Watch this video for some details into Barack Obama’s position on abortion, specifically his position on what to do with babies born alive after a botched abortion.

Yes, this video does make an emotional appeal, but listen to the facts as well.  This is Obama living up to his reputation as the most liberal of Senators.  Hey, he’s even to the left of NARAL, if you can go that far without falling off the political spectrum.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, US presidential election, abortion

(Dan Trabue, frequent commenter on "Stones Cry Out", the group blog I run, in a comment here to my previous post on health care, referenced a think tank paper that predicts cost reductions without a loss of effectiveness with a single-payer system, and took issue with my terming this "socialized medicine".  I decided to put my response up as a post.)

From the Wikipedia entry on health care in Canada: "Health care in Canada is funded and delivered through a publicly funded health care system, with most services provided by private entities."  So in Canada, it’s not government-run hospitals but it is a government funded system.  While the writer of this Wikipedia entry insists it’s not truly socialized medicine, the article at the link to the words "socialized medicine" does concede, "The term can refer to any system of medical care that is publicly financed, government administered, or both", I suppose depending on who you ask.

But who’s in charge of the hospitals or what you want to call it is immaterial, as the outcome is the same.  Britain has government-owned hospitals and Canada doesn’t, but the result is still that bureaucracies make medical decisions instead of doctors and patients.  HMOs were the Left’s bogeyman for years, but their solution is to institute the nation’s, perhaps the world’s, largest HMO/insurance company to make our individual health care decisions.  This makes no sense at all.

From the think tank paper cited:

[The Lewin Group, "a nationally respected nonpartisan
consulting firm"] estimates the proposal would cover 99.6 percent of all Americans without raising total national health spending. It would also save hundreds of billions over time – more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years – in national health spending, according to Lewin.

The Lewin Group is inexplicably closing its eyes to the Canadian system, blue-skying his prediction.  The Canadian system uses both government- and employer-based payment system, utilizing private insurance/doctors/hospitals, and they are in crisis.  They are not saving money (Claude Castonguay, quoted in the original post, notes that rationing and "injecting massive amounts of new money" has not helped).  They most certainly do not serve effectively (Wikipedia cites a study showing 57% of Canadians wait 4 or more week to see a specialist).  And it unfortunately affects everyone (read the Wikipedia article sections titled "Government Involvement" and "Private Sector").

Are you really going to believe predictions on the efficiency and cost effectiveness of a massive government program.  No government program of such a size ever comes in under budget; not Medicare, not Social Security, not the Iraq War, nothing. 

The Lewin Group says that the government could bargain for lower costs, and yet Canada’s are skyrocketing.  They may have gone down at the beginning, but as The Acton Institute’s Dr. Donald Condit notes:

Resource consumption increases when people think someone else is shouldering the cost. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman observed, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.” More than 60 years of “someone else” paying for health care has led to medical expense inflation. Our predominately third-party reimbursement “system,” beginning after World War II for employees and after Medicare in 1965 for the retired, has resulted in out-of-control spending. Increasing the role of government will spur unbridled medical services consumption and further harm the underserved. Medical resources are limited. An expanded government role in health care will necessarily lead to rationing, shortages of health-care providers, delay in treatment, and deterioration in quality of care.

Medicaid is a socialized medicine microcosm. In that system, price controls and bureaucracy result in rationing by deterring provider participation and delaying treatment, with subsequent deterioration in quality of care. Affluent individuals are able to access better health care outside of any government system.

And this "Medicare model" is what the EPI plan wants to take the "best elements" of, which they only enumerate later on as the federal government administering it.  How can the Left possibly say they care more for the less-fortunate in one breath, and in the other hold up health care rationing as "caring"?  This makes no sense at all.

Canada’s system currently compares favorably to the US in terms of a couple of cherry-picked statistics, but that’s like judging a pyramid scheme based on the first few generations.  They are losing on other fronts, like a drain of doctors.  And they are now at the tipping point of that pyramid scheme, where the choice is either returning a bigger role to the private sector (what Castonguay called "radical" and what conservatives call "sensible") or sliding further down the slope to socialism.  The Left, not wishing to have their utopian vision challenged, will no doubt push for the latter.

Read the rest of this entry

As the promise of Universal Healthcare continues to be sold to the American public by Democrats, the anecdotes fly. Look here; a case failure of our healthcare system! Look there; another person falls through the cracks!

The problem is, it’s the big picture that continues to put the lie to the selling of socialized medicine. As I’ve noted before, the system in Oregon will deny cancer patients life-saving or -extending medicine, but will gladly pay for life-ending “treatment”. You can decry all you want the profit motive of the private enterprise system, but with socialized medicine the profit motive is just as motivating, with a bigger bureaucracy larger than any insurance company you can name calling the shots.

