Socialized health care isn’t new, hasn’t worked

When the Affordable Care Act passed six years ago, the issue of health care in America was supposed to be resolved. It wasn’t.

Since the passage of the ACA, the cost of health insurance premiums has risen substantially, and for some groups, it has reached a staggering 78.2 percent price increase, according to a HealthPocket report. Deductibles for the so-called “silver plan” — the most common plan and the second-least expensive — averaged more than $2,900, according to HealthPocket.

So now the left, still unwilling to admit defeat, advocates even more federal regulation of the health care industry.

The most popular bold new idea to be championed by the American left? Socialized medicine.

The problem is, socialized medicine is about the furthest thing from a novel idea since the lobotomy.

Here’s the hard truth — any time the government controls an industry, the quality of the service provided drops dramatically. There’s a reason we wait in line for two hours at the DMV and two minutes at the Wal-Mart. So why would we trust the government to run our health care?

The answer, very simply, is that the left has convinced people across the globe that if a problem exists, it is the responsibility of the government to solve it. In this case, the problem was people who lacked health insurance and were unable to receive care. In nearly every Western European country, the people decided that it was, indeed, the business of the government to solve it.

This has given us a wealth of information about the effectiveness of government-run health care. The results, unfortunately, are often deeply troubling when one looks behind the rosy picture these governments paint.

Take Britain for example, a country whose National Health Service was rated the best health care service in the world in 2014 by the Commonwealth Fund. This was a result of excellent scores in fields such as providing “safe care,” “patient-centered care” and “short waiting times.” In fact, it only scored poorly in one area: “keeping people alive.” No, I’m not kidding.

You see, in the British system, unlike in the private market, the state must decide its health care priorities and work within its assigned budget. This manifests in several disturbing ways.

The first major problem patients in Britain face is actually getting the care they need, when they need it. According to the Daily Mail, as of July 2015, there were more than 3.4 million patients waiting for treatment. Additionally, in 2014, there were about 924,000 patients who had to wait longer than 18 weeks — the NHS target for providing treatment — to receive medical care. In other words, close to 1 million people are waiting more than four months to get treatment for their conditions.

Additionally, according to Forbes, from 2008 to 2009, the average wait time for a coronary artery bypass was 57 days. Is it, therefore, any wonder that the per capita heart disease mortality rate is 37 percent higher in Britain than in the United States?

Another disturbing issue in the British system is the quality of the care — provided you can get it. Take cancer care, for example. In the United States, according to the Daily Mail, a woman diagnosed with breast cancer has a 97 percent chance of being alive five years after a diagnosis versus only a 78 percent chance of survival for British women. The Daily Mail also reports that five-year survival rates for colorectal cancer were only 70 percent in Britain versus 90 percent in the United States.

This isn’t limited to Britain, though. According to a survey by Lancet Oncology, general five-year cancer survival in women is 7 percent higher in the United States than in Europe — 63 percent versus 56 percent — and 19 percent higher among men — 66 percent versus 47 percent.

Perhaps the most disturbing reality of socialized medicine, however, is the terrible treatment of elderly patients. Take, for example, a British survey by Macmillan Cancer Support showing that more than 80 percent of elderly patients thought they had been discriminated against by the NHS.

The report also showed that patients over the age of 75 were five times less likely to be offered life-saving cancer surgeries and are often incorrectly told that they are ineligible for cancer screenings.

One particularly troubling occurrence of ageism in the NHS is the Liverpool Care Pathway — a set of care guidelines that the Royal College of Liverpool designed to provide quality end-of-life care. While this may sound good on paper, the reality was more akin to an Orwellian nightmare than a compassionate system for end-of-life care.

In recent years, a growing number of doctors, patients and families of the deceased have made startling claims regarding the pathway. First, many patients were placed on the pathway without any thorough justification for doing so. In one case, as the BBC reported, a 90-year-old woman was taken to the hospital with a dislocated shoulder and developed pneumonia shortly after arriving.

Without any consultation with her doctors, she was placed on the pathway. Per the doctor’s instructions, she was medically sedated, prevented from eating and drinking and ignored by hospital staff. In other words, she had been left to die. Luckily for the woman, her family arrived and managed to convince the doctors to start feeding her. She made a full recovery.

Shockingly, this wasn’t a limited occurrence, and horror stories about the LCP abound. A 2013 internal investigation found multiple cases of patients being denied food and water, with some patients driven to the point of “desperately trying to suck sponges used by staff to dab their faces,” the BBC report read.

In the aftermath of this report, more has come out about the brutal treatment of these patients by hospital staff. In fact, one member of parliament, Norman Lamb, declared the LCP to be not only uncivilized, but “a national disgrace.” As a result of the scandal, parliament introduced new reforms ending the LCP. Unfortunately, the new guidelines appear to have changed very little. According to a neurologist interviewed by the Telegraph, he continues to receive “reports from relatives desperately trying to obtain ‘active’ care for patients who were denied it because they were deemed to be dying.”

So why would socialized medicine result in this?

The reason is simple. When government controls an industry, competition is nonexistent. The health of the patient is at the mercy of bureaucrats, leaving patients without choice or freedom regarding their health care.

It’s no secret that the American health care system isn’t perfect, but the solution doesn’t lie with increased governmental regulation. It lies with greater economic freedom.

Write to Arnaud at awa8@gmail.com