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Ask any of those countries if they would exchange the US health care wealth-extraction system (pre-ACA) for than their own.
Obamacare: The Unimaginable Suffering That Awaits Us
Posted By John Perazzo On November 5, 2013 @ 12:43 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 35 Comments
There is a vital reason for all Americans to take a close look at how, specifically, the various government-run, single-payer healthcare systems around the world have already affected the lives of the people living under them. This is vital because Barack Obama and the Democrats actually have their sights set on creating precisely such a system here in the United States. For them, Obamacare is, and always has been, nothing more than a stepping stone toward their ultimate goal of a single-payer leviathan administered entirely by the federal government. Indeed, they’ve been quite clear about their intentions:
• In early August, Senator Harry Reid was asked whether his goal was to eventually use Obamacare as a springboard to a single-payer system. “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes,” he replied. “What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever.”
• In late October, Rep. John Conyers stated that Obamacare was just “a very small and modest bill,” and that Congressional Democrats were already contemplating ways to pass “universal healthcare for everybody, single payer.” “That’s what the new direction is,” Conyers affirmed, even as the supposedly “small and modest” Obamacare project was proving to be nothing more than a colossal lie administered with inexpressible incompetence.
• Nancy Pelosi, too, is on record stating: “I have supported single payer for longer than many of you have been—since you’ve been born, than you’ve lived on the face of the earth. So I think, I have always thought, that was the way to go.”
• Kathleen Sebelius, the chief architect of Obamacare’s pathetic rollout last month, has candidly declared herself to be “all for a single-payer [healthcare] system eventually.” On October 7, she told interviewer Jon Stewart that “if we could have perhaps figured out a pathway [to single-payer], that may have been a reasonable solution.”
And of course President Obama himself has been unambiguous about his own views on this matter:
• At an AFL-CIO conference in 2003, Obama said: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care plan…. ‘Everybody in. Nobody out.’ … That’s what I’d like to see, but as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.”
• At an SEIU Health Care Forum on March 24, 2007, Obama declared: “My commitment is to make sure that we’ve got universal healthcare for all Americans by the end of my first term as President…. But I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be, potentially, some transition process. I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out …”
• On August 4, 2007, Obama announced that he planned to pass healthcare reform legislation and then “build off that system to … make it more rational.” “By the way,” he added, “Canada did not start off immediately with a single payer system. They had a similar transition step.”
• In the summer of 2008, Obama said: “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system.”
• And in June 2009, Obama told an American Medical Association audience that “there are countries where a single-payer system works pretty well.”
So, now that we know definitively what Obama and the Democrats ultimately want, let us look at the track record of single-payer systems around the world, so that we can see exactly what is in store for us if we follow the counsel of these masterminds. A monumentally important 2008 Cato Ins ute study offers keen insights into those systems:
Great Britain
Under Britain’s highly centralized National Health Service (NHS), some 750,000 ailing and desperate people are currently on waiting lists for admission to a hospital. More than half of all British patients must wait more than 18 weeks to receive care of any kind. For most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within that time frame. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is just 20 percent. Cancer patients must sometimes wait as long as eight months for treatment, and roughly 40 percent of them never even get to see an oncologist. Many who were considered treatable when first diagnosed are incurable by the time their treatment is finally made available. Indeed, this is the sad fate of nearly one-in-five Britons with colon cancer. In addition, many life-saving procedures such as kidney dialysis and open-heart surgery are subject to explicit rationing, and treatment is often denied altogether to patients who are judged too ill or too old for the procedures to be worth the costs.
Canada
Physicians and modern medical equipment (such as MRI units and CT scanners) are in short supply nationwide, and at any given time as many as 800,000 Canadians are awaiting necessary medical treatment. Across all specialties and all procedures (emergency, non-urgent, and elective), it takes an average of 17.7 weeks for a patient to go through the process of seeing his or her general prac ioner (GP), getting a referral to consult with a specialist, and receiving final treatment. And that figure does not even include the time a patient must wait to see a GP in the first place. Canada’s longest waiting periods are for procedures such as hip or knee replacements and cataract surgery, which could arguably be classified as elective. According to the journal Health Affairs, a 65-year-old Canadian man requiring a routine hip replacement must wait more than six months for this surgery. In August 2006, then-Canadian Medical Association president Brian Day lamented that “this is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week, and in which humans can wait two to three years.”