And as Christians, is this the kind of system that we want to be encouraging? We’d have rationed healthcare (all socialized systems wind up here, sooner or later), equally poor quality, and a respect for life on par with Oregon’s.

But hey, it would be “equal”. Wonderful.

This bit of “hope” and “change”, however, has already been done on this scale. And how has it worked? Let’s talk to one of the founding fathers.

Back in the 1960s, [Claude] Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Read the rest of this entry

Yeah, that’s what I want; permission from the government to pay for the medicine my doctor says I need.  That should never be in question, yet it is in the People’s Republic of England.

Cancer patients deserve to be able to pay privately for drugs without having their free NHS treatment withdrawn, a doctors’ leader said last night.

Baroness Ilora Finlay, president of the Royal Society of Medicine, said Labour’s policy of denying free care to patients who use their own money to buy the latest drugs went to the heart of the purpose of the health service.

Lady Finlay, a doctor who specialises in the palliative care of cancer sufferers, asked:

‘Can we justify spending billions of pounds on the relief of relatively minor conditions and deny patients with life-threatening disease the support of the NHS when they want to bridge the costs themselves?’

Oh no, say the proposal’s detractors.  That would be unfair.

The Government says allowing cancer suffers to pay for some drugs while receiving others free would create a two-tier health service, with patients on the same ward being given different drugs depending on their ability to pay.

But critics say it is ‘cruel and perverse’ to stop people using their own money to better their health.

The NHS has determined what cancer treatments it will and won’t pay for, and even if you could afford it, you’re not allowed to, unless you want to take on the full burden of payment for all your health care, and essentially forfeit the taxes you paid into the system. 

These are the kinds of debates you get into when you let the government run health care.  They pay, so they are in control.  Of everything.  One size does not and has never fit all when you’re talking about wellness.  Do we really want these sorts of debates in Washington?

Technorati Tags: socialized health care, England, Baroness Ilora Finlay, Royal Society of Medicine

I really can’t add anything to Don Surber’s observations, other than to say that somehow I don’t think we’ll learn from the mistakes we made pillorying politicians who didn’t toe the AIDS funding line.

Question: What lesson does AIDS teach us about the dangers of government-run health care?

Answer: The politicization of health. AIDS was peddled as being able to happen to anyone, when in fact it was transmitted mainly via male homosexual sex. Anyone who dared challenge that was branded a “homophobe” and merrily sent on his way. The Independent reported on Monday: “A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health Organization has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared.”

We also know that embryonic stem cell research is not going to make Michael J. Fox all better and that with a 90% 5-year survival rate for breast cancer in the USA (lower in Britain and other government-run health countries) women would be far better served with pink ribbon money going to lung cancer, which has less than a 20% 5-year survival rate.

But politically correct diseases will get the research money. Sickle cell anemia, yes. The heart disease that actually is the No. 1 killer of black people, no.

Technorati Tags: AIDS, health care

Don Surber notes that the health care system run by the state of Oregon won’t pay for cancer drugs, but they’ll cover assisted suicide.  Socialized medicine is about the money just as much as "capitalized" medicine is.

One example cited is that of a woman who’s oncologist prescribed a drug to slow the cancer growth, but Oregon Heath Care wouldn’t cover it, though she could take the Permanant Exit Door(tm) with their blessing.  Instead, the drug company gave her the medicine for free.  Surber notes the moral of the story:

Socialists to cancer victims: Kill yourself.

Capitalists: Can’t pay? No problem.

Oh and the capitalists also pay the taxes that finance the socialist programs.

The New York Post has a column up on this topic as well, noting that the health care system that Ted Kennedy would like to see could actually have killed him (well, if he wasn’t a man of means).

Problem is, governments that promise to "cover everyone" always wind up cutting corners simply to save money. People with Kennedy’s condition are dying or dead as a result.

Consider Jennifer Bell of Norwich, England. In 2006, the 22-year-old complained of headaches for months – but Britain’s National Health Service made her wait a year to see a neurologist.

Then she had to wait more than three months before should could get what the NHS decided was only a "relatively urgent" MRI scan. Three days before the MRI appointment, she died.

Consider, too, the chemo drug Kennedy is receiving: Temodar, the first oral medicine for brain tumors in 25 years.

Temodar has been widely used in this country since the FDA approved it in 2000. But a British health-care rationing agency, the National Institute for Comparative Effectiveness, ruled that, while the drug helps people live longer, it wasn’t worth the money – and denied coverage for it.

Barack Obama – and other Democrats – have been pushing a Senate bill to set up a similar US "review board" for Medicare and any future government health-care plan.

