The Human Face of Socialized Medicine

Some weeks ago a reader of my blog posted the story of his father-in-law, who received treatment under Canada's system of socialized medicine. With his permission, I reproduce his story below. As President Obama this week begins his congressional push for further socializing medicine in America, consider the story of his father-in-law, and think about what socialized medicine will mean for you. Consider the "human face of socialized medicine." My response to him follows his story.

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"I was born in Canada and have taken Canada’s socialized health care system for granted all my life that it was good - until we needed it.

My father in law, a Filipino immigrant, wasn’t feeling well so we took him in for a check up. We waited for a few more months until the testing could be arranged, and then more waiting since there were, “complications.” He had a lung cancer and we would have to wait for “6 to 8 months” before scheduling treatment.

I think he knew he was going to die and took charge. After a few months of constantly coughing, we tried to pester the doctors to speed up the waiting time. He tried his own remedies to alleviate his worsening condition like drinking Ginger soup but he could delay no longer. He and his wife decided to go back to the Philippines for treatment. The doctors there had immediately started treating him with radiation but it was already too late. He had developed a fast growing form of lung cancer and died a few weeks later.

The doctors seemed concerned but wouldn’t change the waiting times due to limited available machines and Canada’s administrative central control in this field.

The fact the Canadian health care system pretends to be based on equality hides the fact it is a socialist experiment that destroys human life and can never be sufficient enough to heal life when needed. The carrot in Canada’s healthcare system is the so called “affordability for everyone” promise, but it is an inherently bad way to go due to its built in socialization. Lives are constantly lost. Ted Harlson (Toronto, Canada)"

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Galileo Blogs' response to Mr. Harlson:

Your story saddened and angered me. It is criminal that your father-in-law had to die because of socialized medicine.

Socialized medicine harms everyone, doctors, patients, and their families. It is deadly to human health, as your story illustrates. Socialized medicine kills.

The alternative is to recognize that doctors have the right to freely charge for their services, just as patients have the right to freely select their doctors. No one has a "right" to medical care. That care must be paid for, and when government is the payer, it means rationing care and killing off the "excess" patients that "the system" cannot afford.

No one worries about there being a shortage of cars. People do not wait in line to buy cars, clothing, or houses. That is because those markets are largely free. Each party voluntarily deals with the other. The result is an abundance of these goods willingly bought and sold in the marketplace, at times and in quantities, and at quality levels that both parties mutually and voluntarily agree on.

Recall the long lines in the Soviet Union for bread, shoes, and toilet paper. That was because their entire economy was socialized. Those Soviet-style lines have now come to medical care, because it too has become socialized in Canada and, soon I fear, the United States. Your father-in-law died waiting in one of those lines.

Please take your grief and fight back by denouncing this injustice, as you have by sharing your story.

Please accept my condolences and best wishes.

Making Socialized Medicine Real

This Canadian patient of that country's system of socialized medicine offers a warning to Americans. It will happen here, unless politicians learn that Americans don't want it.



(HT: Truth, Justice and the American Way)

To Ban It or Subsidize It

The Wall Street Journal today had another excellent editorial piece entitled "Canada's Shooting Gallery" by the Americas columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady. In it, she describes how the city of Vancouver, Canada, pays for a center that will inject the addicts' drugs into them free of charge. Here is my letter to her:

Dear Mary,

I want to concur in your assessment of Vancouver’s shooting gallery. I traveled to Vancouver recently for the first time, and happened upon East Hastings Street. I have lived in New York for over 20 years, through some rough times such as the crack epidemic of the early 1990s. Yet that left me unprepared for what I saw. Human zombies were wandering everywhere in the middle of the day. People appeared to be inhaling crack from a many-tubed “hookah” that looked like an octopus. Zombies congregated in alleys. It was incredible. I thought of the place as the center of a vortex of whirling bums, drug addicts and prostitutes sucked in from all corners of North America. It was a Mecca of self-imposed human misery, and it was paid for by Canadian taxpayers.

I am completely for legalization of all drugs. If people want to destroy themselves (or enhance themselves with safe mood-altering substances such as alcohol and caffeine which, thankfully, remain legal), it is their right. But the alternative to banning drugs is not to subsidize them. That is the statist solution. A vice is either banned or subsidized. What kind of choice is that? Both answers are wrong. We either lose our liberties, or pay for others’ vices. Lost in this false alternative is individual liberty, where people are simply left alone to live their own lives, productively or not, as they see fit. Reality is punishment enough for drug addicts. Only a minority of people will choose that lifestyle because it is so self-destructive; their numbers are further reduced through early death. Subsidize that? It’s insane.

By the way, apart from East Hastings Street, I really enjoyed Vancouver. Its harbor area full of skyscraper condominiums was gorgeous, if only a little bit too indicative of “zoned perfectionism.” In fact, the flip-side of areas zoned solely for beautiful, stylish skyscrapers is squalid areas that excel in squalor. Making housing of a particular form exclusive through zoning pushes other people into ever more marginal areas, such as E. Hastings.

But that is another discussion...

Yours,

GB


Edited 8/30/07: Changed title. Original title: "Canada's Shooting Gallery."

Published on 8/30/07 as letter to editor in Wall Street Journal by the non-pseudonymous me.