Brit MEP warns of dangers of socialized medicine
MEP Mr. Daniel Hannan
Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP for the South East of England and author of The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain. He is an outspoken admirer of the US Constitution, Jeffersonian democracy and de-centralization of government power. He became a bit of a sensation when he responded to Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s speech before the European Parliament March 24, 2009. The entire Hannan speech was put on YouTube and quickly went viral. It was the most watched video in the UK within a week and now has logged almost 2.5 million views.
Some of Hannan’s comments could equally apply to the American president and his cadre of sycophantic legislators, Chicago hooligans and union thugs.
“The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money…
“Prime Minister, you cannot carry on for ever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit. You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re ‘well-placed to weather the storm’, I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line. “
MEP Hannan was a guest on Glenn Beck’s show last evening speaking about the National Health Service in Great Britain and warning Americans about the dangerous potential expansion of governmental power that we are currently debating. He made a few comments that literally stunned me. I was unsure of the accuracy of his statements so went to the NHS web site and found that the same facts were proudly proclaimed there, to wit:
The NHS in Great Britain is the third largest employer in the world behind the Peoples Army of Communist China and the Indian National Railways! It employs “over 1.5 million people. This translates to 2.5% of the population of Great Britain employed by the National Health Service. The same percentage in the US would amount to 7.5 million Americans. And who’s to say we’d keep it to only 2.5%? Is it now clear why the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been so active in this debate, even to the point of acting as enforcers at town hall meetings and roughing up people that oppose Obamacare? The SEIU now has a membership of about 2 million dues paying members but with Obamacare the numbers would instantly swell by at least 337%! And that is why the “card check” legislation is so important, so that all these new government employees would almost certainly “vote” yes for unionization under SEIU.
The NIH claims that the cost of the program in Great Britain is $151 billion per year (for 61 million people) and amounts to £1500 ($2500) in additional taxes per man, woman and child, or $10,000 for a family of four per year; over 60% of the monies going for non-medical expenditures (mostly salaries of bureaucrats, administrators and clerical personnel).
By way of defending the program’s costs and limitations the NHS web site also claims that “in the UK life expectancy has been rising and infant mortality has been falling since the NHS was established. Both figures compare favourably with other nations.” Perhaps, but life expectancy and infant mortality are very poor indicators of the quality or even the availability of health care.
Life expectancy is commonly used as a measure of health care by those wishing to portray the medical system in the U.S. in the worst possible light. The term is poorly understood by most people. Life expectancy is simply the average number of years of life remaining at a given age. In common use it refers to life expectancy at birth, which is nothing more sophisticated than an average age of death from all causes in a population. Infant death, childhood illnesses, injuries, auto accidents, drug overdoses, smoking cigarettes, alcohol abuse, murder and war deaths all go to compute the life expectancy at birth. Many of these causes of death have nothing to do with health care. We could provide everyone with full, free medical care for life and not make much more than a dent in life expectancy.
Infant mortality is defined as the number of deaths of infants (up to one year of age) per 1000 live births. This number too is affected by many societal problems having little to do with doctors or medical care. Drug and alcohol abuse, smoking, teenage pregnancies, premature births, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care (by choice), violence and auto accidents all contribute to the statistics and when these factors are accounted for we discover that the United States has an infant mortality rate that is in line with or better than most Western industrialized nations.
As Mark Twin wrote, (and attributed to Disraeli) “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Case in point.
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