Gird Yer Loins, Government Run Health Care This Way Cometh

by Melissa Clouthier | June 9, 2009 10:13 am

It’s a health-care palooza over at American Issues Project today, my column included. Here’s a snippet:[1]

Here is my concern about the health care legislation: While people will start sifting through the details of the legislation, the most important message of all will likely get lost: With fewer employed people, with less tax revenue, America cannot afford the spending we are currently endeavoring. Adding another government program is state-icide.

In the case of health care, Americans are wise to keep the big picture. The minutia of these pieces of legislation will have some good and bad sounding ideas but it’s all irrelevant. Money must exist for these programs. And there isn’t any money.

Jim Hoft, aka Gateway Pundit[2], talks about government run health care and breast cancer:

Currently the United States leads the world in treating breast cancer. Women with breast cancer have a 14 percent higher survival rate in the United States than in Europe. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Breast cancer mortality is also 9 percent higher in Canada than in the US. Less than 25 percent of U.S. women die from breast cancer. In Britain, it’s 46 percent; France, 35 percent; Germany, 31 percent; Canada, 28 percent; Australia, 28 percent, and New Zealand, 46 percent. The European Network of Cancer Registries reported:

Breast cancer is also the most common cancer in females in Europe. It is estimated that in the year 2000 there were 350,000 new breast cancer cases in Europe, while the number of deaths from breast cancer was estimated at 130,000. Breast cancer is responsible for 26.5 percent of all new cancer cases among women in Europe, and 17.5 percent of cancer deaths.

In Britain, where they enjoy socialized medicine, breast cancer rates have soared by more than 80 percent in the past 30 years under their system. A big reason for this is early diagnosis. Nine of 10 middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to less than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent). Women who develop breast cancer in Europe are four times more likely to be diagnosed when the tumor has spread and survival is less likely than are women in the US.

And finally, another American Issues writer John Beski[3] compares Social Security at its formation and government-run health care now:

A few decades ago, some folks in the federal government decided that pretty much everybody was incapable of saving money: so incapable, in fact, that the government decided that it would force us all to save for our own retirement. So, since 1935, the government has taken some money out of each of our paychecks and saves it for us, so we won’t be poor when we retire. To be fair, a lot of people don’t save as much as they should, but some of the very basic problems inherent to the Social Security system mean that many of us may never again see the money that’s left out of our checks on pay day.

Social Security has been one of the biggest undertakings of the government in the past century, and at the present it will become insolvent and fail well before this humble writer is even close to retirement. Many of the underlying problems with Social Security would likely come up in any socialized health care system. The different circumstances of 1935 and 2009 account for much of the reason that Social Security is failing. When some politicians start crafting health care plans, they would do well to remember this fact and that they are not magical seers.