As regular readers know, I recently had the distressing experience of a TIA, or to put it bluntly, a little stroke. It’s not an experience I recommend. And even though I have solid insurance and am also covered on my wife’s insurance policy through her retirement, I’m not looking forward to getting the bill.
That said, there is much for which to be thankful, and about which to be apprehensive. First, the thankful part. A week after the stroke, I’m feeling just fine. I still have a small vision issue, but it doesn’t affect my reading, my visual acuity, my ability to drive or hamper me in any way. It’s rather like floaters: annoying, but something one learns to live with without any real degradation in their quality of living. I suspect it will improve, but if not, I’m still one of the most fortunate and blessed people on the planet. I actually have no other deficits from the stroke. I do indeed thank the Lord for that every day, and often, more than once.
I am also thankful for the Neuro Tele unit at Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital in Ft. Worth, TX. I was there only about a day and a half, but I was enormously impressed. Everyone there, from physicians to the ladies that brought my food was professional, friendly, caring and relentlessly determined to be helpful to me, despite my relative lack of needing assistance. They seemed to feel so badly about it, I eventually began–from time to time–asking for a refill of ice water I didn’t really need. They even felt badly that I awoke whenever anyone came to my door. I didn’t mention all those years as a police officer.
I was very fortunate to be so close to a first rate stroke treatment and care facility staffed by great people. I know there were others on my floor not nearly so fortunate, but I also have no doubt that by being there, their chances of survival and recovery were greatly enhanced.
We tend to take for granted that kind of medical care. It seems right to us that an MRI or a CAT Scan is only an elevator ride away, or that highly capable technicians will come to our bedside to administer an echo cardiogram, or employ a variety of high-tech devices to do smaller tests that only a few years ago required far more time consuming and intrusive procedures and analysis in a lab.
I thank the Lord for those dedicated men and women as well. That experience, which despite the excellent care, I wish had never been necessary, makes this story so disturbing. From The Daily Mail (UK) Online:
Nearly 40 per cent of doctors [in England] would not recommend their own hospital to friends or family, startling new figures reveal.
A further one in three do not believe NHS [National Health Service] managers act on the concerns of patients.
The Department of Health’s own survey also found that a third of NHS staff had witnessed medical blunders or near misses at least once in the last month.
Just 35 per cent of staff would recommend treatment to their friends of family.
The trust is among several being investigated for high death rates by Sir Bruce Keogh, the medical director of the NHS.
None of this is surprising. Those nations like Canada and England that have single payer, government controlled socialized medicine are clearly inferior in every meaningful way to American health care. Canadians commonly cross the border to obtain medical care they can’t get in Canada due to very long waits for even the services of a general practitioner. Travel expenses added to medical fees are a small price to pay, it seems, when one can’t obtain treatment at all in Canada, even for free.
And the horror stories come out of England at an ever-accelerating rate. Patients abused and ignored by surly staff, patients dying due to inattention and filthy conditions. Rampant infections, despair and degradation, and patients waiting for months and years in agony for surgeries available in America within hours or days.
These are the inevitable consequences of socialized medicine.
I was fortunate in more ways that I can easily recount. But under ObamaCare, I might well not have survived, or suffered debilitating injuries from which there is scant or no recovery. The clean, well-staffed and run facility I took for granted would likely not be there. Even if the building were still open, it would be far more likely to resemble the hospitals of England than the Harris Methodist neuro unit that treated me so well.
None of this is a surprise. We know it’s coming. We know Mr. Obama’s promises, all of the unicorn horns and fairy dust upon which he sold ObamaCare, were lies then and lies now. We know ObamaCare will absolutely fail to reduce health care costs and that those costs alone are certain to bankrupt America. We know we won’t be able to keep our own insurance or doctor.
Mr. Obama and his acolytes think ObamaCare will be his signature achievement. They’re right, but only because it will turn out to be one of the most infamous curses man has ever inflicted on himself. Oh yes, Mr. Obama will be remembered.
My health outlook is bright and hopeful. The future of medicine in America is anything but. So, my most sincere gratitude to the great people at Neuro Tele, and perhaps, just perhaps, we’ll be able to develop the national will to ensure that such talented and dedicated people are not driven from the medical profession by the deranged ministrations of narcissistic politicians.