After denying this treatment completely for seven years, the NICE (did whoever named it intend the irony?) relented – partly. Even today, only a handful of Brits with brain tumors can get Temodar.

And if you want to pay for Temodar out of your own pocket, the British system forces you to pay for all of your cancer care – about $30,000 a month.

So the lion’s share of the populace is stuck with sub-standard health care, and only the super-rich can get what they need.  I thought that’s what Michael Moore said our system was like.

And the column notes that it’s no better in Canada, where, if they live close enough to the border, they come here for the care they have to wait for over there. 

Socialized health care is simply not delivering for the countries that have it.  The fact is, the US system is delivering better medical care for more of its population in a timely manner than government-run ones are.  Why would we want to change that?

But is the Left noticing?  While I was gone on Spring Break, a number of news stories came through showing both Hugo Chavez’s desperation for power and popularity in Venezuela, while the standard of living is predictably spiraling downward.

First, in response to a housing shortage, he declared that he’d nationalize the cement industry.  The first thing that happened as a result was that Cemex, the largest domestic supplier of cement in Venezuela, dropped almost 4% in Mexico’s stock market.  Apparently investors know a losing proposition when they see it.

Then, he renationalized the largest steelmaker in the country.  Their stock dropped 9% in New York.

And during all of this, the people are suffering.

Grimacing from contractions, expectant mother Castuca Marino had more on her mind than birth pangs. She was nervous about whether she and her newborn child would make it out of the hospital alive.

Interviewed as she stood in the emergency room of Concepcion Palacios Maternity Hospital here last week, Marino had heard news reports of six infant deaths there over a 24-hour period late last month. She knew that since the beginning of February, six mothers had died in the hospital during or after childbirth.

"What are poor people going to do?" said Marino, 20, as she was being admitted to this sprawling complex where, on average, 60 babies are born a day. "I’m just hoping that there are no complications and that everything goes well."
Palacios, Venezuela’s largest public maternity hospital and once the nation’s beacon of neonatal care, has fallen on hard times. Half of the anesthesiologists and pediatricians on staff two years ago have quit. Basic equipment such as respirators, ultrasound monitors and incubators are either broken or scarce. Six of 12 birth rooms have been shut.

On one day last month, five newborns were crowded into one incubator, said Dr. Jesus Mendez Quijada, a psychiatrist and Palacios staff member who is a past president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation.

The deaths of the six infants "were not a case of bad luck, but the consequence of an accumulation of circumstances that have created this alarming situation," Mendez said.

He and others say the problems at Concepcion Palacios are symptoms of a variety of ills that have beset the public healthcare system under leftist firebrand President Hugo Chavez. Cases of malaria nearly doubled between 1998, the year before Chavez took office, and 2007. Incidents of dengue fever more than doubled over the same period.

Chavez is trying to counter this with his own, parallel, socialized medicine program, but he’s keeping prying eyes away from the innards.  "Please ignore the man behind the curtain."

Inaugurated nationwide in 2003, Barrio Adentro initially was so popular with the poor that it helped Chavez win a crucial 2004 referendum and hold on to power. It has brought basic healthcare to the barrios, providing free exams and medicine as well as eye operations that have saved the sight of thousands.

But the system siphons resources and equipment away from the public hospitals, which have four-fifths of the nation’s 45,000 hospital beds and where the public still goes for emergency and maternity care, as well as for most major and elective surgeries.

The finances and organization of Barrio Adentro are "a black box and not transparent, so it’s impossible to analyze it for efficiency," said Dr. Marino Gonzalez, professor of public policy at Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, the capital.
A lack of openness has affected other facets of public health too. After the medical establishment blamed him for an outbreak of dengue fever last summer, Chavez halted weekly publication of an epidemiology report that for 50 years had tallied occurrences of infectious diseases nationwide.

Former Health Minister Rafael Orihuela says the loss of the weekly report has deprived the government of information needed for a quick response to outbreaks of disease.
"I am not talking about a failure of the government to adopt innovations in healthcare," said Orihuela, a Chavez critic. "I am talking about a failure to maintain basic healthcare standards."

And in the meantime, Chavez’s poll numbers are approaching George W. Bush lows…

Public support for President Hugo Chavez’s government has significantly declined, according to two polls published on Tuesday.

Some 34% of Venezuelans surveyed said they support Chavez’s government, down from a high of 67% in early 2005, to the lowest level in five years, a quarterly survey of 2,000 Venezuelans by Caracas pollster Datos found.

…and the economy is tanking.

Polls have consistently shown that rampant crime is a major concern to Venezuelans. Double-digit inflation has also accelerated, and sporadic shortages of milk and other food products persist.

