“OH, CANADA!” AT 8 A.M. ON DEC. 19, Sharon Abbott’s left breast was removed at Dartmouth General Hospital. By 3 p.m., she had been sent home. “(There) wasn’t any ifs, ands or buts, I had the operation and they didn’t have a bed, so therefore I had to go home,” she said. Before her surgery, a nurse taught Ms. Abbott how to drain her incision. Doctors then removed her left breast, several lymph nodes and some muscle tissue [Chronicle-Herald Nova Scotia 2007].
“God save the queen!” Code Blue for Socialized Medicine in the UK: • More than a million people are waiting for a first hospital appointment. • 160,000 waiting from 8 to 13 weeks to see a specialist. • 775,000 waiting for operations. • On average, 962 operations canceled each day for lack of doctors and sterilized equipment [National Health Services UK 2006]. And these are the stalwarts of socialized “medicine?”
The U.S. government can almost get all of the mail delivered on any given day, yet you folks complain when we hike a stamp by a couple coppers.
Do you really want Uncle Sam handling your health care tax dollars and your kidney transplant? “Where’s my kidney,” you holler.
It’s in the mail, of course. We’ll probably outsource to Commie China for “cost containment” as they “harvest” many of their transplantable organs from executed criminals at a discount. We promise, though, to get you a kidney that is just about the right size.
Remember, “These are our kidneys that we’ve been waiting for.”
The next problem, however, might be finding a specialist to actually install your new bargain-basement kidney.
A brand new shiny doctor careening in the Canadian social medicinal miasma can find his entry level remunerative expectations fulfilled at the amazing sum of $40,000/year before malpractice insurance. While a U.S. mailman makes considerably more than that, what do you think Uncle Sam will pay to an outsourced Kenyan doctor in Nairobi that you’ll call over the phone for your treatment? The doctor will talk you through your surgery. You supply your own tools.
Just press “1” for English. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, the government always shoots for the lowest bidder, except when it extends to Congressional perks and travel.
Let me get this straight, the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2005 revised estimates for medically uninsured was placed at 44.8 million belly buttons, or about 15.3 percent of the population but that also includes 12 million or so illegal aliens and 14 million Medicaid-eligible people as “uninsured” bringing the figure into a more malleable 18.8 million. And it should be pointed out that over 18 million of the uninsured are people between the ages of 18 and 34.
According to a 2007 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, people between 25 and 34 spend more than four times as much on alcohol, tobacco, entertainment and dining out as they do for out-of-pocket spending on health care.
For a demonstrative example, during a particularly nasty flu season, I delivered a pricey piece of electronics to a customer on my route. The client came to the door to sign for the package, dripping and oozing from all visible orifices. I asked him, “Chris why don’t you go to the doctor?” He phlegmatically chortled, “I can’t afford it” while standing amidst $25,000-plus worth of high-end stereo and TV equipment with all the Hometown Buffet trimmings in his living room.
Hmmm. Consumer, heal thyself. For the whiners and losers out there squealing that they are too “poor” and cannot afford health insurance, the poverty quotient in the U.S. is $10,787 for a single person with no dependents. I know illegal day laborers that make more than that per year.
Most of the “poverty” complaints come from the hyperventilating Hippocratical, too-cool-for-school, predominantly white male Generation XYZ entourage, spoiled and over-pampered by mommy at home yet now finding themselves in the big scary world between the rock of selling a bilious little screenplay to a disinterested Hollywood or the hard place of wearing a paper hat while asking “Would you like fries with that?”
But at least McD’s has health insurance.
Ronald Reagan once said, “A job is the best form of social welfare that I know.” Or try the post office. They even hired me, if you can believe it.
STEVE BREEN is a self-described Reagan Republican who wants to thank his bone surgeon, Dr. Donald Rich Weintraub and “all those cute nurses” at St. John’s Hospital for the great care he received recently for his successful neck surgery. He
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 25, 2008. Read the original PDF.