There are likewise protracted waiting periods for more urgent procedures such as neurosurgery and vascular surgery, where delays can dramatically affect a patient’s chances of survival. A study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal noted that 50 patients in Ontario alone had recently died while they were on the waiting list for cardiac catheterization. In an address to the Canadian Ins ute for Health Information, University of Ottawa Heart Ins ute cardiologist Richard F. Davies noted that in a single year, 71 Ontario patients had died before being able to undergo coronary artery bypass graft surgery, while another 121 had been “removed from the [waiting] list permanently because they had become medically unfit for surgery,” and 44 others had left the province to have their surgery performed elsewhere—usually in the United States.
Italy
Because cutting-edge instruments such as MRI units and CT scanners in Italy are in short supply as compared to the United States, Italian patients must wait, on average, 70 days for a mammogram, 74 days for an endoscopy, and 23 days for a sonogram. Moreover, the nation’s public hospitals are largely considered substandard, unsanitary, and overcrowded.
Spain
Because Spain has a severe shortage of primary care physicians and nurses, patients are not free to select their own healthcare providers. Rather, they are assigned a primary care doctor from a list of physicians in their local community, and if they need more specialized care, they must obtain a referral from that doctor. On average, Spaniards must wait approximately 65 days to get an appointment with a specialist—including, for instance, 81 days to see a gynecologist and 71 days to see a neurologist. Similarly, they must wait an average of 62 days for a prostectomy and 123 days for hip-replacement surgery. And a number of vital health services that U.S. citizens take for granted—such as rehabilitation, convalescence, and care for those with terminal illness—are virtually unavailable in Spain, where public nursing homes, retirement homes, ho es, and convalescence facilities are in limited supply.
Portugal
Portugal has only one general prac ioner per 1,500 people in its population, and only about one-seventh as many MRI units per capita as the United States. Thus, despite guarantees of “universal coverage,” waiting lists are so long and so prevalent that the European Observatory on Health Systems says that they resemble “de facto rationing.” More than 150,000 Portuguese are currently on waiting lists for surgery, out of a population of just 10.6 million. Further, there is little freedom to choose one’s own doctor anywhere in the country; patients may change their GP only by applying in writing to the NHS and explaining their reasons.
Norway
Long and growing waiting lists are a serious problem in Norway, where citizens must consult a government list in order to choose a general prac ioner who subsequently acts as a gatekeeper for whatever specialty services and providers they may need. On any given day, some 280,000 Norwegians (out of a population of just 4.6 million) are waiting for care. The average wait for hip-replacement surgery is more than four months; for a prostectomy, nearly three months; and for a hysterectomy, more than two months. Approximately 23 percent of all patients referred for hospital admission must wait longer than 90 days before they can be admitted.
Greece
Greece has fewer than one-eighth the number of general prac ioners that would be required to meet the overall population’s demand. Patients routinely wait as long as six months for surgery, five months for an outpatient appointment with specialists in fields like hypertension or neurology, and 30 days for just a simple blood test. The country’s public hospitals are widely considered substandard; most suffer from severe staffing shortages caused, in large part, by low pay.
Cuba
Leftists revere Communist Cuba for numerous reasons, not the least of which is the government-run, universal healthcare system that was put in place by Fidel Castro. Many of these admirers—among the most notable of whom is the filmmaker Michael Moore—form their impressions of the Cuban healthcare system from its tourist hospitals, which are, by any standards, clean, well staffed, and of excellent quality. Indeed Cuba, in an effort to attract wealthy foreigners who are willing to spend their money on healthcare services, has pioneered the practice of so-called “health tourism” through agencies such as SERVIMED, which markets Cuban medical services abroad. Calling Cuba “the ideal destination for your health,” SERVIMED frankly admits to being “a tourist subsystem.”
