Follow me on Facebook!Waiting for your invitation.
Posted on March 4, 2010 - Filed Under Health Care
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Click here to listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM & FM, Friday, March 05, 2010.
Cannock Chase Hospital and Stafford Hospital are both operated by Great Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) in Staffordshire, a landlocked county more or less in the middle of England.
It’s where you go in that part of the U.K. to access your government provided health care.
Here is what it says on the website shared by these two hospitals about breast screening.
What is the NHS Breast Screening Programme?
The Programme makes sure that if you are aged between 50 and 70 we will invite you for breast screening. We will get your name from your Primary Care Trust record. This record is made up from your doctor’s list so it is important that your doctor always has your correct name and address.
We invite doctor’s practices for screening in turn. So you will not necessarily get your invitation in the year that you turn 50. As long as you are registered with a doctor, we will invite you for breast screening before your 53 rd birthday.
We will invite you? As in, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you?”
Any woman who has a mother or a sister that suffered breast cancer immediately sees the problem with this. If you have a family history of breast cancer, sitting around until age 53 waiting to be “invited” could spell an early death.
I am not making this up. If you didn’t follow the link above, follow it here.
If this doesn’t chill you to your core, you have ice water in your veins. The British National Health Service rations mammograms by making women wait for an invitation to be screened for breast cancer. Inevitably, some invitations will arrive too late.
By contrast, if you are a 34-year old woman here in Tyler and are so inclined, you can probably get a mammogram somewhere here in town before lunch. A few months ago, my wife got a mammogram on literally five minutes notice while she was at the mall. (And she paid for it out of her pocket.)
For whatever you want to say in criticism of American health care, when it comes down to it, which would you choose? Paying out of your pocket or arguing with your insurance carrier on the one hand or on the other hand waiting for some employee of the government to “invite” you to receive a screening that might, when completed, have been done too late to save your life?
Americans are starting to understand this and that’s why the whole health care reform effort is underwater in the polls by double digits. Yet, Obama and the Democrats press on.
They persist in telling you that you won’t have to give up your health insurance if you’re happy with it nor will you have to give up your doctor. Don’t believe it. What they are proposing sets the groundwork for the federal government to unavoidably become the sole payer of health care costs. That’s because when everybody, by law, must have access to the same level of health care regardless of how much or how little they pay, demand will exceed supply.
When the train wreck happens, the government will inevitably step in and before long, you’ll find yourself sitting around waiting for your invitation.
Imagine if the market for 52-inch plasma TVs was managed in the same way. If you think you could go to Don’s TV or Best Buy this afternoon and pick one out, think again.
And while you’re thinking, don’t think that rich liberals are going to be waiting on their invitations. Already, somebody somewhere is no doubt drawing up plans for the poshest of posh health care resorts in some place like the Caymans at which Nancy Pelosi and Jennifer Aniston will get health care of a quality that will be unavailable anywhere in the U.S. to you and me.
The arrogance of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Obama and their acolytes in pursuit of this disaster is unlike anything I have ever seen.
The American people don’t want ObamaCare and they have said so loudly and clearly. Somewhere in here, the number of American people that are tired of not being listened to is going to reach critical mass.
When families and businesses are struggling to survive, arrogance from those we elected to serve us is particularly intolerable.
Would you folks please shut up and listen?
Posted on February 25, 2010 - Filed Under Goverment Spending, Health Care
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White House "summit" on health care. February 25, 2010.
Click here to listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM & FM, Friday, February 26, 2010.
As I write this on Thursday afternoon I am halfway watching and listening to President Obama’s health care “summit” taking place live for the benefit of the cameras and, one can’t help thinking, for the purpose of providing political cover for the administration and congressional Democrats.
What I have seen and heard is more of the same political sludge. The fact that we’re still talking about a massive overhaul of health care after the American people have spoken through a galaxy of public opinion polls and, more on point for a bunch of politicians, at ballot boxes that Democrats could once count on, is truly flabbergasting.
What will it take to get these people to listen? As a friend of mine said of those that attended the You Tell Me Live event last Saturday, “they just want to be heard.” The ‘they’ he was referring to is you.
In the case of health care, we may not have yet been heard but we certainly have spoken. There is not a single public opinion poll out there that shows a majority of Americans supporting the House bill, the Senate bill or, by extension, the president’s recent proposal as posted on the White House website (which is not much different from the Senate bill).
Mr. President and members of the majority in Congress, we’re talking and you’re being paid to listen. We don’t want a vast, radical overhaul of our health care delivery system. Yes, we know that health insurance premiums have been increasing at several times the rate of inflation. Yes, we know that health insurance carriers are frequently arbitrary and capricious in honoring their obligations. Yes, we know that it is difficult for many Americans to afford health insurance. We know all of these things and we think they’re all bad.
But we don’t think they’re as bad as the postal service (which is going broke).
We think what you are proposing is worse than the postal service and we want you to stop.
It used to be that when the American people spoke, politicians listened. When did you guys get the idea that you no longer have to?
We can live with the shortcomings of our health care system for a while longer. For all that is wrong with that system, it remains the best in the world.
We don’t want this thing with which you have become obsessed for a long list of reasons but the biggest one is our growing understanding that we can’t afford it. Americans know that the creation of the largest entitlement in our history could be what finally bankrupts us.
Americans are getting their financial houses in order and they now understand, better than at any time in nearly a century, that our government must do the same thing.
If you want to solve the health care problem, fix the underlying economy first. It is only when our economic future is more secure that we can address securing how we finance health care.
Mr. President, Madame Speaker, Leader Reid, if you want to talk about overhauling health care, get us feeling good about the future again. Right now, we don’t and we’re resisting anything that we think is likely to make things worse.
Call the health care debate off. With each passing day and with each new revelation about our country’s financial situation, you folks are increasingly looking as if you’re polishing the silver on the Titanic.
We want from our government what we are imposing upon our own households. We want fiscal responsibility. We want to reduce debt.
Have a televised summit at Blair House about that.
Because we were done with health care last month and we told you so.
Why aren’t you listening?
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