The story is a lot murkier than that. Just as you report Canadians crossing the border to avail themselves of another health system, so also I have seen reports of people travelling from England to France to avail themselves of another health system – only, in that case, it is another state run health system, but one that actually works. And, of course, within the U.S.A. politicians often opt out of the free market system to use the far superior state-within-a-state system, e.g. Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Now it is quite possible that all this reflects a downward trajectory and that France’s system is simply not as far gone, just as Britain’s was once the wonder of the world (remember, wonder can also include, as in Dr. Johnson’s famous comparison of a woman preaching to a dog walking on its hind legs, wonder that it is done at all rather than wonder that it is done well – but the advocates of the N.H.S. didn’t pick up on that). Also, the system is somewhat different and rather better in Scotland, whether because of a better tradition or because of better resourcing for pork barrel reasons (so I shall charitably assume that your references to England meant just that, rather than being a gratuitously offensive lumping in of the rest of us with the English – someone called McDaniel should appreciate the point).
Over and above that, the N.H.S. isn’t a pure state system, but rather it incorporates handling the medical and surgical professionals as independent contractors, a relic of how it was brought about by buying those groups out with “chains of gold”. Today’s problems seem largely to reflect cack-handed attempts to “reform” by bringing in new pseudo-market mechanisms like the hospital trusts, making the N.H.S. even more neither one thing nor the other and achieving no set of objectives but rather setting up bad incentives to “make engineering reasons for accounting reasons”, a well known path to perdition – all as doomed as similar Soviet attempts to reform the system with efficient mechanisms while still preserving the grand structure.
So what all this suggests is something subtler, that a state health system can work but that there is a sort of Shakespearian tragedy at work: anyone else can see how to do it, but those in a position to do it and who want to do it – the tragic heroes – have a sort of blindness leading them on to destruction, so being who and what they are they do it wrong, all the more so because it all seems to be going so well at first. The silver lining for you is that Obamacare is likely to “work” quite well for quite a while, so you have little to worry about for yourself; your children’s plight is another, worse, matter.
Oops. I meant to write, “make engineering decisions for accounting reasons”.
Builder’s triangle.
Fast. Cheap. Good quality.
Pick two.
The US opted for fast and good quality. That is why Canadians (with money) come from across the border, and Europeans with money visit the US for medical services. Many other countries opted for cheap and good quality. That is why there is a line for services. That is the greener side of the fence. So, soon, we will hop it, with the hopes of cheaper and good quality being the balm to our injury. This is where the analogy breaks down: its not simply about the here and now if I can pay for it. Twenty and some change years ago, smoking was en vogue, and the correlation between sodas and diabetes was not as widely publicized. Well, in short, now it is. Actions in the past directly related to your health in the future, and with the supply of those that will provide for those whom realized the correlation (be it past or future) dwindling, those with cash (but less concern for their well being) want to ensure their medical needs will be cared for.
The concept of “health insurance”, but all rights should be limited to catastrophic incident. Mr. McDaniel, I am sure you of all people reading would be inclined to that opinion. Realistically speaking, what should a physical run? Maybe basic blood work? The human body is not unlike a piece of machinery, barring random happenstance, EVERYTHING that goes wrong with it is predictable, if not identifiable by inspection. A buddy of mine tells me “Dude, I need four root canals, what are the odds!” , and I ask him the last time he saw a dentist’s office. “Four years”. Gee, Sherlock…
If you want the ULTRA liberal spin on this, here is what I see:
An army of folks yammering that “Moo-chelle” can’t tell them what to eat, stuffing their faces with the exact stuff that is bad for them, and ten years down the pike wondering why there are so few doctors that can hack off a toe or prescribe Lipitor to them.
RE:”An army of folks yammering that “Moo-chelle” can’t tell them what to eat”
Twenty five years ago “Moo-chelle” or her equivalent would have told us to use margarine, hydrogenated vegetable oils, and shortening instead of butter, olive oil,and lard. Today we know better. Maybe.
Given the US’s obesity rates in virtually all ages, “maybe” is a bit strong.