But after providing for the needs of affluent foreigners (and of the country’s top government officials), the Cuban healthcare system has little left for the general public. Hospitals for ordinary Cubans are typically unsanitary. Syringes are frequently used to inject multiple patients without any sterilization, and “disposable” gloves are likewise used and reused. Consequently, infectious diseases such an impetigo and hepa is—and infestations such as scabies, lice and fungal diseases—are commonplace in the Cuban hospital population.
Moreover, Cuban hospitals have serious shortages of antibiotics, insulin, heart drugs, blood-pressure meters, disinfectants, and even clean water and soap.
It is noteworthy that in the pre-Castro years of the 1950s, the Cuban population as a whole had access to outstanding medical care through association clinics (clinicas mutualistas) which predated the American concept of health maintenance organizations by decades, as well as through private clinics. At that time the Cuban medical system ranked among the best in the world, as evidenced by the fact that it had Latin America’s lowest infant-mortality rate—comparable to Canada’s and better than those of France, Japan, and Italy.
So the evidence is crystal clear. As the Cato Ins ute puts it, “In countries weighted heavily toward government control, people are most likely to face waiting lists, rationing, restrictions on physician choice, and other obstacles to care.” By contrast, “those countries with national health care systems that work better, such as France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, are successful to the degree that they incorporate market mechanisms such as compe ion, cost-consciousness, market prices, and consumer choice, and eschew centralized government control. In other words, socialized medicine works—as long as it isn’t socialized medicine.”
Yet socialized medicine is precisely the direction in which Obama and Democrats wish, beyond any shadow of a doubt, to steer the United States of America. What, then, does this tell us about the judgment and the motivations of these men and women?
Some questions simply answer themselves.
Don’t miss this week’s Glazov Gang, which explores To Lie for ObamaCare.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/john-pe...aits-us/print/
Ask any of those countries if they would exchange the US health care wealth-extraction system (pre-ACA) for than their own.
Read the articles I posted before calling me a liar, tbh....
I'm not ignoring the ACA site, nor is it "giving away" personal info. iow, You Lie
It's displaying people's personal info to complete strangers via a glitch in the coding, and Sebilius admitted that ex-convicts could get access to people's personal info as Obamacare "explorers," tbh.... anyone who willingly gives their info to that website is a complete moron
ok, now thats funny.
+1
What’s Behind the Rate-Shock-Victim Obsession
CNN’s Jake Tapper obtained the memo. Here is how he described it: “Officials expressed concern that the next shoe to drop in the evolving story about the Affordable Care Act would be disappointment from consumers once they are able to get on the troubled Healthcare.gov website — disappointment because of sticker shock and limited choice.” Notice the crucial difference in framing. The memo simply acknowledged that in some cases — a caveat that appeared twice — consumers would have fewer options and higher prices than the administration would like. In CNN’s characterization, the caveat disappears altogether. Tapper portrays the problem as “disappointment from consumers,” writ large. The minority facing sticker shock has become a stand-in for the entire public.
This turns out to be a synecdoche for the entire Obamacare narrative now.
The world of the Republican Party’s fever dreams has sprung to life in the mainstream media, where the Affordable Care Act now exists primarily as a series of cruel, oppressive acts of theft against innocent Americans.
Here areCBS News, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post chronicling the parade of horribles.
The stories often turn out to be either more complicated than initially depicted, or wildly overblown. But it is surely true that some people will find themselves worse off, at least immediately, under the new law. That their fate has blotted out everything else about the law explains why health-care reform is so maddeningly difficult to enact in the first place.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...obsession.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ce...b_4229439.htmlAnother Obamacare 'Horror Story' Debunked; and, No, the President Didn't Lie About the Law
As the week began, another "Obamacare" horror story hit the press, instigating a fleet of outrage-pornographers and concern trolls across the political spectrum to continue self-flagellating and screeching about the disastrous Affordable Care Act -- selectively forgetting about actual healthcare horror stories that existed before the law was implemented. It was a story focusing on yet another vague, anecdotal tale about a hapless ACA victim whose insurance policy was canceled, thus vindicating the accusation that the president lied about "keeping your existing insurance policy if you like it."
