“Big hearts and no brain activity leads to terrible outcomes. Think, people! If a consummate, pathological liar is the one promoting something, do you really think it’s going to be good for you? Once government makes all the decisions on who gets care and when, you’ll have nowhere to turn—even if you have the money to pay.” Bob Allen, Political Outcast
The Telegraph reports that death panels in Britain are working just fine. “Almost 40 per cent of elderly people who would have qualified for care in recent years are now excluded after social workers were ordered to apply tougher eligibility tests,” unofficially, of course. A recent report by researchers at the London School of Economics, describes vast cuts in the last two years as “without precedent in the history of adult social care,” as they warn that the British NHS is caught in a “vicious circle” of abandoning the care of the elderly and disabled.
The researchers warn that by the time the government overhauls the NHS, which includes a national £72,000 cap on the cost of care, about $118,000 in U.S. dollars, set to go into effect in 2016, the cuts will be imposed on a system “whose foundations have already been seriously eroded”.
In a shadow of things to come under ObamaCare, doctors in Britain were complaining this summer that their country’s £5.6 billion publicly funded National Health Service (NHS) was “worse than Communist China.” Doctor’s are fed-up with NHS unelected bureaucrats [death panels] overriding their medical decisions, “bullying” doctors and putting money concerns before patient care. Doctors also accused successive governments of a “war of attrition” on district general hospitals.
But even with all the cost cutting, compromising of patients’ health, and using their controversial “death pathway” as a means of euthanasia to cut cost for elderly care, the NHS is about to run out of funds. By 2020, the largest single-payer healthcare system in the world will be running a deficit six times larger than its annual operating budget, forcing the closure of up to 20 percent of Britain’s hospitals, which are already inundated with patients seeking free care.
The problems with “socialized medicine” isn’t confined just to Britain. Canada’s single-payer, government-run system, where any private health care is outlawed under the Canada Health Act, is similarly failing its patients.
What the left refuses to see or admit is that production of health care services involves resources and those resources cost money and the true costs of those resources will not be reduced under Obamacare. History has shown that government produces waste, cost over-runs and more importantly, fraud because they have no incentive to do otherwise.
When demand exceeds supply, our government will have no other choice but to resort to cuts in services provided through the use of unelected bureaucrats (death panels) just as they have in Britain. Unfortunately, these cuts in services and reimbursements to doctors and hospitals will lead to a shortage of qualified doctors and hospitals, as well as diminish the quality of care patients receive, just as they have in Britain. And as government continues to twist the arms of insurers through regulations, mandates and price controls, more insurers will leave the market place, forcing consumers into the waiting arms of government.
Like Socialized medicine in Britain and Canada, ObamaCare may “guarantee” access to care — but that doesn’t mean patients will actually receive it.
“Obamacare posed as a free-market alternative to a British-style single-payer system. Then, during congressional debate, the White House ostentatiously rejected the so-called “public option.” But that’s irrelevant. The whole damn thing is the public option. The federal government now runs the insurance market, dictating deadlines, procedures, rates, risk assessments and coverage requirements. It’s gotten so cocky it’s now telling insurers to cover the claims that, by law, they are not required to. Welcome 2014, our first taste of nationalized health care.” Charles Krauthammer
