. In fact, the Canadian government spends over $1 billion each year for Canadians to receive medical treatment in our country.

And now, Sweden:

Sven R. Larson tells about some of Sweden's problems in "Lesson from Sweden's Universal Health System: Tales from the Health-care Crypt," published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (Spring 2008). Mr. D., a Gothenburg multiple sclerosis patient, was prescribed a new drug. His doctor's request was denied because the drug was 33 percent more expensive than the older medicine. Mr. D. offered to pay for the medicine himself but was prevented from doing so. The bureaucrats said it would set a bad precedent and lead to unequal access to medicine. Malmo, with its 280,000 residents, is Sweden's third-largest city. To see a physician, a patient must go to one of two local clinics before they can see a specialist. The clinics have security guards to keep patients from getting unruly as they wait hours to see a doctor. The guards also prevent new patients from entering the clinic when the waiting room is considered full. Uppsala, a city with 200,000 people, has only one specialist in mammography. Sweden's National Cancer Foundation reports that in a few years most Swedish women will not have access to mammography. Dr. Olle Stendahl, a professor of medicine at Linkoping University, pointed out a side effect of government-run medicine: its impact on innovation. He said, "In our budget-government health care there is no room for curious, young physicians and other professionals to challenge established views. New knowledge is not attractive but typically considered a problem (that brings) increased costs and disturbances in today's slimmed-down health care."

Is this the change you voted for? I certainly didn't. But, with a socialist President and a socialist controlled Congress, it is going to be shoved down our throats whether we like it or not.

You can access the complete column on-line here:

Sweden's Government Health Care
Dr. Walter Williams
TownHall.com
March 4, 2009

Ruin Your Health With The Obama Stimulus Plan: Socialized Medicine Is In The Spending Bill

Not many people talking about this, but we really need to get the word out. The pork spending bill that is now speeding it's way through Congress with the help of three RINO traitors (Specter, Snowe and Collins) contains a socialized medicine provision that we should all be aware of and call our Representatives and Senators about.

In short, this provision will make the federal government the final dicision maker in what treatments your doctor may or may not prescribe. In other words, a bureaucrat will have override authority with the power to say "no" to any treatment even if your doctor says "yes."

Writing for Bloomberg, Betsy McCaughey has this:

The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors. But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis. According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

And what happens if doctors and hospitals don't want the government to override their decisions?

Read on:

Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541) What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make. The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.

In other words, if the government decides that you aren't worth saving, medical treatment will be withheld from you. If the government decides that your children are not worth saving, the government will withhold treatment from them.

Can you imagine the impact this provision is going to have on organizations like St. Jude's Children's Research Centers? How many children will the feds give up on due to what the bureaucrats rule a "hopeless diagnosis?"

For those of you who voted for "change," congratulations! You got it.

But, who will be the hardest hit? In the beginning, it will be the elderly.

Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt. Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council (464). The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis. In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.

But the socialists who support this abomination claim that individuals will "benefit in younger years and sacrifice later." Until the inefficiancy that is inherent in federal bureaucracies catches up and the available care needs to be rationed further. Then, the "hopeless diagnosis" will be a death sentence for patients of all ages.

Why was it hidden in this pork-laden spending bill?

Here's why:

Hiding health legislation in a stimulus bill is intentional. Daschle supported the Clinton administration’s health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. “If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it,” he said. “The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol.”

For an administration that claims to be the most transparent of all time, they sure do seem to be hiding alot.

We need to kill this bill before we get saddled with the nationalized health-care disasters that are Canada and Europe.

Now, some of you may think that you are going to be able to pay for private care to cover what the government denies. But don't count on it. In Europe and Canada, it is illegal to get private care because that makes the system "unfair towards the rich." How long before the socialist Barack Obama and his socialist allies in Congress get that rule passed?

Contact your Representatives and Senators now and ask them to kill this bill before it is too late.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Ruin Your Health With The Obama Stimulus Plan
Betsy McCaughey
Bloomberg.com
February 9, 2009

And you can find your Congressional delegation contact information on-line here:

Congressional Email Directory

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.

More :

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

Associated Press Rips Obama's Infomercial, Ad Skips Over Budget Realities

Now, the Associated Press is not what anyone would call a bastion of right-wing philosophy. In fact, it is a very leftist organization. That is why it is fairly big news when such an organization takes a leftist candidate for president to task over statements made during a half-hour long infomercial.

Calvin Woodward looks into a few of Barack Obama's claims and separates the fiction from the fact. From his article:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial Wednesday night about the costs of his programs and the crushing budget pressures he would face in office. Obama's assertion that "I've offered spending cuts above and beyond" the expense of his promises is accepted only by his partisans. His vow to save money by "eliminating programs that don't work" masks his failure throughout the campaign to specify what those programs are - beyond the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

Just like John Kerry, who claimed he had a plan, but refused to reveal that plan to the American people. Here are some examples of what Obama claimed versus the truth:

THE SPIN: "That's why my health care plan includes improving information technology, requires coverage for preventive care and pre-existing conditions and lowers health care costs for the typical family by $2,500 a year." THE FACTS: His plan does not lower premiums by $2,500, or any set amount. Obama hopes that by spending $50 billion over five years on electronic medical records and by improving access to proven disease management programs, among other steps, consumers will end up saving money. He uses an optimistic analysis to suggest cost reductions in national health care spending could amount to the equivalent of $2,500 for a family of four. Many economists are skeptical those savings can be achieved, but even if they are, it's not a certainty that every dollar would be passed on to consumers in the form of lower premiums.

This same system has been tried in Canada and Great Britain and each time were colossal failures. Even the Canucks and Brits admit that they don't have universal health care but rather that they have rationed health care. The quality of their care is now among the lowest in the industrialized world.

