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The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - This author is a fool...
... if he thinks that "The Market" will provide affordable, quality health insurance to the millions of cancer survivors, chronically-ill, disabled, and middle-aged people who would lose their employer-based health insurance under his tax increase proposal. I'll gladly admit that reforms are needed, but this market chaos he proposes is not the answer.
Rating: - John B. Sullivan, Jr., MD
The whole premise of this book is a fallacy. Health care is not a market driven phenonmenon. Capitalism as the author refers to is basically those with lots of money get quality health care, those without lots of money get something of much lesser quality. He ignores trauma as a major cost of health care and the fact is trauma victims don't usually make the choice to be traumatized. Also, 50% of trauma victims have alcohol in their system and he makes no effort to bring back prohibition as a cost saving feature of health care. The reason health care costs go up instead of down is due to illness, age, lack of preventive health, and good old American freedom to eat at any McDonald's you wish and smoke as much as you like. A person having a heart attack will not stop to consider how to best spend his limited health care dollars in our market economy. He wants help now. He wants the latest and best drugs, an excellent cath lab and great cardiologists whose hospital has the lowest mortality. If the man has no money or no insurance, he could have a bill of $100,000 in two or three days that is the equivalent of another home mortgage. But this is capitalism, so his wages will be garnered and his home sold to pay the bills. He should have gone to the cheaper hospital, wherever that is and also should have taken the cheaper ambulance Maybe he should have walked to save money for the $1.2 trillion health care system and demonstrated that he too is a good capitalist like the author of the book. Save your money and read Health Affairs, its a reliable, peer-reviewed publication on health care policy and financing.
Rating:  - The perfect antidote to Moore's Sicko propaganda
Let me state now that NO ONE is denying that healthcare in the United States is messed up right now, and is facing some SERIOUS issues. Even the most conservative Republican knows this full well and good. This is not even the issue. The real issue should be: would socializing things make our problems better or worse?
Michael Moore, in Sicko, touts Canada's socialized healthcare system, even calling it "free." (It's not free. The government also does not "pay" for it because the government does NOT have any money. Taxpayers pay for it.) Moore is of course conveniently ignoring many well-known facts. The author of Cure was a Doctor in Canada, and saw first-hand the problem with socialized medicine. His book demonstrates that it's not all that it's cracked up to be. Sorry Hillary.
In England and Canada, if you go to the doctor or the hospital, you won't get a bill. Yeah that's great. But the problem that has emerged is that it takes SO LONG to even get in for certain types of treatment that people are DYING OF EASILY TREATABLE ILLNESSES THERE. In England this has gotten SO BAD that more people are dying a year of treatable cancer than from automobile accidents!!! Yes, that's right. The cancer WAS treatable, but by the time they actually get in for treatment, it has advanced to the stage that it no longer is treatable, and the patient dies.
So, if the healthcare in Canada is SO WONDERFUL, then why are so many Canadians flooding our Northern hospitals every year? They come across the border for an appointment they can get right away, when in their own country they would have to wait nine months to a year for treatment. As shown on 20/20, dogs and cats that need surgery in Canada get it faster than humans!
By the way, if you get strep throat and have to wait a month to even get in to see a general practitioner (which is about the typical wait for GPs in Canada), then what's even the point? You'll be better by the time you get in! So, depending on whether what you have is life-threatening or not, YOU'LL MAY EITHER BE BETTER OR UNCURABLE BY THE TIME YOU EVEN SEE A DOCTOR! Who cares if it's "free"? As the Canadian woman on the September 14th episode of 20/20 said who had to come to America for a life-saving surgery that the Canadian system classified as "elective surgery" (whereas the American doctor gave her only a couple weeks to live), "Who cares if they make a profit (in America), I'm alive!"
The wait to see dentists in England is so bad that people are now performing home dentistry. We're not talking teeth cleaning here, but people pulling their own teeth out instead of having professional work done! Lines to get into the dentist in England look like the lines did at the local theater on the opening night of Star Wars Episode III. No thank you!
By the way, if the government-run medical system in Canada is so great, then why does a private clinic now open in Canada EVERY WEEK, on average, even though such clinics ARE ILLEGAL? Furthermore, if these private clinics are illegal in Canada (and they are), then why does the Canadian government do nothing to stop them? BECAUSE THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT KNOWS IT NEEDS THEM, THAT ITS HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IS CRUMBLING, THAT'S WHY. The prime minister of Canada recently suggested that their socialized healthcare system is on the brink of collapse, and Americans are scurrying to emulate it!
This book is a much-needed reality check after the overlong season of uncritical love surrounding Moore's obscurantist propaganda documentary. In fact, it's too bad this book isn't a documentary itself; it could then act as a more effective counterweight.
Rating: - Evidence versus anecdotes
David Gratzer, being a licensed physician in Canada and the US, is a credible critic of proponents of socialized medicine. He does an excellent job of providing data to support his points, and most of his points are that people supporting the concept of a single payer for health care use anecdotes rather than convincing data to show how the US health system is failing. He uses hard endpoint data, such as diagnosis of breast cancer in early stages, cancer survival data, and survival after heart attacks, to show that health care in the US leads other countries in the world and espcially those with single payer systems run by the government. He makes the point that being "politically correct" doesn't necessarily make one "scientifically correct". The way he criticizes the mind-set of socialized medicine reminded me of the methods used by Thomas Sowell in his 1995 book, "The Vision of the Anointed". He pointed out that most of the "policially correct" set ignore factual evidence. Gratzer finds these arguments and provides the evidence that is often ignored. This should be a must read for those in positions to influence the debate.
Rating: - Who's Really 'Sicko'
In Canada, dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week. Humans can wait two to three years.
By DAVID GRATZER
Wall Street Journal Online, June 28, 2007; Page A13
'I haven't seen 'Sicko,'" says Avril Allen about the new Michael Moore documentary, which advocates socialized medicine for the United States. The film, which has been widely viewed on the Internet, and which will officially open in the U.S. and Canada on Friday, has been getting rave reviews. But Ms. Allen, a lawyer, has no plans to watch it. She's just too busy preparing to file suit against Ontario's provincial government about its health-care system next month.
Her client, Lindsay McCreith, would have had to wait for four months just to get an MRI, and then months more to see a neurologist for his malignant brain tumor. Instead, frustrated and ill, the retired auto-body shop owner traveled to Buffalo, N.Y., for a lifesaving surgery. Now he's suing for the right to opt out of Canada's government-run health care, which he considers dangerous.
Ms. Allen figures the lawsuit has a fighting chance: In 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that "access to wait lists is not access to health care," striking down key Quebec laws that prohibited private medicine and private health insurance.
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Other European countries follow this same path. In Sweden, after the latest privatizations, the government will contract out some 80% of Stockholm's primary care and 40% of total health services, including Stockholm's largest hospital. Beginning before the election of the new conservative chancellor, Germany enhanced insurance competition and turned state enterprises over to the private sector (including the majority of public hospitals). Even in Slovakia, a former Marxist country, privatizations are actively debated.
Under the weight of demographic shifts and strained by the limits of command-and-control economics, government-run health systems have turned out to be less than utopian. The stories are the same: dirty hospitals, poor standards and difficulty accessing modern drugs and tests.
Admittedly, the recent market reforms are gradual and controversial. But facts are facts, the reforms are real, and they represent a major trend in health care. What does Mr. Moore's documentary say about that? Nothing.
Dr. Gratzer, a practicing physician licensed in Canada and the U.S. and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of "The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care" (Encounter, 2006).
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