DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum House passes health-care bill for kids

She won't be home tonight,...and the house is only one-story anyway,...

The neighbor's is 2 story though,...

or when and show up

Dean Wormer's wife is hot.

Just think, in one single election day, Arch went from young and vibrant, to a grumpy old man.

Memory loss, gray hair, and dependence on viagra?

'Too Old' for Hip Surgery
As we inch towards nationalized health care, important lessons from north of the border.

By NADEEM ESMAIL


President Obama and Congressional Democrats are inching the U.S. toward government-run health insurance. Last week's expansion of Schip -- the State Children's Health Insurance Program -- is a first step. Before proceeding further, here's a suggestion: Look at Canada's experience.

Health-care resources are not unlimited in any country, even rich ones like Canada and the U.S., and must be rationed either by price or time. When individuals bear no direct responsibility for paying for their care, as in Canada, that care is rationed by waiting.

Canadians often wait months or even years for necessary care. For some, the status quo has become so dire that they have turned to the courts for recourse. Several cases currently before provincial courts provide studies in what Americans could expect from government-run health insurance.

In Ontario, Lindsay McCreith was suffering from headaches and seizures yet faced a four and a half month wait for an MRI scan in January of 2006. Deciding that the wait was untenable, Mr. McCreith did what a lot of Canadians do: He went south, and paid for an MRI scan across the border in Buffalo. The MRI revealed a malignant brain tumor.

Ontario's government system still refused to provide timely treatment, offering instead a months-long wait for surgery. In the end, Mr. McCreith returned to Buffalo and paid for surgery that may have saved his life. He's challenging Ontario's government-run monopoly health-insurance system, claiming it violates the right to life and security of the person guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Shona Holmes, another Ontario court challenger, endured a similarly harrowing struggle. In March of 2005, Ms. Holmes began losing her vision and experienced headaches, anxiety attacks, extreme fatigue and weight gain. Despite an MRI scan showing a brain tumor, Ms. Holmes was told she would have to wait months to see a specialist. In June, her vision deteriorating rapidly, Ms. Holmes went to the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, where she found that immediate surgery was required to prevent permanent vision loss and potentially death. Again, the government system in Ontario required more appointments and more tests along with more wait times. Ms. Holmes returned to the Mayo Clinic and paid for her surgery.

On the other side of the country in Alberta, Bill Murray waited in pain for more than a year to see a specialist for his arthritic hip. The specialist recommended a "Birmingham" hip resurfacing surgery (a state-of-the-art procedure that gives better results than basic hip replacement) as the best medical option. But government bureaucrats determined that Mr. Murray, who was 57, was "too old" to enjoy the benefits of this procedure and said no. In the end, he was also denied the opportunity to pay for the procedure himself in Alberta. He's heading to court claiming a violation of Charter rights as well.

These constitutional challenges, along with one launched in British Columbia last month, share a common goal: to win Canadians the freedom to spend their own money to protect themselves from the inadequacies of the government health-insurance system.

The cases find their footing in a landmark ruling on Quebec health insurance in 2005. The Supreme Court of Canada found that Canadians suffer physically and psychologically while waiting for treatment in the public health-care system, and that the government monopoly on essential health services imposes a risk of death and irreparable harm. The Supreme Court ruled that Quebec's prohibition on private health insurance violates citizen rights as guaranteed by that province's Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.

The experiences of these Canadians -- along with the untold stories of the 750,794 citizens waiting a median of 17.3 weeks from mandatory general-practitioner referrals to treatment in 2008 -- show how miserable things can get when government is put in charge of managing health insurance.

In the wake of the 2005 ruling, Canada's federal and provincial governments have tried unsuccessfully to fix the long wait times by introducing selective benchmarks and guarantees along with large increases in funding. The benchmarks and the guarantees aren't ambitious: four to eight weeks for radiation therapy; 16 to 26 weeks for cataract surgery; 26 weeks for hip and knee replacements and lower-urgency cardiac bypass surgery.

Canada's system comes at the cost of pain and suffering for patients who find themselves stuck on waiting lists with nowhere to go. Americans can only hope that Barack Obama heeds the lessons that can be learned from Canadian hardships.

Mr. Esmail, based in Calgary, is the director of Health System Performance Studies at The Fraser Institute.



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123413701032661445.html

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Why is everyone so outraged that we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on our own country and people, but no outrage over the hundreds of billions spendt in Iraq based on falsehoods around here?

Is it "fine and dandy" to go, "WOOPS, no WMD, my bad", about Iraq, but begrudge the same type of money towards our own nation and people?

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No, it's not fine and dandy.. perhaps some day soon a form of democracy will take root in the Iraq and there will be some justification for our losses... I hope so.

Regardless of whether it's this year or next year or the year after... at some point we will be out of Iraq, the money faucet will be turned off and we will have to live with the debt as well as the sacrifices... But just because we made a mistake in one area, does not justify us making another mistake somewhere else. This type of spending bill isn't something that's going to last a year or 10 years, it's going to last FOREVER... and it's just going to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. That's the problem I have with it.

As much as I hate to use the term "politics as usual", that is what we're seeing here. Reed, Polosi & company have added a lot of "pet projects or pork" to the spending bill. At last check, the senate had cut out about 150 billion of it.

In the end, I think it will be a bill NOBODY will be happy with, Neither conservatives nor liberals. At that juncture, I'll know they pretty well got it right IMO



When neither side is happy, they found a happy medium IMO

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In the end, I think it will be a bill NOBODY will be happy with, Neither conservatives nor liberals. At that juncture, I'll know they pretty well got it right IMO

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Well this is just a fundamental disagreement then.. because at that point, what you usually have is a watered down version of an already bad bill... which is to say, NOTHING.

People scream and holler for compromise.. congressional compromise usually results in the worst ideas from both sides being merged into one big happy mess.

Obama said today that he wants some of the stuff put back into the bill.

This thing is nothing more then a scam to get around a normal appropriations bill. Hey Dems, you own Congress and the White House...No need to play fast and lose. If you think all this stuff is better for the country then do it the right way.

Why not have 2 bills? The stimulus portion and then the stuff we really want but couldn't get passed any other way portion?

Sort of like the money to fund the war in Iraq P?

Same crap, different party..................

No Pit, it's nothing like the Iraq war money at all.

After reading your last post I think you are part of the bitter Republican machine. Then I remembered that you are bitter towards everyone....Except Phil Dawson.