For Canada’s Sake, We Must Preserve Free Market Health Care in America

Jessica Peck Corry has a great article on socialized health care at Human Events today.

She examines the Canadian socialist health care system to illustrate where President Obama and his fellow Marxist are hell-bent to take America.

Enter Rick Baker, a Canadian determined to improve health care in his country. Baker joined Gilbert Monday at a Vancouver hotel to speak with American reporters as part of a health care dialogue organized by the Colorado-based Independence Institute, a free market think tank where I am a public policy analyst.

Baker began by offering a blunt disclosure. “I make my living sending patients to the U.S.,” he said. “This is medical tourism, but instead of sending someone to Thailand, we’re sending them to Delaware.”

Through an innovative partnership with 22 independent American surgery centers and doctors in 13 states, Baker and his American counterparts transport Canadians to the U.S. for timely care at cost savings up to 80 percent. The partnership operates largely outside the traditional health insurance system. And this isn’t just about helping Canadians. Baker now also provides a similar state-to-state service for Americans seeking more affordable or timely care.

Under Canada’s controversial federal health legislation, surgeons are prohibited from charging patients to provide “medically necessary” treatment. In addition, they are limited to performing surgeries to six hours a week. Gilbert recalled one surgeon telling her, “I spend six hours in surgery each week, less time than I spend explaining to sick patients why I can’t perform theirs.”

At least Canadians have some outlet, some relief valve through which to escape socialist morass and mediocrity. The poor British (I lived there for three years and was treated by their National Health Service) have nowhere else to turn–mainland Europe is even further down the road of socialism than they are.

Speaking of Canada’s system, I’ve visited Canada a couple of systems and seen a bit of how things work there, though not nearly as intimately as I did the British system.  But my wife and I have some Canadian friends who came to visit us for a couple of weeks several years ago, and something that happened while they were here illustrates one of the key reasons socialist health care systems don’t work well.

While I took about a week off while our Canadian friends were staying with us, I ran out of vacation time and had to go back to work before they left.  While at work, I got a call from my wife and one of our Canadian friends about something that had happened to my son that morning.  It was a relatively insignificant injury which, had I been there, I could have taken care of in 60 seconds and sent my little guy on his merry way playing again.  I tried to tell my Canadian friend (who was trying to be helpful and look out for my family in my absence) what he could do to remedy things, but he was politely insistent that I needed to take my son to the hospital.  After several attempts to explain this to him over the phone and soothe my Canadian friend, I finally gave up and drove home from work to demonstrate that 60 seconds of “home health care” and then go back to work.

You see, my Canadian friend (like many people in “free” socialist health care systems) was used to employing the health care system for things that most Americans simply deal with on their own. We don’t see the need to waste hours out of our day to have a medical professional do what we could do for ourselves–all because it’s “free.”  This widespread attitude leads to trivial but massive overload of the health care system…leaving the system incapable of dealing with the serious health issues of others.

This brings us to a point in the article that gets close to the heart of why socialists systems never work.

The Vancouver gathering came as President Barack Obama continues his push to radically expand the role of government in administering American health care. But participants weren’t just focused on bashing Canada as a role model. It was also about explaining that America’s health care woes don’t come from an absence of government, but rather too much government and not enough consumer choice.

“The Canadian system is a Ponzi scheme is that is just a little further along ours,” explained Dr. Keith Smith, an Oklahoma anesthesiologist who partners with Baker and manages his own outpatient surgery center. Baker believes real change will come only when patients are given the incentive to help control costs, freed from being forced to blindly abide by the decisions of insurance companies.

Ponzi schemes (which is all socialism is, really) will work only so long as the contributors greatly outnumber the consumers. And with human nature being what it is, some are going to consume at ghastly and wasteful rates that quickly throw the system off kilter. And it isn’t long after that many of the contributors start to see they are working hard to contribute to a system where others take and take and take, and the contributors get very little for their effort. When these awakening contributors realize this, they often slow down or quit contributing to join the gravy train.

We’ve seen this with Canada’s health care system.

We’ve seen this with England’s health care system.

We’ve seen this with Sweden’s health care system.

We’ve seen this with France’s health care system.

We see this in every Marxist/socialist system that’s ever been tried around the world, including the former Soviet Union.

We saw this when the Pilgrims tried it in America.

We’ve seen it with Massachussett’s socialist health care system.

We’ve seen it with America’s Social Security and other welfare systems–that are all inefficient, wasteful and going broke.

Why, why, why do we never seem to learn?!

Why are some among us always so arrogant to think that somehow they can find the magic angle to make something work that generations of human beings around the world have never been able to make work?

It’s because as with most issues on the Left, liberals fail to understand human nature, or refuse to understand it. And in doing so, they are dangerously close to dragging down the greatest nation in history to socialist mediocrity and probable oblivion.

We must turn around 180 degrees from the schemes of President Obama and run as fast as we can away from them…and toward free market solutions that empower consumers, encourage competition, reduce costs, and are in harmony with the economic principles that made America the most prosperous nation in history.

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