The record shows socialism doesn't bring high quality anything. I wish liberals would give up their socialist dreams. They always think it would work if only it were done right.
Under socialist health care schemes, young people usually get good health care and the elderly sub-standard (by American standards) care. Makes sense from the governments standpoint, the young are future taxpayers. The old are beyond their big taxpaying years and a financial drain on the government.
Elton John's Partner Blasts Michael Moore and 'Sicko'
Posted by Lynn Davidson on June 2, 2007 - 13:52.
Update at bottom:
Maybe Michael Moore should listen to people who actually have socialized medicine—at least those who are allowed to disagree with their government’s policies. Singer Elton John’s partner David Furnish slammed Michael Moore and his latest docuganda “Sicko” for misrepresenting the quality of the US health care system. On June 02, Furnish stated, ”[America] was the only place to get good treatment”(emphasis mine):
Elton John's partner David Furnish has hit out at filmmaker Michael Moore for criticising the US healthcare system.
The star - who lives in England - insists new movie Sicko is inaccurate, and has praised America's medical services - branding it "the only place to get good treatment".
He says: "I completely disagree with Michael Moore. With my own father, when he was ill, the only option was to hire a jet and fly him to America. It was the only place to get good treatment."
Furnish flew his father, who lives in Canada, to America for the fast, advanced quality care that he does not believe can be had elsewhere.
According to Canadian journalists who saw “Sicko,” Moore gave “lavish praise” Canada’s socialized health care system in comparison to the US, but once Canadian journalists challenged those claims, Moore changed his tune about Canada's medical utopia and began bad-mouthing the country’s program. Although he now criticizes the Canadian system, he still states that it is better than ours, although to “insult” it, he claimed, “The Canadian system…if not that far above us…The French system is the best in the world.”
If Canada is that much better than the US, why would Furnish leave the country? If socialized medicine that better than the free-market system, then why didn’t Furnish take his father to the UK or France for the “best in the world” level of treatment? Instead, he chose the US. It could have even been free of charge in France.
I wonder if Michael Moore will call Sir Elton’s partner a greedy corporate dupe for spreading the capitalist lie that American health care is better than the rest of the world's. Surely, he’ll chastise Furnish for not dutifully waiting in line for months for treatment, even though survivability rates for many diseases like breast cancer (fatal to 46% in UK vs. 25% in US) and prostate cancer (fatal to 57% of Brits, 25% of Canadians and 19% of Americans) are significantly lower in Canada and the UK than in the US.
David Furnish and Elton John are a popular celebrity couple in the UK and Europe. Any time that a celebrity bashes Bush or the US or supports Moore, the media are quick to cover it. Will they cover this celebrity attacking “Sicko” and Michael Moore? So far, not in America, and only minimal coverage in Europe. It is still early, so it is possible.
Update 06/04 06:40 EST:
The UK's the Times apologized for criticizing Furnish for supposedly flying his father to the US on a private jet, which for some reason was an indcation of wrong doing. WENN reported that "Furnishes father took a commercial Air Canada flight."
If a son can afford to send his sick father to a hospital on a private jet instead of a crowded plane so he is comfortable, then why should UK'sTimes care? What Furnish was rumored to have done for his father sounded rather compassionate and thoughtful to me, but not everyone feels the same way. A "Sicko" fan in England contacted me to say he agrees with the Times' criticism of Furnish over the "guff" about the private jet. Since the dad actually flew on Air Canada and not on a private jet, the point is moot.
newsbusters.org
The Market and Its Medicine
Solving the health-care "crisis" means not more government involvement but less.
BY STEPHEN MOORE
Tuesday, December 5, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
About 10 years ago, I broke my leg playing basketball. After I came out of surgery, with a cast stretching from my ankle to the top of my leg, an orderly asked me whether I had ever used crutches before. I hadn't, so he showed me what to do, swinging through them from one end of the room to the other. The whole lesson lasted about 90 seconds. When I got my hospital bill, I saw that I had been charged $150 for "gait training on crutches." I did what all insured Americans do: I forwarded the bill to my insurance company. Why should I care? I wasn't paying for it.
One of the problems with American health care, as David Gratzer notes in "The Cure," is precisely a payment system that takes the patient out of the equation. In the early 1960s, the average American paid out of pocket one of every two dollars that he spent on health care; today the figure is one dollar in seven. The inevitable effect is hugely wasteful spending (and inflated hospital bills like mine). In fact, per-patient costs have gone up almost exactly in inverse proportion to the share of spending borne by the consumer.
Dr. Gratzer cites a remarkable Rand Corp. study that tracked health-care spending by 2,000 families over eight years. The families who got free health care spent 40% more than the families with cost-sharing arrangements. And yet the health outcomes for the two groups were the same. The lesson: Market-based health insurance systems, such as health savings accounts, cut out inefficiencies and lower costs without compromising quality.
Dr. Gratzer, a physician from Canada and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is painfully aware, thanks to Canada's single-payer government system, of how inefficient and limited health care can be when the market is kept almost completely out of the calculation. He has seen the effects firsthand. In Canada, the average wait between a doctor visit and prescribed surgery is 17 weeks. American patients are twice as likely as Canadians to get lifesaving treatments like dialysis, three times more likely to get a coronary bypass and four times more likely to get coronary angioplasty. The survival rate for leukemia, breast CANCER, colon CANCER and heart disease is much higher if you are treated in a U.S. hospital than in a Canadian one or, for that matter, in a European one.
And it isn't only health-care "delivery" that is affected by suppressing market forces. Dr. Gratzer rightly spends part of "The Cure" celebrating the medical marvels that a dynamic, capitalist economy has helped to make possible by allowing capital to flow in productive directions. "Death due to cardiac disease has fallen by nearly two-thirds in the past five decades," he writes. "Polio is confined to the history books. Childhood leukemia, once a death sentence, is now almost always curable. Depression and mental illness are now treatable. . . . The death rate from heart attack and heart failure has fallen by more than half since 1950." In short, the medical progress of the past 50 years has been breathtaking.
For some, including Dr. Gratzer, the costs are breathtaking, too, even when they are corrected for the payment dysfunctions that he analyzes so well. Are we suffering from a kind of runaway health-care inflation, as Dr. Gratzer at times suggests? Perhaps. But it can easily be argued that medicine, because it is subject to hyper-technological change, is hard to gauge by traditional inflation measures. The current treatments for disease aren't really comparable with those of a quarter-century ago.
To complain about the cost of heart surgery or CANCER treatment by comparing it to the inflation-adjusted price in the 1960s or '70s is to miss the point: You died 30 years ago, and you live today. The cost of my leg surgery would have been a lot cheaper in the 1960s, but I wouldn't be able to play tennis or even run after the surgical repair was done, as I can now. How much is it worth to a family with a child who has leukemia to be able to treat her and give her a full life? The families I know who have seen their children recover say that they would have given up everything they own for today's miracle cures. Yet it's become a great American pastime for patients and politicians to whine about the "high cost of drugs" and other treatments that save lives.
All of which can lead to demagoguery and calls for a nationalized health insurance system of the sort that Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean are always so keen to recommend. Such calls may grow louder soon: America is clearly at a crossroads in medical care. Within the next decade we will get either some version of Hillary-care or more free-market medicine, starting with universally available health savings accounts. Let's hope that our nation's policy makers read "The Cure" before they decide. They will learn that the government route flattens costs only by holding back the pace of technology, artificially controlling its price and rationing its use. That is not a prescription for better health.
Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial page. You can buy "The Cure" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
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