Utopia: An impractical scheme for social improvement.
If you’ve been gathering petition signatures to refer the expansion of Arizona’s Medicaid program to the ballot, you’ve heard some people smugly respond, "I’m for ObamaCare"! I think everybody should have free health care." Sometimes they will cite how their friends in England and Canada love their health care system, and how their government-run emphasis on preventive care catches diseases before they grow serious enough to require drastic medical intervention.
What they don’t talk about is how the National Health Service cares for people when they are sick, or how long they have to wait for an appointment to treat illnesses. Keep in mind that most people are healthy anyway. So, if your friends haven’t been really sick, how would they know how good their medical system is?
Having a health care system available doesn’t mean you have timely access to it.
Also, for those who say, "ObamaCare is not a single-payer system," know this: The ultimate goal of Obamacare was and is to get rid of all the thousands of people who work for insurance companies, put them out of business, and have the government run our health care system, just like in England.
Waiting too long for an MRI or CT Scan Not due to Doctors Ordering too Many: BCMJ Study
"Patients in BC wait up to a year for routine MRI scans and Eddy said there’s no doubt in his mind that some problems are not diagnosed early enough.
“Do waiting lists cause harms like missed brain and spinal cord tumours? We know we’re missing some of these diagnoses.”
Britain gives America a Preview of ObamaCare:
"Last month, Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS, issued a forensic report, commissioned by the government, which found that 14 underperforming hospitals in England had substandard care, contributing to the needless deaths of nearly 13,000 people since 2005.
"Earlier this year, it was reported that a single hospital in Staffordshire recorded 1,400 ‘excess’ deaths.
"The lack of adequate nursing staff, cuts to elder care budgets and a rise in immigrant populations are a few of the factors that have exacerbated the problem."
The Canadian Patients’ Remedy for Health Care: Go to America!
"And wait patients must. A hospital survey of five countries (United States, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and Australia), conducted by Robert Blendon and colleagues in Health Affairs found that “waits of six months or more for elective surgeries were reported to occur ‘very often’ or ‘often’ by 26–57 percent of executives in the four non-U.S. countries; only 1 percent of U.S. hospitals reported this. Half of all Canadian hospitals reported an average waiting time of over six months for a 65-year-old male requiring a routine hip replacement; no American hospital administrators reported waits this long."
US vs UK: The Breast Cancer Survival Stakes.
"But five-year survival rates for all forms of the disease – including the most advanced – stand at 85 per cent in the U.S and just under 74 per cent in the UK. If the cancer is caught early – at what doctors call stage 1 – the differences in survival are even more shocking.
"An American woman has a 97 per cent chance of being alive five years after diagnosis.
"In Britain, this figure is only 78 per cent."
Facts About America’s Health Care Quality that the World Doesn’t Know.
"To justify more government control of America’s health care, ObamaCare supporters frequently assert that access to and quality of health care in the United States are poor. However, the facts from source documents and medical journals show that Americans enjoy superior access to care compared to nationalized systems, the very systems put forth as models for ObamaCare — whether defined by wait-times for diagnosis, treatment, or specialists; timeliness of surgery; access to screening; or availability of medical technology and drugs. The separate issue of quality of care also demands analysis of objective data – and that means data from peer-reviewed medical journals, rather than subjective “rankings” and surveys by advocacy groups."