By all accounts, when the proposed “health care reform” bill passes, it will still leave many Americans uncovered. We will still be saddled with a crazy-quilt of separate for-profit insurance bureaucrats who know zip about medicine, but who will nevertheless check their spreadsheets and profit margins before deciding what medical care we can get. Medical decisions will not be made by you and your doctor, but by the insurance bureaucrat standing between you and your doctor.
This law will require all Americans to become the paying customers of private companies or pay a fine. These insurance companies enjoy exclusion from antitrust legislation . These companies will still be able to set rates, define benefits, and exclude people whom they say did not disclose preexisting conditions.
The politicians, including the liberals and moderates, tell us that these measures are necessary to protect free enterprise system and enable market forces to solve our broken health care system.
There’s something terribly wrong with that picture.
I covered these topics in depth last month in two articles, Why Single Payer is “Off The Table” and Lying about Canada and UK.
The first article discussed the politicians’ arrogant dismissal of the single payer system. The second article discussed how the politicians, demagogues, and other “stakeholders” at the political discussion table justified ruling single payer off the table. It describes a disinformation campaign about the Canadian and British systems, a campaign which caused much embarrassment and discomfiture among the folks in the British and Canadian conservative establishments.
As non-US resident readers of this blog and others have said, it is hard to recognize the UK system and the Canadian system from the “big lie” descriptions of the American extreme right and their paymasters, the insurance companies.
As a matter of fact, a long-serving Conservative Party MP (Member of Parliament) tweeted my article Lying about Canada and UK shortly after it appeared on this blog, and more than a few of his followers retweeted it. And several other sites reprinted this article. It seems that many British and Canadian conservatives want to disassociate themselves from the nuttiness and ranting of their American co-“thinkers.”
Many Canadian and British health care professionals and ordinary citizens find it irritating to hear the out-and-out misrepresentations and distortions of their system.
Below is a YouTube video called Universal Health Care Message to Americans From Canadian Doctors & Health Care Experts. It has a lot of interesting information about Canada’s health care system, commonly called Canadian Medicare, which covers every resident of Canada at half the cost that America pays.
We Americans need to listen to our wise Canadian neighbors to the north of us. They have much to teach us.
Check it out, and you’ll see what I mean.
Regards,
Alan OldStudent
Alan OldStudent's Musings Blog 
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