“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas


Saturday, August 08, 2009

Obama's fundamentally changing America.....for the worse

If there are any idiots reading this who still think that Obama's nationalized health care system might not be such a bad thing, then watch this clip of the UK's Daniel Hannan, of whom we at TRR are huge fans, describe to Glenn Beck what health care is like in Great Britain. Especially scary is what he says in the last minute of this 7-minute clip....



Once the national health care bureaucracy becomes an entrenched part of our federal government, there will be no reversing it. It won't be like the next administration or congress will be able to throw it out and go back to the way it was. This change will be permanent and catastrophic! If you do nothing else during the month of August, contact your representatives and promise to fight against them in the next election if they dare saddle America with this idiocy.

7 comments:

Bill Lockhart said...

Why do we always hear the evils of the UK health system and never about the Canadian system or those of other European countries? The survival rate for Canada for prostate cancer was close to US. Could you Blog some info concerning the status of health care in other nations with socialized medicine besides UK--they may just be the rotten apple in the bunch.

ed said...

I think it is used because it's the closest thing to what we're trying to do. You can't use Canada as an example of anything. They have no identifying culture to speak of, they don't produce anything except comedians, and they don't have very many people. Cuba has a nice socialized health-care system. If you like, I could blog on how great the Cubans have it.

Bill Lockhart said...

Yeah, if the Cubans have a good system, it would be nice to hear about it. Of course I think the last part of your comment is sarcasm, but I would like to hear how a good socialized medicine system is run from someone I can trust.

ed said...

Well Billy, you can't trust me to not be sarcastic about the government seizing 1/7th of the US economy and dooming every citizen except themselves, to awful, sub-standard care and early, painful deaths.

Bill Lockhart said...

Unfortunately I have also seen those doomed to "awful" superstandard of care and live a long and painful death. My "favorite" case: the child given the partially mismatched bone marrow transplant in a last ditch effort to save her life. It, of course, auto-rejected ...big surprise. But could our great health care system let that stop us? NOOO. She was put on a ventilator. Then sedated and paralyzed to keep her from fighting the ventilator. She developed increasing lung failure requiring increasing pressures which eventually seeped through tissue planes and made bubble wrap air blebs under her skin. She got pneumonia --was given strong antibiotics and developed kidney failure and was place on renal ultrafiltration (sort of like mini-dialysis). The fluid imbalances caused her to swell to 5X her initial size. And how long there she stayed I don't know, but I do know that she didn't make it. Now one saving grace of a socialized system might be the end of such horrors known as the $1 million funeral. This is an example of waste in the current system and is more rampant than you might want to know. If we could eliminate this waste without resorting to socialization we might be able to fix the problem. But with expectations of miracles, no sense of when to stop treatment on the part of families or doctors, the ever present threat of lawsuits and excess tests and procedures to cover one's ass, and the corruption in the pharmaceutical industry with price gouging , and insurance plan chaos, I'm not sure what we can do to stem the tide of ever soaring prices that is increasing it's cut of our GDP. Is the government the best answer--probably not, but no one else is taking the reins. So we get stuck in our own shitpile. Do YOU see anyone who can take this all on?

ed said...

Right you are Billy, about heroic measures that pointlessly prolong a life for no reason other than it's technologically possible to do so. Sticking a feeding tube into a warm body with nothing but brain-stem function and keeping it "alive" at a cost of millions in a persistent vegatative state, is playing God. That said, the government shouldn't be making those decisions for any family. The private sector in which insurance companies compete for insurers will either provide that coverage or not....consumers and providers can decide that for each family.
The biggest "fix" to the health-care industry would be to strictly limit tort awards against hospitals and doctors. The cost of defensive medicine, I would argue, is the single largest contributor to the high cost of health-care as it stands. Trial lawyers like John Edwards should be limited severely in how much they can collect in front of 12 people too stupid to get off jury duty.
As long as lawyers make up the political class in this country, we'll not likely see tort reform any time soon.

Ed said...

Billy, here's a link to a site called, The Real Cuba. At it you will find shocking images and descriptions of what the average Cuban endures at the hands of it's nationalized health-care program.

http://therealcuba.com/Page10.htm