Opinion
Obamacare meets the reality of nationalized health care: Rationing and long lines
Examiner Editorial
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June 22, 2009
President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the legions of liberal political activists trying to ramrod nationalized health care through Congress face an insurmountable obstacle in the Internet. There are mountains of data available today regarding the decades of experience with similar systems in Canada, Great Britain and elsewhere, and the facts about that data are within a few mouse clicks of every American. As the debate in Congress and the nation’s public policy forums heats up, key facts gleaned from that abundance of data are becoming ever more prominent.
Take, for example, the report out last week from the Wait Time Alliance (WTA), a group of 13 Canadian medical groups, including the Canadian Medical Association. For cancer patients, the report found that “the median wait time for radiation therapy was almost seven weeks.” That figure exceeded the recommended maximum wait time of one month. Note, too, that as a median figure, there were just as many patients who waited longer than seven weeks as who waited less than seven weeks. The WTA report also found unacceptably long delays for people seeking emergency room treatment, with an average of nine hours for patients who were treated and released. The average for patients who needed to be treated and admitted to the hospital was 24 hours! And patients needing psychiatric care for major depression are being forced to wait up to six weeks before starting treatment, according to the WTA report.
Long waits for critical treatment are inevitable in government-run health care systems for one simple reason: Making health care “free” creates an infinite demand for medical services. But no country can satisfy an infinite demand, so government bureaucrats always end up rationing health care. Long lines of people waiting for services are the result. It’s the same process that produced long waiting lines for decades in the Soviet Union for basic necessities like bread and housing.
Obamacare advocates can only hope their friends in the mainstream media do a better job of carrying their water for them in the weeks ahead than The New York Times and CBS with their latest poll. Using a sample with exactly twice as many Obama voters as McCain voters, the Times/CBS pollsters got a result in which 57 percent of their respondents said they would pay higher taxes “so that all Americans have health insurance that they can’t lose no matter what.” But, as anybody who has taken a basic statistics course knows, a warped sample and an “apples-to-oranges” comparison has zero credibility.
