A must read by Walter Williams.

We’re hearing that Michael Moore, in his upcoming movie, interviews some happy Canadians who are satisfied with their health care system. This doesn’t surprise. Most healthy people don’t like to think about getting sick and like the idea that if and when they do – they will be taken care of (especially if they think that someone else is footing the bill).

However, when Canadians get older and need more medical care, they run up against the strict rationing imposed by their system. After paying a life time’s worth of high taxes to support socialized medicine, they come face-to-face with its’ realities.

It’s safe to say that Mr. Moore never interviewed Mary Lou Frye who has had her urgent brain surgery cancelled six times:

In March 2006, Mary Lou Frye had a seizure and drove off the Fraser Highway into a ditch.

A CAT scan revealed a golf ball-sized tumour behind her left eye. She had surgery in May 2006, but bleeding cut the operation short, leaving part of the tumour.

She now has two tumours in her brain, but since January Frye has had her surgery postponed six times, the latest last Friday when four other neurosurgery cases were also postponed.

The previous day, four neurosurgery cases were postponed due to a lack of beds.

Meanwhile, Frye, 64, who raised three kids as a single mom, is failing. Doctors have declared her urgent because of headaches, loss of balance and walking difficulty.

But Ms. Frye is not alone. Canada’s Fraser Institute, in its’ report Waiting Your Turn, estimates that over 770,000 Canadians are currently on waiting lists.

We hear ad nauseum from the single-payer left about the supposed administrative efficiency of Medicare and Medicaid. Since insurance companies must control waste and fraud in order to make a profit for shareholders they are deemed inefficient. However, government can draw from the seemingly bottomless well of tax revenues. Here’s the result:

In what was described as one of the biggest healthcare fraud cases ever in South Florida, federal prosecutors on Friday accused a couple of leading a billing company that bilked Medicare out of $56 million over a six-year stretch.

Mabel and Abner Diaz were accused of operating All-Med Billing Corp. of Miami Lakes in a scheme that used 29 durable medical equipment firms to submit false claims to Medicare.

“This is one of the most important cases ever filed by our office,” U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta said. “This is our money which could have been used to treat patients rather than line the pockets of the accused.”

Take a look at this paragraph:

Health care reform is one of the most urgent needs facing American today. The high and rising cost of health care threatens to bankrupt individuals and small businesses, while millions of Americans no longer can afford to buy health insurance. Serious charges are being leveled against the quality of America’s health care system, and proposals for reform than can only be called radical are seriously discussed in Washington D.C. and in state capitals around the country.

Reads like something written recently, no? Actually, it is by Dick Armey, and was written in 1993 as the forward to the book Why We Spend Too Much On Health Care.

The more things change…

Here is what happens with a lack of price transparency:

A missionary who does his work in Africa walks into a hospital. He has a simple procedure done that requires a two-day stay. When he gets the bill, he is shocked to find that the procedure cost $28,000. He’s even more shocked to find that a local person with health insurance would have paid a mere $3,300.

That’s the joke. Here’s the punch line: That country is the United States and the hospital is in New Jersey.

Read all of Paul Mulshine’s column.

The Free Market Cure Blog is now online. The site is still being worked on – and a “soft launch” of this endeavor is still days away. However, expect penetrating and insightful analysis of the current health care policy debate here very soon!