Before we dive into the lie accusation, let's take a closer look at an op/ed for the Wall Street Journal written by a stage-4 gallbladder cancer survivor, Edie Littlefield Sundby.
Sundby wrote that she received a letter from UnitedHealthcare announcing the cancellation of her insurance policy. She was advised to seek a different plan from the ACA exchange in California, known as Cover California. However, she claimed that there aren't any insurance plans in the exchange that are accepted by both her primary care doctors at University of California San Diego, and her oncologists at and Stanford, thus forcing her to choose one or the other.
But here's the thing: Sundby wasn't shoved into this predicament because the ACA law forced her insurance provider out of the ballgame. UnitedHealthcare, one of the most notorious insurance providers before the ACA was passed, responsible for canceling policies and penalizing customers, decided to voluntarily bail out of the individual insurance game as a matter of corporate strategy. In doing so, it could avoid taking on less healthy customers early in the exchange sign-up process, forcing other insurers to absorb the risk. Clever. And sinister.
UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Officer Stephen Helmsley said, "The company's plans reflect its concern that the first wave of newly insured customers under the law may be the costliest." He continued, "UnitedHealth will watch and see how the exchanges evolve and expects the first enrollees will have 'a pent-up appe e' for medical care. We are approaching them with some degree of caution because of that." A pent-up appe e -- you know, to not go broke while attempting to not die.
As you probably recall from the days before the ACA was passed, scores of customers were stripped of their insurance policies, many while suffering from life-threatening illnesses. The difference back then was once they'd lose their insurance, they were unable to qualify for a new policy due to rules against pre-existing conditions. That's thankfully not the case with Sundby -- not after the passage of the ACA, not any more. While she might be forced to switch emergency care facilities or to a new team of oncologists, she will absolutely be able to sign up for a new policy with better benefits thanks to the ACA. Conversely, four years ago, when UnitedHealthcare and others were pulling these exact same kinds of profit-making stunts, she would've faced bankruptcy or death or both, unable to sign up for a replacement policy.
These are details not mentioned in context of the "Obama lied" story.
Indeed, going back to 2009, the president continuously reassured individual policy holders that if they liked their current insurance, they could keep it. On Monday's edition of Morning Joe, they aired a series of clips of the president saying in various forms, "If you like your plan you can keep it." This promise hasn't actually panned out exactly as originally conceived, forcing Mika Brzezinski to literally smack herself in the face with a stack of paper. Brzezinski continued by shouting at panelist Chris Matthews, "Why would you let your president go out and say that?!" During the ensuing melee, Scarborough held up Sundby's WSJ op/ed, "There's this story in the Wall Street Journal about a lady with stage-4 cancer that's been kicked off her plan!"
Once again, no. The ACA didn't force Sundby off her plan. UnitedHealthcare's profit margin was the culprit here. But regarding this alleged lie, the president was actually correct given the language of the law.
The Affordable Care Act, as signed by the president in 2010, states quite clearly that if your individual health insurance plan was in effect prior to March 23, 2010, your plan would be grandfathered as-is, despite new rules that expand mandatory benefits and ban practices such as lifetime limits. In other words, if you signed up for an insurance policy before March of 2010, and if you like that policy, you could ostensibly keep it. It's in the law.
However, an implementation rule was added later by Health & Human Services which narrowed the grandfathering parameters. If the benefits of a policy were altered after that date, those policies would lose grandfathered status. Meanwhile, HHS determined that up to 67 percent of customers would lose their plans, but only as a reflection of normal trends in the system -- not as the result of a sudden drop off due to the ACA.
So when the president said, "If you like your insurance you can keep it," he meant that the law itself wouldn't force you to call up your insurance provider and cancel your policy if you liked it. Nor was he suggesting that an insurance company would be compelled by the law to keep you as a customer for life, irrespective of cir stances. While the law in fact prohibits the cancellation of a plan if you're suddenly sick or injured, or if you make a mistake on your application -- two common occurrences before the ACA -- you can still lose your plan if you fail to pay your premium or if you lie on your paperwork.
