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PTBC J-Log

A conservative OPINION blog --with bite. OPINION by Joel Johannesen.

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Billboards in Canada help Canadians find better, faster health care in the U.S.A.

Written by Joel Johannesen on Tuesday December 01 2009 at 11:55 AM


If Americans need any more proof that there’s a huge market for American health care here in Canada where we already have a “free”, government-run “health care” system the likes of which the political Left in America is trying to foist on Americans, here’s some more. 

A reader took an iPhone snap of a billboard — one of many dotting the highway in Niagara Falls Ontario, directing Canadians to go south to the Kaleida Health care facilities in Buffalo New York.

image

Kaleida Health has a web site designed just for Canadian consumption as well.  They boast that each of their five hospitals are located within minutes of Canadian border crossings.

image

There are such long lineups in Canadian hospitals for the rationed health care (which all Canadian taxpayers pay for whether they get it or not), it is laughable to even imagine a Canadian hospital advertising along U.S. highways trying to get Americans to come up to Canada and get their care.  And of course none do.  Lineups exist in Canadian facilities even though many Canadians don’t bother using Canadian facilities —obviously choosing private American health care services instead.  Canadian health care is so severely rationed that patients have to go to the United States for timely care in many cases.  I shudder to imagine if that option didn’t exist.

Advice to Americans:  Keep what you’ve got, and just make it better.  Keep the sticky hands of so-called “progressive” governments far from health care.  Governments can’t run a Kool Aid stand.  They certainly can’t run a health care system in Canada, and we have just one-tenth the population (and many of us get our major health care needs met at American facilities as I said). 

Health care in Canada started as a relatively small program, by socialist-minded “progressive” politicians not unlike yours currently trying to shove it down your throats now.  But even those now-dead Canadians must be turning over in their graves today, knowing how their small idea for “reform” has grown totally out of control, and become entirely government-run, totally taxpayer-funded, all-inclusive and all-encompassing, totalitarian, and essentially bankrupt system.  Government-run things have a habit of doing that… growing until it’s all government, all the time, irreparable and irreversible. 

Do you know that it’s now against the law in Canada for individuals to pay for their own basic health care needs with their own money?  Against the law!  It didn’t start out that way.  Only North Koreans now suffer under this sort of draconian, totalitarian law.  That’s why I often refer to Canada’s decrepit system as a “North Korean-style ‘health care’ (always using quotes around “health care” because like the Democrats’ “plan”, it has less to do with “health care” than with left-wing, “progressive” ideology) system”. 

Don’t let your government ruin your fantastic health care that so many in the world, including Canadians, depend on.  So many of the problems inherent in the U.S. system are caused not by the private, free market doing its thing, but by governments once again meddling in the private, free-market sector, and ruining it, as usual.  As our columnist Ann Coulter says:  “All the problems with the American health care system come from government intervention, so naturally the Democrats’ idea for fixing it is more government intervention. This is like trying to sober up by having another drink.”

There are myriad examples for sensible reform which won’t add to what is now the 1.2-trillion-dollar yearly Obama deficit, or the now 12-trillion dollar debt, all put out there by conservatives and summarily ignored by liberals and their media, who still laughably get away with claiming that Republicans and conservatives have no ideas on health care reform. 

For example, state governments currently not allowing interstate competition for health care insurance and services: unleash the genius of the free market and get the government off the backs of the people and their enterprises!  History proves that works, and proves government-run things fail.  Repeatedly.  (I’d go further and insist that here in Canada we should also allow not just Canadian companies to provide private insurance, but American companies as well —all across North America).

Reform it further by reigning in the trial lawyers and reforming THAT industry:  embark on dramatic “tort” reform.  This would help reduce ridiculous medical malpractice lawsuits against which doctors and hospitals now have to protect themselves with huge, sometimes six-figure annual malpractice insurance premiums.  This alone would vastly reduce costs to doctors and health care facilities, and would even further reduce costs to insurance companies and individuals by vastly reducing many of the needless or redundant tests or procedures currently done simply to reduce legal risk — not health risk — and to avoid ridiculous malpractice suits.  Democrats won’t introduce tort reform simply because the Trial Lawyers Association bankrolls the Democratic Party and politicians by hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.  Yet it’s one of the things that could most reduce health costs in America. 

Sever the link between health insurance and employment. Using tax reform, employees could be incentivized to own their own insurance instead of relying on employers. This would increase competition and more.

Allow individuals, small businesses, and trade associations to pool together and acquire health insurance at lower prices, the same way large corporations and labor unions do.  Other reforms, such as in the tax system could further reduce costs. 

More than anything, don’t be bowled over by all the specious talk from the “progressives” of the Democratic Party about “free” health care, or about a so-called “public option”, being anything but a grungy, secretive one-way road to a full-on government-run, government-owned, totalitarian, rationed, state-controlled and even more expensive — and eventually decrepit — “health care” system.  One built on ideology rather than good old American ingenuity and common sense; and on those tried and true free-market, free-enterprising, free American ways.

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Posted by Joel Johannesen on   Tue, December 01, 2009 at 11:55:07 AM • If you think PTBC has no value, then don't pay anything for it. It will fade into the sunset. That's the free market at work.
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