Health care: Tales from the Cryptic

With the push for ObamaCare in full swing, we get regaled by the President, the Vice-President, the media and by Obama supporters (often one-and-the-same) with health care disasters allegedly from private industry and focusing on treatment supposedly unjustly denied to the protagonists in these tales of woe. Conservative blogs collect these stories, and the comments typically fill with observations about matters that are murky about these stories. For example, they involve emergency needs of people without insurance (not clear just why they don’t have insurance), though they can find such emergency services, without charge if they cannot afford them, as well as an assortment of government programs, from Medicare to Medicaid and on. There are the tales of veterans, though they should be able to get care in Veteran’s Administration facilities (though perhaps not of the highest quality, but that will be the case under ObamaCare, anyway). Then there are the tales of woe of unserved children, never mind that there is an extensive SCHIP program that serves “children” up to age 30.

But Obama, Biden, Axelrod, and the rest are unlikely to tell of the benefits of the private system and the disastrous aspects of government-directed care. The hospital parking lots in American cities with their cars bearing Canadian license plates must be avoided. Canadians fleeing their system would only point out inconvenient truths. Mark Steyn links to yet another such instance, this time of the absence in Canada of a place for a premature baby that needed emergency help. (U.S. immigration authorities don’t come off too well in this matter, either.)

Steyn sarcastically describes the situation:

“Well, it would be unreasonable to expect Hamilton, a city of half-a-million people just down the road from Canada’s largest city (Greater Toronto Area, five-and-a-half million) in the most densely populated part of Canada’s most populous province (Ontario, 13 million people) to be able to offer the same level of neonatal care as Buffalo, a post-industrial ruin in steep population decline for half-a-century.”

Also click the links in Steyn’s post. The other one describes another instance of the Canadian health care system being overwhelmed by births. And Canada is not even reproducing at replacement rates. One can imagine how well rationed care would work in Canada if they were having children at normal rates.