Want a preview of what the U.S. health care system will look like in the near future if the Affordable Care Act remains as is?
From a story in the Ottawa Citizen: “Former deputy prime minister Herb Gray, who was a member of Parliament when medicare [the Canadian government-run health care program] was adopted in 1966, was forced to wait in the emergency room at The Ottawa Hospital on a stretcher for 48 hours before being moved to a bed, his widow Sharon Sholzberg-Gray says.”
But the widow, Sholzberg-Gray, isn’t your average Canadian citizen; she was a long-time paid defender of and spokesperson for Canada’s single-payer system. As the story explains:
“Sholzberg-Gray, a lawyer who was president of the Canadian Healthcare Association in the late 1990s, said even a career as an advocate for changes that were needed in the health-care system didn’t prepare her for the stress and anxiety of having a frail loved one on a stretcher in emergency for so long.
“Such a long wait without a real hospital bed worsens a patient’s condition, she said. ‘You can’t even get off the bed yourself.’ Spending days in the emergency room, she said, ‘does not create the best conditions for your future health status.’”
So a former member of parliament who voted for Canada’s government-run health care system and his wife who spent her career defending it became the latest victims of it.
Strangely, she doesn’t seem to be angry about the fact her husband waited for two days on a stretcher before getting a hospital bed. “Sholzberg-Gray said she doesn’t blame the hospital, which provided good care, but she said the health system needs to better meet the needs of the elderly.”
It’s never the government's role in the “system”! Remember President Obama's assessment of the VA health care system?
That embrace of failure isn’t an anomaly; it’s endemic to government-run systems. And those caught up in it eventually begin to accept mediocrity as the norm.
Just look at the U.S. education system, where those who have been stuck in low-performing public schools eventually begin to accept low-performance as the norm—even to the point of criticizing those who try to flee it.
People forget that the system used to be better, before the government took control. And the next generation never knew any different.
So there may be some justice in the fact that Gray and his wife became victims of the very system they supported. But you can bet that won’t happen to President Obama; U.S. big-government advocates always seem to leave themselves a way out of what they impose on everyone else.
September 30, 2014