The Total Failure of Single-Payer Healthcare and the Smugness of the Left-wing Media

With the end of the Obama Administration upon us, the healthcare debate has re-emerged.

The Left wants the government to control health care, health insurance, everything. Totalitarian governments seek to take over health care precise because it provides the fastest for controlling the people. Everyone needs good health, and its maintenance turns into an absolute necessity in times of trouble.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the Democratic Party still refuses to give up the dream of single-payer, i.e. socialized medicine.

They simply refuse to give up on the idea.

This uniues exchange during health care panel in the US Senate--early in 2014--focused on the the possible advent of single-payer.

US Senator Bernie Sanders was still chairman of the committee, but Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, served as the ranking member and opposition.

The Los Angeles Times, of course, could not pass up a fuddled opporutity to shame Republicans who oppose government-run, really bad healthcare.

Here is the article:

Watch an expert teach a smug U.S. senator about Canadian healthcare

Where to start? Dr. Danielle Martin of Women's College Hospital, Toronto, tries telling Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C) what he doesn't know about Canadian healthcare.

A U.S. politician's I-don't-need-no-stinkin'-facts approach to health policy ran smack into some of those troublesome facts Tuesday at a Senate hearing on single-payer healthcare, as it's practiced in Canada and several other countries.

The truth is Richard Burr brought up excellent points about why any government should stay away--far away--from government health care.

Here's an excellent video segment on the realities of government-controlled medicine:

For the record, Crowder went undercover to get Canadian health care in its single-payer system.

It sucked.

The countries in question have successful and popular government-sponsored single-payer systems, provide universal coverage and match or outdo the United States on numerous measures of medical outcomes -- for far less money than the U.S. spends. To explain this, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) asked seven experts to testify before his subcommittee on primary health and aging.

No they do not.

One of the Canadian experts even testified against single payer, and how many Canadians have to go to the United States to get adequate care.

Check out these stories, reported by Reason.com:

Those interested in how the U.S. matches up should watch the whole 90-minute session, viewable below. (The official subcommittee hearing record is also available.)

Here is the clip from Bernie Sanders:

By far the high point of the morning was an exchange between Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Danielle Martin, a physician and health policy professor from Toronto. The exchange, in which Martin bats down the myths and misunderstandings about the Canadian system that Burr throws at her, starts at about the 1:00:15 mark.

(The reference to "Premier Williams" is to Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams, whose decision to have a heart valve procedure in Miami, near where he owns a condo, rather than Canada, is widely viewed in Canada as a rich man's failure to investigate the care available to him closer to home.)

The truth is that Premier Williams is the rule among those who have the finances to get health care where it is quick and quality.

Check out this clip from John Stossel:

But the arrogant left-wing Los Angeles Times attempted to shame Senator Burr and promote the single-payer model.

Here's a lightly edited transcript of the key moments, which start with Burr asking Martin about the observation in her written testimony that wait times for elective surgery in single-payer systems will lengthen as doctors move out of the public system:

BURR: Why are doctors exiting the public system in Canada?

MARTIN: Thank you for your question, Senator. If I didn’t express myself in a way to make myself understood, I apologize. There are no doctors exiting the public system in Canada, and in fact we see a net influx of physicians from the United States into the Canadian system over the last number of years.

What's the truth? Check out this link.

What I did say was that the solution to the wait time challenge that we have in Canada -- we do have a difficult time with waits for elective medical procedures -- does not lie in moving away from our single-payer system toward a multipayer system. And that’s borne out by the experience of Australia. So Australia used to have a single-tier system and did in the 1990s move toward a multiple-payer system where private insurance was permitted. And a very well-known study by Duckett, et al., tracked what took place in terms of wait times in Australia as the multipayer system was put in place.

Here's a major problem. Waiting times is a frequent political problem in single-payer countries. It is near political suicide to argue for insurance or free-market reforms.

But they need to be done!

And what they found was in those areas of Australia where private insurance was being taken up and utilized, waits in the public system became longer.

How are these times measured, though? Keep in mind that those who give up on waiting altogether--are not even counted as waiting. Wait times are longer probably because more people are willing to wait -- because they know that they will get better care and sooner.

BURR: What do you say to an elected official who goes to Florida and not the Canadian system to have a heart valve replacement?

MARTIN: It’s actually interesting, because in fact the people who are the pioneers of that particular surgery, which Premier Williams had, and have the best health outcomes in the world for that surgery, are in Toronto, at the Peter Munk Cardiac Center, just down the street from where I work.

But how long would the Premier have to wait?

Check out the comments from these Canadians:

So what I say is that sometimes people have a perception, and I believe that actually this is fueled in part by media discourse, that going to where you pay more for something, that that necessarily makes it better, but it’s not actually borne out by the evidence on outcomes from that cardiac surgery or any other.

Media discourse is dedicated to promoting single-payer systems. The facts are harder to find.

(The ultimate zinger came at the end of the exchange, when Burr thought he had Martin down for the count about wait times in Canada, and she neatly put the difference between the Canadian and U.S. systems in perspective.)

BURR: On average, how many Canadian patients on a waiting list die each year? Do you know?

MARTIN: I don’t, sir, but I know that there are 45,000 in America who die waiting because they don’t have insurance at all.  

This is not a zinger. Senator Burr asked a direct and welcome uestion and she could not answer it.

This article neglected to mention the next fact which Senator Burr asked -- how many Canadians die without insurance or worse--who die waiting for health care?

Mrs. Martin did not have that answer at all!

Final Reflection

Single-payer, socialized health care is terrible, horrible, no good very bad.

By and large, people will say the like their "free" health care, until they have a major health care need or crisis.

By the way ... it's NOT free. The taxes are high, even rapacious.

The waste and misspent funding is terrible, too.

Richard Burr was spot on. Bernie Sanders tried to mock his Republican colleagues on the dais, but they were right.

And guess what? Republicans took back control of the US Senate at the end of the year.

The media is smug and arrogant and wrong. I wonder what would happen if any of the journalists or the editors got sick all of a sudden? Would they want to go to a Canadian hospital ... or an American one?