Montrose - Daily Press

Dr. Manhart’s letter describes the fallacy of continuing our move toward a socialistic health care system. Most economists will agree that a “free” good or service will always be overused with an associated decrease in quality and requirement for rationing. “Free” medical care is not exempt from this law of economics. Whenever demand exceeds supply, some rationing must occur. Price and competition are the rationing factors in a free market, and well meaning but incompetent bureaucrats do the rationing in a socialistic system. The European experience is that the infirm elderly are the first to suffer.

Let us examine the success of Canada’s health care system as evaluated in the December 2003 issue of the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, in an article entitled, “Access Denied: Canada’s Healthcare System Turns Patients into Victims.” This article points out that Canada has abundant health insurance, but a profound lack of health care. About 10,000 doctors left Canada in the 1990s for other countries, with no plans to return. In Ontario, nearly 80 percent of its regional communities are listed by the provisional government as “under serviced “due to physician shortages. Their partial solution is to create 369 new nurse practitioner positions to take up for the lack of doctors.

Average total waiting time from a referral from a GP to treatment was16.5 weeks. Wait to see a radiation oncologist was 8.5 weeks, an eternity if you actually have cancer, 5.2 weeks for a CT scan, 12.4 weeks for an MRI and 3.2 weeks for an ultrasound. In some cases, patients died waiting as they became too ill to tolerate a procedure. Compare this with your experience with our health care system. Facilities in Canada are so limited that the hip replacement capital for Canadians is Cleveland, Ohio.

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In an April 2003 report to the Canadian government, the Canadian Social Affairs Committee concluded “Canada’s publicly funded healthcare system is not fiscally sustainable” and recommended further rationing and increased taxes as a solution.

This is not the kind of healthcare system we want for our citizens. Our system does need to be improved, but certainly there are superior solutions within a capitalist framework. Winston Churchill said, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” How true!

Hans Croeber

Montrose

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