Mary Katherine Stout praises President George W. Bush for his brave stand against universal health care

Many Republicans foolishly thought they could create a limited health-care program for kids and avoid ending up with full blown HillaryCare. What they didn't seem to appreciate was that Schip was itself a baby step toward universal health care.

   --Mary Katherine Stout in the Wall Street Journal, 25 August 2007

Our current system, non-universal health care:

*Sign next to an airport cafe cash register last summer

Comments

[The Sanity Inspector]

"If you think healthcare is expensive now, just wait until you see how expensive it is when it's free."
-- P. J. O'Rourke

[Sedulia]

Yet funnily enough, all the countries with universal health care pay less per capita than Americans do.

[The Sanity Inspector]

True--if you don't count all the lost time they have to wait for treatment, and all the people who die while doing so.

Fee-for-services can certainly hurt--but it only hurts once. High taxes for crummy, unmotivated service is a chronic ailment.

[Sedulia]

Have you ever actually lived in France or Germany and experienced the care there? It is simply not true that people there die waiting for services. This is a myth that I keep hearing from Americans with no experience with single-payer systems. Why do you believe this?

I never had or heard of delays being treated in more than 20 years in Europe. In fact I find it's much harder to get a fast doctor's appointment in the U.S..

It is much more common for an American to have a heartbreaking medical-expense dilemma than it is for a person in a single-payer system. The bottom line is, no one, even the most conservative people, in those countries wants to switch to OUR system.

I believe your myth of delays and waits comes from the actual, serious problems in the U.K. system-- which developed only when anti-government Margaret Thatcher set about deliberately weakening the universal health care system there.