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| Miracle Cure | | Date Created: Mar 23, 2005, 09:06 PM |
 Miracle Cure: How to Solve America's Health-Care Crisis and Why Canada Isn't the Answer
by Sally C. Pipes
Ms. Pipes is a Canadian who moved from The Fraser Institute in Vancouver to San Francisco to be the president of the Pacific Research Institute. Her book is divided into two parts. The first, and largest part, is on the US health care situation, and the latter section is on the Canadian system which she knows from experience. The Canadian health care system (which is also called Medicare) is held up as a shining example by medical socialists in the US who are pushing for universal care or single-payer medicine here. This would probably look more like the VA Hospital system in the US but assuming it would look like the Canadian system, Pipes documents that, as you might expect, the Canadian system isn't up to it's image as portrayed by medical socialists in the US.
Rather than try to critique the book. Let me just say that Pipes has it down and even has a section on the flegling efforts of US doctors to provide private care outside the insurance/government/welfare system. If you want to know what's really going on in the US and Canadian health care sector, read this book.
Excerpts:
"The goal of a health care system should be to provide all citizens with access to quality and affordable health care. These goals can only be accomplished by strengthening the sovereignty of the patient and restoring the doctor-patient relationship, both of which require reducing the role of government."
"This book provides insights into the fallacies of the Canadian system, something the American media have failed to do. Government control is not the solution and if forced upon us, Americans would rebel over the lack of access to the health care that they have grown to view as a right. But it will be too late."
"Most Americans are, however, so unused to directly bearing the full cost of health care that they've grown accustomed to thinking of it as an entitlement. It is for this reason that politicians have grown used to speaking of health care as if it were a constitutional right."
"In the United States, reformers must:
Eliminate the preferential tax treatment was given to employers as a concession at the end of World War II when wage and price controls were in effect.
Give individuals the opportunity to purchase health care with pre-tax dollars regardless of whether they have a job or not...
Move from managed care -- the dominant system of insurance in the United States -- to a system of consumer-directed plans such as HSA's, defined contribution plans...
Abolish state regulations and mandates...
Reform medical malpractice insurance and a system that currently encourages lawsuit abuse.
Remove the barriers to entry that make the health care industry a restricted monopoly.
Restructure Medicare so that it becomes a menu of choices among privately run, competitive insurance programs similar to those enjoyed by federal employees."
"An even greater source of government intervention in health care is the ambition of social planners. The history of health care in recent decades is larely the history of social planners intervening to undo the unintended consequences of their earlier interventions...Thus the logic of intervention continues, one solution begetting one crises after another -- until breakdown, forcing the entire system to become government run."
"The United States is mired in a quasi-socialist medical system that distorts incentives to provide good health care, while degrading the doctor-patient relationship. In reaction, doctors and patients alike are seeking out way to get around the system -- and even outside of it, altogether."
"Today, after 30 years of government intervention [in Canada], the system suffers from:
-- long waiting times for critical procedures
-- lack of access to current technology
-- increased costs to taxpayers and patients
-- a brain drain of doctors
In turn, each of these problems has caused Canadians to lose out in their quest for the three essential aspects of any good health care system. Canadians are finding their health care degraded in terms of:
-- access
-- affordability
-- quality
Each of these problems can be traced to government intervention. So how do many of Canada's leading health care experts respond? They call for yet more government control and increased funding by raising taxes."
"In both sections of this book, we have seen that for all the vaunted differences between the health care systems in the United States and Canada, they both suffer symptoms of the same disease -- the desease of central control. The cure is to open both systems to competition and consumer choice.
The greatest risk to both systems is not that they will go bankrupt. It is that they will come to see human beings as nothing but cost centers. Both systems must keep faith with the purpose of health care, which is, after all, to serve people. Both must see each new patient cured as a cause for joy. If we allow ourselves to lose this concern, we will lose more than access, affordability, and quality in health care.
We will lose our humanity."
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