Obama's "Public Option"

The healthcare reform debate is heating up and we’re going to start hearing a lot about how we lag behind other countries in the access quality and cost of our healthcare. One country that is pointed out to us from time to time as a shining example is Canada. Maybe it’s because it’s closer to us than France, the U.K. or Germany. But the America-is-always-wrong crowd likes to point to Canadian healthcare as one model we should imitate. 

As I write this an outbound call center recording is laying down a message on my voice mail telling me that my Republican congressman is in the tank for the big drug companies and is trying to water down Pres. Obama’s plan for “public option” healthcare. You’ll be hearing a lot about “public option” healthcare in the next few weeks. “Public option” is a phrase conjured up by the slickie boys in the White House that the tested well with focus groups.  It sounds more benign than its real name: socialized medicine. 

Well, Canada’s had the “public option” for many years. So before we rush to judgment on healthcare reform, let’s take a look at how that “public option” is working out with our northern neighbors: 

1. According to a 2008 study in Lancet Oncology  five-year cancer survival rates are actually higher in the U.S. than in Canada. An American man has a 20% better chance of surviving cancer than his counterpart in Europe, for example. And if you’re a 50-year old man diagnosed with prostate cancer in the U.K., it’s a death sentence.
   
2. A joint American-Canadian study shows that Americans have greater access to preventive screening tests and have higher treatment rates for chronic illnesses than Canadians.
   
3. This “embrace” of government-run health care is motivated in part by a perception that poorer people in the U.S. are denied access to quality care. But today 14 million Americans already have access to quality care through Medicaid, Medicare, and the S-CHIP programs. In fact, a 2007 article in the Forum for Health Economics & Policy concluded that the healthcare gap between rich and poor is greater in countries like Canada that practice socialized medicine than in the U.S.

 These are facts that the President's Beltway brownshirts don't want you to know, but which even governments who run healthcare are starting to realize. In 2005 Canada’s Supreme Court invalidated the public healthcare monopoly in the Province of Quebec. Between 2006 and 2008 the Province of Ontario outsourced 160 emergency neurosurgeries, according to Dr. David Gratzer of the Manhattan Institute.  Where did the Ontario Health System send these patients for treatment? To The United States of America.

 In addition, to exporting patients, the Canadian system exports doctors to the U.S. My own mother received excellent care in her later years from a Canadian émigré doctor who became fed up with the problems with Canadian socialized medicine. But if you’re Canadian this means fewer doctors. And fewer doctors mean longer waits for treatment and bureaucratic rationing of healthcare.

 Healthcare reform will be the most contentious issue we face over the next year. If you are a Democrat enacting Pres. Obama’s healthcare proposal will be the Holy Grail—the final step in the creation of an American Social Democracy on the order of France or Germany. If you are a Republican it will be the most expensive entitlement in the history of the country—and the one that everyone admits will never be undone.

  

So let’s make this an informed debate. Whether you're liberal or conservative, this is too important an issue to be decided by focus groups, lobbyists or slick Beltway consultants. If we’re going to play follow the leader and mimic the failing healthcare systems of other countries all Americans should be aware of the consequences. Know the facts before you line up behind a “public option” that isn’t an option at all.

 Just thought you might like to know.