Here's the kicker. The law absolutely prohibits arbitrary cancellations -- except for grandfathered plans like Sundby's UnitedHealthcare plan. Frankly, switching to a Cover California plan might be the best thing for Sundby because her grandfathered plan likely included lifetime and annual limits on coverage (bad news for cancer patients); it wasn't required to comply with government audits to prevent excessive premium hikes; and it could've randomly forced her to change doctors anyway.
Now let's be honest: did the president and especially HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius do a terrible job explaining the law? Absolutely. The roll-out of the website has been a disaster and Sebelius completely botched the implementation of the law then bungled a crucial appearance on The Daily Show.
Granted, it's no easy task to fully explain a sweeping new program like the ACA, especially given the complexities of the health insurance system. But when I read blog commenters who are doing a better job at detailing the law than the administration has, I can't help but to think the Obama team is inadvertently sabotaging one of its biggest accomplishments by derping its way through the process. Meanwhile, the press and the GOP has been nefariously seizing upon the confusion and amplifying it into a melodramatic scape, which, in reality, is far from being an accurate illustration of reality. In spite of its flaws, the ACA is an historic achievement and if these issues can be ironed out soon, and if the administration can get back in the ballgame, the ACA will surely live up to its potential.
Context and subtlety is everything.
Yet another over-simplification turned into a misleading political meme. Sadly par for the course these days.
Lol, Bob Cesca
Repugs are GLEEful that healthcare.gov is destroying Obama and ACA, but that's just another fevered Repug/tea bagger fantasy
Polls: Obamacare's Troubled Rollout Has Not Changed Public Opinion
Republicans are convinced that the Affordable Care Act will sink Democrats, but there's little evidence that the law's bumpy rollout has caused a shift in public opinion.
Quite simply, polling looks virtually the same as it did before the law's glitch-filled launch became the subject of congressional hearings and the butt of late night and country music jokes.
Consider Gallup's findings released last week. In a poll conducted Oct. 26-28 -- weeks after the troubled website HealthCare.gov went live on Oct. 1 -- 44 percent of Americans said they approved of the law while 47 percent said they disapproved.
Those numbers differ only slightly from Gallup's poll conducted Oct. 18-20, which found 45 percent approving of the law and 50 percent disapproving.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/poll...public-opinion
earlier polling that included why of the disapprovals, about 10% said ACA didn't go far enough.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 11-07-2013 at 05:52 PM.
Obama lied. No ifs, ands, or buts. He needs to man up and admit it. Sadly, that will not happen because he is a greedy pussy mother er that only cares about the amount of money he has just like every politician.
sorry ass msm CNN just said he made an apology lol
not genuine of course, and will be spun by fake liberals tbh
If he was really sorry, he would willingly give up his King like healthcare and replace it with some ty plan under Obamacare.
Sad mem about the Obama lied GOP scare tactic...people with pre-existing conditions would have no options without the ACA, plus her ty coverage would have bankrupted her...As you probably recall from the days before the ACA was passed, scores of customers were stripped of their insurance policies, many while suffering from life-threatening illnesses. The difference back then was once they'd lose their insurance, they were unable to qualify for a new policy due to rules against pre-existing conditions. That's thankfully not the case with Sundby -- not after the passage of the ACA, not any more. While she might be forced to switch emergency care facilities or to a new team of oncologists, she will absolutely be able to sign up for a new policy with better benefits thanks to the ACA. Conversely, four years ago, when UnitedHealthcare and others were pulling these exact same kinds of profit-making stunts, she would've faced bankruptcy or death or both, unable to sign up for a replacement policy
LOL ad hominem.
Bob Cesca is basically boutons, sans Tourette Syndrome.
How exactly does that make him wrong about anything? Be specific.
There should be a rule that if you need to paste and copy your opinion you automatically lose the argument.
good policy. I cut and paste ARTICLES and support them with my own opinions, and defend them SUCCESSFULLY against You People.
I'm going to laugh when the same millennials that voted Obama in end up sinking the ACA by refusing to sign up.
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