As promised, the Obama Administration is off and running to ” reform ” the health care system in the United States. And save money doing it (if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge I’ll sell you, cheap).  It’s not necessary to compare his projected program with the nationalized health systems in Canada or the U.K. Compare it to the V.A. program right here in the United States.
Visit a VA Hospital in your area, sit-down in the outpatient area or in a hospital ward, and you’ll learn what Obama medicine is likely to be ––– a lack of sufficient funds to operate especially at the end of the year;  a lack of many of the most advanced pharmaceuticals in their pharmacies; long waiting lines in the outpatient areas; long waits for admission to the hospital; overworked, underpaid physicians and nurses; lack of cutting edge technologies to handle acute-care; lack of cutting edge technologies to handle chronic care (except those VA hospitals that are medical school teaching affiliates. And much more.
Oh, yes ––– and when 130 million or more citizens are ultimately enrolled in the program (see my blog post Medicare for All, April 20th, 2009) the complexity of the system will  become overwhelming. If you think it’ll work smoothly, efficiently ––– well, there’s that bridge . . .
In fact, the entire system will collapse. Taxes to rescue the medical system will reach astronomical levels, and a significant degree of rationing will be required to hold down costs ––– chemotherapy, hip/knee replacements, coronary bypass surgery, cardiac valve replacements, coronary angioplasty, pacemakers, dialysis, and cataract surgery will not be allowed for patients over the age of 65 or 66; and kidney/ cardiac/ lung  and other transplantation procedures will be forbidden for those over the age of 55.
Will this occur overnight? Of course not.  It will take a decade or more, a slow steady deterioration of a marvelous health care system that really only needed a rational change in the way it functioned financially, structurally, and bureaucratically to remedy most of its perceived ills.
And the annual cost of Obamacare will likely exceed a  trillion dollars a year.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.