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Story originally printed in the Winona Daily News or online at www.winonadailynews.com

Published - Monday, April 14, 2008

Guest view: Hopping down the bunny trail of socialized medicine

By Stan Gudmundson | Winona

If the so-called single-payer system is merely a pass-through method whereby the government makes no decisions whatsoever and will never ever make any healthcare decisions, then proponents could possibly make the case that their scheme isn’t socialism. However, if bureaucrats or politicians make the decisions about how much we spend or are involved with allocating resources, then the scheme is a government monopoly. That is socialism.

Socialism has gotten a bad name for good reason. It doesn’t work. Never has and never will. It is what it is.

I am absolutely certain that every American would like all of us to have the best possible health care. Unfortunately there isn’t an infinite amount of health care available. Given finite health care resources, our basic options are simple: We allow the free market to allocate those scarce resources or we let government do it.

One of the problems with health care is that it is open-ended. No one anywhere is against a good health care system. But how much is enough, and who defines it? In a socialized system, the government decides. In a market system, the market decides. And the only way we can a obtain a true picture of the costs of anything is through a market system. Socialist monopolies haven’t a clue.

Dr. David Gratzer, a Canadian physician now working in the U.S., says that socialized medicine proponents fall into two camps. He calls one group “magicians” because they believe that the solution to health care utopia is great administrators. The other group, the “spendthrifts” are convinced that spending lots of money is the key.

A significant problem for single-payer proponents is that there aren’t any socialized health care systems that work well. The National Health Systems of both Canada and Great Britain, for example, are in deep, deep trouble. Consequently, there has been a move toward private medical practice. Even the French have good private hospitals. People with any kind of money don’t use the national health systems. True, they are “free,” but there aren’t adequate resources.

According to the latest data I have, there are 13.6 CT scanners for every million Americans but only 8.2 in Canada and 6.5 in the United Kingdom. The U.S. has 8.1 MRI units per million while Canada has 2.5 and the UK has 3.9. In Canada, it takes on average 2½ years to be tested for sleep apnea. In British Columbia, MRIs cannot be used except between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., even though there is a patient waiting list. And the bureaucrats won’t let technicians extend the hours. Costs, you know.

Survival rates ought to be a major criteria for any decisions concerning a move to socialized medicine. But if you look at socialized programs, we find that their citizens don’t get nearly the care we get here in the U.S. Breast cancer survival rates for U.S. women are 80 percent but 67 percent in France and Germany, and 50 percent in the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Eighty percent of U.S. men with prostate cancer survive, compared with 75 percent in Canada and less than 50 percent in Britain.

In the U.S., there are five times as many coronary bypass procedures done as there are in Canada and three times as many as in England. Want more? There is lots more documenting socialized medicine’s failures.

One of the common rejoinders socialist proponents almost always make is that U.S. life expectancy is lower than many other countries. Comparing raw data to raw data, that is true, but when our social pathologies and accident and homicide rates and a host of other things are factored in, the U.S. actually has the highest life expectancy in the world.

Stewart Shaw says, “For every Canadian health care access horror story, our American system has failed to serve at least one patient.”

Really? Then how does

he explain the differences in survival rates or medical procedures accomplished? He can’t. The real horror stories are reflected in the differences in survival rates. Our survival rates are higher because we have more resources available, lead the world in medical technology and do not (actually cannot in our emergency rooms) turn away citizens if they need help even if they don’t have insurance.

There is no doubt that health care here in America is in a critical state. But it is not so critical that it cannot be made worse by socializing it. There are an abundant number of options we ought to pursue first. The fact is, even without health insurance, the vast majority of our citizens are better off than people in national health service systems.

But if we are to seriously consider socialized medicine, its proponents should be required to, at the very least, point to a system in another country that works so well that we can emulate it. In addition, that particular system must have survival rates and health care availability that is equal to or better than we have now here in the United States. And until proponents can do that, there is absolutely no point in even considering going down this bunny trail.