Health care and government health care

The democrats in congress are falling all over themselves to change our health care system so it will be more like the systems of Canada and Great Britain. They say that doing that would make our health care system "better."

Well. . . there's something funny about that. Every so often you read about Canadians and Europeans coming over here to the U.S. to pay with their own money for health care treatments. Canadians and Europeans do that even though health care in Canada and Europe is supposedly provided "free" by the governments there.

Why would Canadians and Europeans come to the U.S. for health care when they can get it "free" in their own countries under systems set up by government bureaucrats just like President Obama and the Democrats in congress want to set up here?

It turns out The Hoover Institution has been doing some looking into health care "outcomes" in Canada and Europe. And it has found that Canadians and Europeans get a whole lot less of a whole lot of treatments and procedures that have been proven to save and extend lives here in the U.S. And it's not just rich people who get the short end of the stick in Canada and Europe. Middle class and poor people in Canada and Europe don't get health care that matches up to the health care that middle class and poor people get here in the U.S.

For instance, "Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher."

So why do President Obama and the Democratic congress want to destroy our current health care system and replace it with a "single payer" system like they have in Canada and Europe? They're certainly not going to improve anyone's health care by doing that.

You can read the whole list of things at which the U.S. health care system does better than that in Canada and Europe by going to this link. It's a one page article and it's very straightforward.

I think it's worth your time, unless you don't care whether some government bureaucrat "improves" your health care and makes you twice as likely to die of breast cancer, or six times as likely to die of prostate cancer, or more than four times as likely to die of colorectal cancer.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/49525427.html

Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg of National Review whose post on The Corner led me to this Hoover Institution article.