Squeaky Wheel Seeks Grease

Check out The Lone Libertarian’s post from today.

It’s regarding a response by another documentary film-maker to Michael Moore.

Read it, watch the video at the end of the post, and be sure to watch this video, as well: Two Women.

The video gives a brief explanation of a situation where socialized health care fails, miserably. One woman has a dysfunctional bladder, and needs a nerve stimulator in order to simply urinate. She is put on a waiting list for the operation. Now, keep in mind that she doesn’t need a new bladder - there’s no waiting period for a donor involved. She just needs an electronic device implanted. It’s close to an outpatient procedure in complexity.

She is #32 on the list. The hospital will only do 10-12 surgeries of that type per year, so she is slated to wait for 3 years to even be scheduled for the surgery. Her mother offers to pay to get moved up on the list because of the urgency of her daughter’s situation, but the hospital refuses. After all, under a socialist health-care system, everyone is equal, and no one merits special attention. This woman ends up having to have her bladder taken out because she got so many infections. She is now bedridden. All efforts by her mother to contact the Minister of Health for Ontario were ignored, blatantly.

The other woman started out life as a man. “She” wanted surgery for an official sex change, and apparently became quite buddy-buddy with this same Minister during the course of the lobbying process for the surgery. As far as I can tell, things have been completed, and “he” is now a “she”. I guess there was no one else who wanted the surgery that year?

Michael Moore has a good point that the health care system in America needs an overhaul. He has the wrong approach by singling out a socialist system as the perfect solution. Anything the government chooses to regulate always ends up going badly.

I need a $15000 surgery. I don’t have insurance (can’t afford premiums), and I don’t have the money to pay for it. So I’m just dealing with it for now. I may never get the surgery. I will likely be rendered infertile (not that I *really* care), and if things progress much further, emergency removal of the affected organs might be necessary. I have to go to a specialist to get anything done with my condition - and of course specialists have to deal with government regulation (i.e. I could go to any hospital anywhere in the country and still have to pay $15000 for the surgery - no one can set their own price), so there’s really not much point in my researching other options for this procedure. So I wait. *shrugs* Not much else I can do.

However, if I wanted a breast reduction, boy howdy, I could get that next week and pay…let’s see what the clinics in Memphis offer it for…$5200.

$15000 for 2 small holes to be made in my abdomen, one for what amounts to a soldering iron, and the other for a small camera. 4 stitches, likely. Some anesthetic, certainly. Sent home after a day with some painkillers and instructions for no heavy lifting.

OR

$5200 for a T-shaped incision encompassing the entire lower half of your breast, careful removal of fat and some breast duct tissue, upwards of 30 stitches (sometimes per breast, depending on how big you were to begin with), anesthetic, 2-3 days of recovery in a hospital before being sent home with painkillers, and instructions for no heavy lifting.

Um…what’s the difference?

Oh…plastic surgery operates under a free-market system. Gotcha.

Basically, if you want your boobs done, you shop around for the best price. You get what you pay for in some cases, but the doctors who don’t do a good job get slammed and taken out of business, leaving the other doctors to pick up the slack…more customers and more demand means lower prices as doctors try to woo clients with promises of a perfect figure.

If you have to have extensive scar-tissue removal from your organs…well, that’s not merely aesthetic, so you can’t just pay someone to take care of it for you. It’s a medical condition, so it has to be monitored. This results in the hospitals having to pay fees to the government, and then the doctors having to pay separate fees…and these costs are passed down to the patient.

Yeah, I’m starting to get an idea of what we might need to do.

Jesse covers it a little more eloquently than I do, though. So hop on over there and check it out, and look up the Free Market Cure website, as well. It’s another side of the same propaganda coin, but somewhere in between lies the answer, so it’s best to educate yourself on all extremes to find the best process for change.