Posted by
Rob on Tuesday, March 20, 2012 5:40:37 PM
Fareed Zakaria, a hack who writes for the dying Time mag rag, has
published an article defending the indefensible--the Obamacare health care plan that has ballooned up to 1.7 trillion dollars over the next 10 years. Think about it, there are 300 million people in America. If I gave each one of them $6000 dollars to invest in, say, Apple stock, it would still be cheaper than Obama's plan--which doesn't even cover everyone. So how does one sell a $1.7 trillion dollar outlay that doesn't accomplish what it purports to do--according to the title Zakaria put on it?
The way liberals of his ilk sell everything--with guilt.
But doesn't the Catholic Church have a monopoly on guilt? And come to think of it, don't they already have hospitals for everyone, staffed by nuns who might arguably take better care of you than the government? So how is Zakaria going to pull this one off?
Ahh. By comparing America to Switzerland.
Don't laugh, it is better than having to learn French. I worked for 3 years in Switzerland, and discovered that English is the unofficial language of the multilingual nation.
Yup, Zakaria thinks Switzerland is the US of Europe. Not only do they speak English, but they have a market-driven economy with voting 4 times a year. And universal health care works so well there, why can't we copy their model? Here's his take-away conclusion:
All of them provide universal health care at much, much lower costs than we do and with better results....
Well, having lived there, let me comment on what I saw of the vaunted health care system. We
had a very good friend who was diagnosed with colon cancer, treated, and the cancer went into remission. But a few years later it returned, and didn't respond to the "cheap" anti-cancer drugs. It was
still treatable, but expensive, so the Swiss would not treat her because she was 61 and
didn't deserve to live any longer. After we flew in from US and her
brother from UK, they decided maybe she was more important than they
first thought. So they removed the biggest tumors from her liver, and she lived another
3 months before finally succumbing.
The fastest way to determine
whether socialized medicine is good for a country, is to look at the
longevity rates of patients diagnosed with cancer. There's no question
that private healthcare in the US permits people to live longer (especially colon cancer) than the vaunted socialized health care systems of Canada, UK, or Switzerland. So what
do you want: "universal death care" or private health care?
Zakaria goes on and on about how expensive treatments are in America. But he confuses the cost of the treatment with the cost of healthcare. Sure the treatments are expensive, and so some people don't get them. Yep, that's unfair, and we can debate the unfairness of life separately. So what do you want, unfair life or fair death?
And when you opt for fair death, realize that it is always cheaper to die, so that cash-strapped governments will always be defining fair death downward.
Which, of course, is why Obamacare is so very much more expensive than private care when it first starts out.
It takes time to build the death camps.