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A HEALTH CARE HORROR STORY FROM CANADA
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN
MCGANN
DickMorris.com
There are howls of outrage coming from the liberal
community in Alberta, Canada. It seems that some doctors, desperate to
protect their patients from the overcrowded and failing socialized medical
system in their country, have set up private clinics to treat them. To
circumvent Canadian laws, which prohibit charging for medical care, they
have set up private, membership clinics where, for $2,000 a year, patients
can access well staffed and equipped clinics and avoid the long waits and
compromised care of the public system.
The leading Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail,
reports that "critics say that the clinics are taking physicians away from
the public system making it even harder...to find a family doctor."
David Eggen, executive director of a group that supports the Canadian
socialized system, Friends of Medicare, said that it's already hard to find
a family physician in Canada and that clinics like these, springing up in
several Canadian cities, could make it even harder.
But it is illegal to make patients "have to pay a fee
to gain access to health services" that are provided free by the government
system. So patients and doctors are forming membership-only groups to
avoid the legal penalties that could potential stop them from getting or
giving the care that they need.
This is where the United States
is headed. Socialism dries up the supply of medical care and forces
ever stricter rationing of the available resources. As Margaret
Thatcher famously said, "Eventually socialism runs out of other peoples'
money."
With the full implementation
of Obamacare and its likely cuts in physician reimbursement, more and more
doctors will choose to opt out of Medicare and charge their patients for
their care. The elderly who need specialized care will have no choice
but to take out insurance, not to fill gaps in Medicare coverage, but to
overlay the system with private coverage so they can get the care Medicare
now provides to all seniors. If you want to see a family doctor,
it will be rough unless you are paying for the care privately.
And to see a specialist, at the low reimbursement rates afforded by the
program in the future, will be well nigh impossible.
Medical care for the elderly will become like public
housing or public education in the inner city. Those who can afford to
go elsewhere will. Those who can't will be left to fend for themselves
in overcrowded public facilities that will be, at least, free.
And then, as in Canada, liberal critics will rail, not
against the system that dried up the resources in the first place or against
the socialist rules that drove doctors out of medicine, but against the
private clinics for resources from the public sector.
By plunging our excellent medical care system into this
new world of regulation, fee cuts, and care rationing, the U.S. is going
down the disastrous road Canada has taken.
Unless we can elect a Republican
majority in November and a GOP president in 2012, this is our future.