The Sorry State of Free Health Care

Socialism just doesn't work, folks. The longer it's tried, the more it costs and the less it works.

The National Center for Policy Analysis looks at the pathetic wait times in countries like Canada and Britain where they have socialized medicine and finds that while our medical system in the United States leaves a lot to be desired, we're doing pretty well compared to the socialists:

- The Fraser Institute found that Canada's median waiting times from a patient's referral by a general practitioner to treatment by a specialist, depending on the procedure, averages from 5 to 40 weeks; the wait for diagnostics, such as MRI or CT, ranges between 4 and 28 weeks.

- In England, 750,000 are awaiting hospital admission, and the National Health Services hopes to achieve an 18-week maximum wait from general practitioner to treatment, including all diagnostic tests, by the end of 2008.

- In both countries, many patients with diseases that are curable at the time of diagnosis become incurable by the time of treatment or patients become too weak for the surgical procedure.

The article also states that 1 out of 3 Canadian doctors sends patients to the States for treatment each year. Why? Their patients might be dead before they got treated in the worker's paradise of Canada.

I lived under the British National Health Service for three years. This "free" health care creates a crippling tax burden for British citizens, and they get lousy service for all their sacrifice.

Once when I had food poisoning, I sat in the waiting room of a British hospital for about 2 hours vomiting in a garbage can (after having spent the two hours before that also throwing up) until a doctor finally saw me. By then my stomach was empty (and I think I'd evacuated several pounds of stomach tissue as well).

The medical care I received? The doctor said, "Yeah, mate, looks like you had some kind of food poisoning, but since you've got it all out of your system now, just go home and take it easy."

Wow. Isn't government health care great?

Please, Lord; don't allow liberals to impose "free" health care on the American people!