Theodore Dalrymple observes the iron law that when things get equally better for everyone, inequality between the highest and lowest grow bigger as a matter of mathematics, not malevolence:
Two considerations arise here, however. The first, as a simple thought experiment shows, is that equality in health is not necessarily desirable in itself. Suppose that the infant-mortality rate in the highest social class is three per 1,000 live births, while that in the lowest is six per 1,000 (approximately the case in Britain today). Then suppose that we could reduce the rate by one death per 1,000 births in each social class, yielding two per 1,000 in the highest class and five per 1,000 in the lowest. A cause for rejoicing, certainly—but not from the point of view of equality, for the ratio of deaths in the lowest class to deaths in the highest class would widen from 6:3 to 5:2—that is, from 2.0 to 2.5. Surely, however, only a latter-day Lenin would reject such an improvement because it increased inequality. Similarly, an increase in the infant-mortality rate of the highest social class, to six per 1,000, would represent an advance to complete equality; but again, no one but a Lenin would wish it.
And then there is this tonic to the Left's infatuation with nationalized medicine:
Horror stories from the NHS also abound, as in this paragraph from the April 10 Independent reporting British patients’ recent experiences with nurses:
Diana watched her father “fighting for breath” and “thrashing around in blood-stained sheets” while five or six nurses “laughed and joked about their recent holidays.” Caroline was told by the midwife who was meant to be helping her through labour that she was busy “eating her biscuits.” Lesley woke up from her operation for breast cancer and was given a drink “reluctantly,” by a nurse who wouldn’t stop reading her magazine. Bronwen, who had open heart surgery, said that there were plenty of nurses “hanging around chatting, sometimes on mobile phones,” but not many who seemed to want to do “their job.” Denis “woke up in something akin to corrective treatment camp” where he saw “elderly confused people being threatened in quiet corners” and patients “being verbally abused.”
These ordeals are far worse than anything that the Labour MP suffered in 1946. Would he conclude from them that state-sponsored medicine was an abomination?
The horror stories in the Independent were relayed to the columnist after she publicized some bad treatment that she had received; in a health-care system employing 1.2 million people, it would be surprising to find no such stories. For every one of those, however, one could probably find another of devotion and good care. My mother was nursed extremely well in the NHS in the five weeks leading up to her death; my 92-year-old uncle was nursed in it abominably before he died. What is clear is that articles like the one in the Independent, though they appear regularly in the British press, leave no trace in Britons’ opinions about their health-care system. Apparently, the NHS was born with original virtue; all other systems partake of original sin.
I've heard similar horror stories about Canadian health care, but I've also heard Canadians express discomfort about ever going back to a private system with its purported higher costs.
This is one reason to oppose Obamacare; it threatens to take away our righ to complain and to get better health care. Witness the inhuman assimilation of individual conscience into a system that would deny the most basic human instinct to take care of one's suffering child:
At a campaign stop in Vancouver, Conservative leader Stephen Harper was asked whether he would access private health care if his children needed medical attention and couldn't receive it in a timely manner through the public system. Harper's forthright answer was that he, like any parent, would do "whatever it takes" to get the proper care for his kids.
A short time later a TV crew caught up with NDP leader Jack Layton and his wife, and asked him about using public and private health care. Layton replied that they would "choose to suffer" (his words) rather than accept private health care.
Upon hearing Layton's words, my first reaction was: "That man has no kids." Like Stephen Harper, surely no parent would sacrifice his child on the altar of the Canada Health Act. Parents sit at bedside softly singing to their child while placing a cool cloth on a fevered brow. Parents bundle their child to the hospital through a January night to get antibiotics for an ear infection. Parents do not "choose suffering" for their kids because of an ideological commitment to a health care system whose waiting lines grow longer and longer and longer.
Perhaps Layton was being genuine. Perhaps, if his wife had cancer and needed a scan, they really would sit and wait for weeks, rather than access a private clinic and obtain the potentially life-saving information within a couple of days. If that choice were only Mr. Layton's, he's entitled to it. But when Mr. Layton "chooses to suffer," that means he chooses for every Canadian to suffer along with him. Mr. Layton, who would undoubtedly sympathize with a poor mother stealing groceries to feed her hungry children, excoriates any parent not stealing, but buying health care to alleviate the suffering of his child.
Here in Manitoba, the NDP government allows hundreds of needy children to go without available dental care because it chooses suffering. Hundreds of seniors live with painful hip and knee conditions because the NDP chooses suffering. Across Canada, thousands ache, and some die, because the Liberals and the NDP choose suffering.
The morning after the Harper and Layton remarks, the radio news item was, "Stephen Harper has come under fire for saying he would use private health care." Have we, as a society, gone so far down the road to collectivism that the suffering of men, women, and children is less important than the sanctity of the Canada Health Act? Do we accept that our governments, Liberal and NDP, have chosen suffering and death for the sake of some theoretical collective good?
Nationalized health care guarantees suffering, and tells people not to complain, lest they be accused of breaching the social compact whereby people let other people suffer, lest their taxes go up.
This is nuts.
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