as great as it sounds? According to Business Insider ... In Canada, doctors have waiting lists and the process is more like getting into a country club where you have to be recommended by other members. Special equipment, like MRI machines, always have a waiting list and work around the clock, so it is not unusual to get an appointment a month or two out, with a middle of the night time slot. According to the Pacific Research Institute, it’s so bad that 52,000 Canadians come to the U.S. every year to receive the medical care they need, but refuse to wait for. It’s a similar story in the U.K... where waiting lists are so bad that nearly 300,000 citizens had to wait six months or longer for treatment. Of course, there’s another big problem. Simply having “free” access to medical care doesn’t necessarily mean that the quality of care is decent. One Swedish economist confessed that his country’s health care system is “such a colossal failure that few in the Left today view the memory as something positive.” That's why 10% of that country’s population has reverted back to private health insurance. Of course, there’s another big problem. Simply having “free” access to medical care doesn’t necessarily mean that the quality of care is decent.
According to two separate studies of Medicare recipients conducted by the RAND Corporation and the Oregon Health Study, providing Medicare for All health insurance doesn’t equate with better health. After all, you can go to your doctor as often as you’d like... but if you smoke a carton of cigarettes a day, are obese, and inherited poor genes – you’re probably not going to live to 100. Another side effect that nobody talks about is how a government-run plan would stifle medical innovation. Today, companies will willingly operate at a deficit for years at a time on the quest for a drug that could be worth billions of dollars a year – more than enough to quickly earn back the cost of developing the new treatment. Under a government-run health care system, some sort of price control would likely be in place... meaning it could take decades or longer for innovators to be compensated for their discoveries. That could be enough to deter our nation’s top medical minds from wasting years on a discovery that comes with little-to-no payoff. Of course, we haven’t even discussed the economic impacts of a Medicare for All plan. According to estimates from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a Medicare for All program would cost $15 trillion over the next 10 years. Somebody has to pay for it all. And nearly all of the options Sanders has proposed focus on higher taxes. For starters, there would be a 7.5% payroll tax, and a new
40 September 2018
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