ObamaCare? Ask the British and Canadians by Larry Elder
The Bear on Aug 31 2009 at 7:24 am | Filed under: Health Care
“We spend more on health care than most other countries.” “We need to bring costs down.”
To address these complaints, enter ObamaCare — which may or may not include a “public option” or a taxpayer-assisted “co-op” to keep insurance companies “honest.” But do countries with government-run health care succeed in retaining high quality while “bringing costs down”?
What about England?
Civitas, a nonpartisan British think tank, recently scolded the British National Health Service (NHS) for “putting the patient last.” Why? Civitas blames the government-run health care system’s monolithic nature, lack of competition, and the burdensome and wasteful regulation, redundancy, oversight and meddling by government — including some 69 public bodies besides the Department of Health, such as the Care Quality Commission and the Environment Agency. This means the NHS serves the bureaucrat, not the patient.
What about our neighbor to the north, Canada?
After all, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said that if “starting from scratch,” he’d emulate their “single-payer,” government-run system. Tell that to the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association, the equivalent of the American Medical Association. “We all agree that the system is imploding. We all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize,” she said.
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