Obama's socialized health care plan is analyzed here:

Barack Obama Proposes A Disastrous Socialized Health Care System
84rules
June 18, 2008

And that plan would be rife with fraud:

Medicare Rife With Fraud: The Dems Model For Socialized Medicine
84rules
August 26, 2008

THE SPIN: "Here's what I'll do. Cut taxes for every working family making less than $200,000 a year. Give businesses a tax credit for every new employee that they hire right here in the U.S. over the next two years and eliminate tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. Help homeowners who are making a good faith effort to pay their mortgages, by freezing foreclosures for 90 days. And just like after 9-11, we'll provide low-cost loans to help small businesses pay their workers and keep their doors open. " THE FACTS: His proposals - the tax cuts, the low-cost loans, the $15 billion a year he promises for alternative energy, and more - cost money, and the country could be facing a record $1 trillion deficit next year. Indeed, Obama recently acknowledged - although not in his commercial - that: "The next president will have to scale back his agenda and some of his proposals."

Just a short while ago, it was a tax cut for working families making less than $250,000 per year. Joe Biden has put that figure at $150,000 per year. But history shows us that it is a campaign promise that he cannot keep. Bill Clinton promised no new taxes for anyone making less than $90,000 per year in 1992. The reality was that in order to fund his spending porgrams, people making as little as $30,000 per year were gouged for more taxes. Barack Obama would find the same problem in keeping his promise of a lower threshold. Economists from several different institutions have worked the numbers out and have predicted that families making $45,000 per year will have more taxes taken from their paychecks.

Small businesses won't do any better under Obama:

Obamanomics Is A Recipe For Recession
84rules
July 30, 2008

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Obama's Prime-Time Ad Skips Over Budget Realities
Calvin Woodward
Associated Press via My Way News
October 29, 2008

Taxpayer Funded Medical Care: 17,000 Deaths

There is alot about the socialized health care systems of Canada and Great Britain that doesn't get reported in Old Media. One of the more recent developments out of Great Britain, a development that I learned about from Glenn Beck rather than ABC News, is that the British government has guaranteed a wait of "no more than four hours" in the Emergency Room.

Sounds noble, eh? Well, wait until you hear how the government run hospitals are putting this "guarantee" into effect. It is a procedure called "patient stacking." Essentially, what they do is they hold the patient in the ambulance outside of the emergency room until the ER staff can assure the ambulance drivers that the patient can be seen within four hours. Some patients have been held in the ambulances for up to nine hours (not including the four they spend waiting in the emergency room) and some medical emergency victims have been kept waiting for over ten hours while waiting for an ambulance to become available to come and get them.

That's just the latest example of how socialized medicine, especially socialist programs proposed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, are dismal failures and should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

From Deroy Murdoch at the New York Post:

Great Britain's big-government National Health Service. Low-quality, taxpayer-funded health care killed more than 17,000 Britons in 2004, according to the TaxPayers' Alliance in London. The TPA examined the World Health Organization's latest-available data to contrast the NHS with the Dutch, French, German and Spanish health systems, which are less government-dominated. Specifically, the pro-market group measured "mortality amenable to health care" - those deaths that a medical organization realistically should prevent. While those four countries averaged a 106.6 amenable mortality rate, Britain was almost 29 percent deadlier, with its rate of 135.3. The TPA thus calculates that the NHS took the lives of 17,157 Britons who otherwise would have survived were they treated by doctors across the English Channel. This figure is more than two-and-a-half times Britain's yearly alcohol-related deaths, and is quintuple its annual highway fatalities. Comparing 60 million Brits to 300 million Yanks, this is like a federally-operated health agency eliminating 85,785 Americans in 2004.

Despite the fact that the British socialist health care system is probably the best financed in the world, it is one of the worst health-care performers in the world. Here are some of the other things going on that people should know about before embracing HillaryCare or ObamaCare:

Poor sanitation has become the NHS' latest worry. The BBC's Danielle Glavin worked undercover at a government hospital in Kent. "On my first day, as I emptied bins, swept and mopped, I noticed old blood stains ingrained on the floor," Glavin reported. In one surgical theater, "a blood-stained gown was left on a trolley for 24 hours, and used medical instruments were discarded in a sink for a day." This helps explain why the British government estimated that 9 percent of inpatients in 2000 suffered hospital-acquired infections. The bacterium Clostridium difficile often is associated with hospital outbreaks and extended medical stays. English and Welsh death certificates citing C. diff as a cause or contributing factor grew from about 1,000 in 1999 to 3,807 in 2005. Diseases snuff Britons sooner than they do others in the developed world. A September 2007 Lancet Oncology article found 66.3 percent of American men alive five years after cancer diagnosis. Among male Finns, that figure was 55.9 percent, while only 44.8 percent of Englishmen survived after five years. Across the European Union, 20.1 females per 100,000 under 65 died prematurely of circulatory disease. Among British women, that number was 23.6.

Anyone who believes the idiotic propaganda that Michael Moore put in his informationally challenged movie Sicko should go over to Great Britain the next time they think they might have cancer. We'll see how truly they believe in socialized medicine then.

The parting shot:

Collectively, these data strongly rebuff the notion that America's imperfect health-care industry needs a booster shot of mandates and regulations. What it sorely lacks is more choice, competition and freedom - and loads less government. John McCain's ideas - among them, expanded health-savings accounts; individually owned, portable health-insurance policies available across state lines; and medical-lawsuit reform - are the antidote to the "health care with a British accent" that Clinton or Obama would import, unless American voters stop them.

And once again, despite so-called Conservative opposition, John McCain has the better idea.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

17,000 Deaths
Deroy Murdoch
New York Post
February 24, 2008