Comment on Obamacare


Aug 04, 2009 @ 05:34 AM
By James A. Nollet, Milkowice, POLAND

Regarding
Time To Go, Grampa
by Patrick J. Buchanan

Human Events
August 4, 2009


Getting back to the subject of restricting health care for the aged, I'm reminded of a column I once read.

I was in Heathrow Airport outside London waiting for my next flight, and I picked up one of the famous Fleet Street tabloids, and there was an article by an elderly gentleman, and he told his story of his recent encounter with the English Public Health System (PHS)

This was a man whose family had suffered grievously during the Great Depression. There was NO public health back then, and if you couldn't afford to pay a doctor, you simply did without. You might as well have been living in the Dark Ages.

Anyway, WWII came and went, and as soon as it was over, England couldn't kick Winston Churchill out of office fast enough, because now it was time to install a nice, post-war LABOUR government, which would give England free public health!

My columnist was a yellow-dog Labour supporter for many, many years. He thought that PHS was the greatest thing since the invention of fire.

But then he got older and he needed a certain procedure.

I forget what his problem was exactly, but it was 1) NOT life-threatening, but 2) VERY PAINFUL. So he went to his PHS clinic and they told him, NO PROBLEMO, and all he'd need to do now WAS TO WAIT 18 MONTHS OR SO, because they were too busy to attend to him before then.

So he had a choice. Spend his life savings of 8,000 Pounds and have the procedure done privately, or wait with excrutiating pain.

He chose to spend the money. And now, he STILL likes PHS, but he just doesn't feel the same as he did before.

Another story: I once wrote a book, the story of one of the first men to receive a heart transplant in the Boston area. The book was never published but that is neither here nor there.

At the time, my uncle was a well-known pathologist in northern Minnesota who'd had a hand-shake agreement with Walter Mondale in which Mondale promised that, if elected in 1984, he'd make my uncle the US Surgeon General.

So I tapped my uncle for wisdom about the medical aspects of what I was writing about, and the subject got on to heart transplants, and he told me this is how it works in England.

In any given year, the PM and the Parliament decide how much per cent of GDP they will spend on PHS. Whatever the number is, that's the number.

So now they have a number, and they have a good idea how much tax revenue they will be able to spend. Then they divide the whole pie. In the case of heart transplants, the amount of pie available may mean that in the next year, England will be able to afford to transplant 200 hearts on the public dime.

But suppose there are 500 who need a new heart?

At THIS point, England will impose an age cut-off, on the reasonable theory that the younger you are, the more good a new heart will do you, and the better you will be able to withstand the rigors of the transplant.

Let us suppose that the cut is Age 35 since, of the 500 total candidates, 200 are age 35 or younger.

Good for them. Bu what about the remaining, older, 300?

They are plain bleep out of luck. England tells THEM, either you pay for it privately, or YOU JUST DROP DEAD, but WE CAN'T DO IT, because we don't have enough money for everybody, and we are rationing what we do have.

Think about THAT, America.