While these polls are not as open as those in the US, they do show a general malaise among Venezuelans.  Bruce McQuain at Q&O believes that the power grabs are specifically because of the poll numbers.  Whether or not that’s true, the narrative of The Socialist Utopia(tm) and the bill of goods it sells continues on course, to the detriment of the Venezuelan people, and to the ignorance of Chavez’s buddies in the US.

Technorati Tags: Hugo Chavez, Venezuela, Cemex, socialism, socialized medicine

And those who need blood transfusions pay the price.

San Jose State University’s decision this week to ban blood drives on the 30,000-student campus over discrimination concerns is drawing a gush of criticism from local blood banks.

Stanford Blood Center officials said they actually agree with San Jose State President Don Kassing that the federal Food and Drug Administration is wrong to prohibit blood donations from gay men.

But in a statement Friday, the center called his decision to suspend campus blood drives for that reason "a terribly misguided tactic that could have a devastating impact on the blood supply, and therefore, patients in our community."

Kassing’s stand — based on the university’s non-discrimination policy — has focused attention on a longstanding FDA rule that many say is overly restrictive. Critics, however, worry it sets a bad example that could exacerbate blood shortages if others follow his lead.

It’s one thing to stand up for your principles, and it’s certainly San Jose State’s prerogative to do this, even though I disagree with the principle.  But to shut down blood drives on campus is just entirely misguided and ignores the very real cost of this particular type of stand.

Gay rights groups on several college campuses, including Stanford’s, have held protests on the issue in recent years. At San Jose State, it was an employee’s complaint last year that prompted Kassing’s office to investigate whether the rule made blood drives discriminatory.

They decided it did, since gay men were being treated differently than other groups of people with similar risk factors.

There is no inherent "right" to give blood, but fair enough; let’s assume some sort of evil "discrimination".  Who’s paying the price?  Certainly not the blood banks.  While we’re never really awash in too much donated blood, they’ll still do their jobs as best they can.  Not the FDA.  How does this really affect them?

No, the folks who are really getting punished for this restriction (and pardon me if the regulations regarding the nation’s blood supply err on the side of caution) are those who actually need the blood.  The patients in hospitals who need it to live and who, I’m pretty sure, are quite happy not to have to worry about AIDS-tainted blood. 

These are "bleeding-heart liberals" who care more about hurt feelings over donating restrictions (and really, that’s the only harm I see here) than they do people whose lives may depend on them.  How revealing.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, Don Kassing, FDA, homosexuality, blood donations, AIDS

Yeah, right, this is the first thing I think about when I hear the word "freedom".

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday she might be willing to garnish the wages of workers who refuse to buy health insurance to achieve coverage for all Americans.

The New York senator has criticized presidential rival Barack Obama for pushing a health plan that would not require universal coverage. Clinton has not always specified the enforcement measures she would embrace, but when pressed on ABC’s "This Week," she said: "I think there are a number of mechanisms" that are possible, including "going after people’s wages, automatic enrollment."

I’m sorry, but that does not give me a warm fuzzy about what other freedoms Hillary might take away from us for "our own good". 

Again we find that stem cells could be the cure for things that had been incurable.

Heart attacks occur when the heart muscle is starved of oxygen, usually because the arteries that supply it with blood become blocked with fatty deposits. A bypass operation restores this blood supply, but the lack of oxygen leads to permanent scarring of the heart muscle.

Even after the operation the heart’s activity does not return to normal. "If you have a large heart attack like this and you are lucky and are referred for a bypass operation, your quality of life will be permanently affected because the pumping function of your heart is reduced," said Raimondo Ascione, the surgeon who is leading the research. "Your tolerance to exercise is reduced so you can’t really enjoy your life."

The trial will involve patients with the worst prognosis, those who have scarring on at least half of the left ventricular wall. "It’s the worst heart attack you can have. Most patients just die," said Ascione.

The team will extract bone marrow from all 60 patients and separate out a class of stem cells that makes up 1% of the tissue. Previous studies have suggested that this cell type is able to regenerate heart muscle cells and blood vessels. By using the patient’s own cells there will be no problems with tissue rejection.

But again, as well, is a missing word in the article.  It’s implied in that last quoted paragraph, but it’s not said by name.  These are adult stem cells, from the patient.  Very little these days is said about adult stem cells, because of the agenda of folks who want embryonic stem cell research to get federal funding. 

The question isn’t whether or not embryonic stem cells would be useful.  The real question is; if adult stem cells have such wide, varied uses, and have been proven to work time after time, why do we want to step into the ethical quagmire of using embryos?

Technorati Tags: stem cells, Raimondo Ascione, heart disease, medicine