Yes, this is happening in Wales, but let us not forget that this is a path many American politicians are currently trying to lead us down:
Health care should be a right, not a privilege. RT if you agree: https://t.co/pD7PtYj4ZF
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 1, 2017
That just happened this week. The junior senator from California is trying to make her first big policy splash by co-sponsoring a single-payer health care bill with avowed socialist Bernie Sanders.
Government health care fetishists love to pluck anecdotes that reinforce how wonderful it is, but the general facts most often don’t back them up.
The Labour-led Welsh government’s management of the health service has attracted fresh criticism after it emerged that the number of people waiting more than 12 months for an operation in Wales has risen by more than 400% in the past four years.
A freedom of information request by the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) revealed the number of people waiting more than 52 weeks for surgery in the year ending March 2017 was 3,605. In March 2013, the figure was 699.
The number of people waiting more than a year for treatment in England – which has more than 17 times the population of Wales – was 1,302.
Tim Havard, regional director for Wales at the RCS and a consultant general surgeon said: “Long waits for surgery can be traumatising for patients and their families. In some cases patients will be in extreme pain or immobile, possibly unable to work or carry out daily tasks. A patient’s condition can also deteriorate the longer they are made to wait for treatment, meaning the eventual outcomes are not as good as they could have been.”
Sometimes the wait for services from the government health care types isn’t merely a result of bureaucratic inefficiency, but rather because officials have decided certain patients don’t need them and wish they would hurry up and die already.
Avid consumers of the news come across stories like this coming out of the UK all of the time. That’s because bureaucracies are inherently inefficient. They exist to bloat and perpetuate themselves.
Single-payer advocates are fond of pointing to small countries in Europe where it seems to be working. One thing often left out of the discussion is the fact that wealthy people in these countries can afford to come to the United States or go to Singapore if they don’t want to endure the waiting times.
It’s also ridiculous to apply and compare what’s happening in a boutique country that’s essentially the size of a large American state (England is the size of two) to a country that has hundreds of millions of people.
The progressive Democrats are working feverishly to make single-payer the goal of the entire party, and they just may succeed. With the way the GOP Congress is flailing, we may only be a couple of years away from having this nightmare unleashed here.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member