Learning From The Mistakes Of Others

The debate on single-payer healthcare in America has been going on for a while. ObamaCare was designed to fail and be a step in the direction of single payer. So how well does single-payer healthcare work?

On September 8, 2016, Investor’s Business Daily posted an article about nationalized healthcare in Britain. There were some serious warnings in the article about nationalized healthcare.

The article reported:

Before you embrace the idea (single-payer healthcare), you might want to look at what’s happening in Britain right now.

There, some hospitals are moving to ration care for those who are officially deemed obese — that is, anyone who has a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more. Oh, and while they’re at it, they will also ration care for smokers, too.

Why? “To plug a funding black hole,” as the British Telegraph newspaper put it. Translation: Britain’s National Health Service faces such a serious financial crisis that it now has to deny care to some people, despite its claims of “universal care.” And who better to deny care for than two of the most despised groups in today’s modern society — those who are obese and smokers?

This new plan to bar overweight people and smokers from most surgery for up to a year is getting its first tryout in North Yorkshire. But, as Britain’s Royal College of Surgeons has warned, rationing will soon become the norm across Britain as the health care system deals with soaring costs and failing care delivery for its patients. And the impact will be broad: The Telegraph, working off population data, estimates more than half of Britain’s population will be considered obese in the coming decades.

The nightmare stories of bungled care and needlessly dying patients are already legion for the NHS, which is notorious for delivering substandard service to its patients.

The article explains the impact of ObamaCare on insurance companies:

The problem isn’t ObamaCare per se,” wrote Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor for the Clinton administration, in a blog post. “It lies in the structure of private markets for health insurance — which creates powerful incentives to avoid sick people and attract healthy ones. ObamaCare is just making this structural problem more obvious.”

This is a classic example of blaming the victim for your own crimes. Aetna takes a hit of nearly half a billion dollars from a system Reich’s leftist pals in the Democratic Party created, and then Reich blames insurers for greed.

The Democrats who wrote the ObamaCare law knew they would be destroying the private market for health care. But they don’t care. And they don’t care to learn from others, like Britain’s National Health Service, that have already gone down this dangerous path.

Americans would be very wise to heed Britain’s warning, and just say no to single-payer.

Good advice.