Take It from a Canadian: You Don’t Want the Public Option
As President Barack Obama scours the U.S. to drum up support for reforming healthcare, the Washington Post (among others) says the White House may be willing to dump its government-run insurance plan.
If so, this will have the duel effect of encouraging opponents of Obama’s goal to create a cheaper, non-profit, government-sponsored health plan for the 40 to 50 million Americans presently with no health insurance, while alienating liberal-left Democrats who seek to emulate a Canadian health system.
Looked at from the outside, it’s hard to see Obama succeeding.
Americans have been so conditioned for so long against anything resembling socialized medicine, that hackles rise at creating another government bureaucracy to manage health.
A couple of things stand out about universal healthcare.
A case can be made (from Canada’s experience) that you cannot maintain a healthcare system like Canada’s and at the same time maintain the world’s largest, best equipped, all-purpose military whose existence imposes caution on rogue elements of the world. A country that has the one, can’t easily have the other without a prohibitive tax increase.
America’s military is more important than universal healthcare.
Canada’s costly healthcare necessitates that its military be small, over-strained and under-financed. Competent but perpetually frustrated.
Another thing: Obama insists that if his health reform plan is passed, people can keep their current insurance plans. Wanna bet? (The bill is supposed to be ready by Sept. 15, but probably won’t be.)
If the government-run insurance plan were adopted whereby non-insured people would be insured, how long would private companies continue to contribute to the health insurance of their employees? Would they not start cutting health plans and force the government to pay? You know the answer as well as I do.
While Canada is cited by fans of universal health as an example to aspire to, opponents of socialized medicine see Canada as a disaster.
Apart from high costs necessitating a high tax rate, a huge downside is catastrophically long wait times for operations. This results in unknown numbers of deaths of patients waiting.
Emergency or critical cases are dealt with quickly and competently in Canada, but waiting to be diagnosed can be a death sentence. Access to healthcare in Canada is a continuing problem.
It is scandalous that getting an MRI in Canada can take weeks or months, and then done in the middle of the night. Often it’s who you know, what clout you have, your importance in the community that dictates if you go to the head of the queue. In the U.S., if you have money (a great equalizer) you get service. Period.
In the U.S., Obama must overcome prejudice against government-run health. While he stresses it’s reform he seeks, not control, critics fear “reforming” healthcare means “rationing” healthcare.
By instinct, Americans prefer less government to more government.
Judging from opinion polls and raucous town hall meetings, and from the unease of many elected Democrats, Americans are skeptical of Obamacare by a 2-1 margin.
And with a health reform bill that is 1,000 pages long, and wants the government rather than physicians deciding on end-of-life healthcare for the aged, few have a clue what reform would really mean.
Obama has staked his first year in office on healthcare reform – and so far he seems to have badly misjudged what Americans want or will accept.