Health care in Canada is about to take a turn for the worse, according to this article in the Vancouver Sun.  Adrian Dix from the NDP health clinic is reported in the article to have said that Vancouver patients needing neurosurgery, treatment for vascular diseases and 11 other medically necessary procedures can expect to wait longer for care due to a funding short fall.  That's organizational speak for we can't afford to pay for your operation. 

According to the report, "Vancouver Coastal — which oversees the budget for Vancouver General and St. Paul’s hospitals, among other health-care facilities — is looking to close nearly a quarter of its operating rooms starting in September and to cut 6,250 surgeries...."

The article goes on to say that the information about these cuts is taken from a Vancouver Coastal Health Authority executive summary document that was leaked before final decisions on the matter have been made.  The health authority confirmed the document is genuine, but said it represents ideas only.

“It is a planning document. It has not been approved or implemented,” said spokeswoman Anna Marie D’Angelo.

I have to ask why?  Why would anyone even consider playing these games with the lifes of so many? Why would any rational process try to cut costs by eliminating "medically necessary procedures" and by reducing the number of facilities that can provide those treatments while thousands of needy people stand in the wings waiting for those potentially life saving procedures? 

That my friends is how government controlled health care systems determine whether you will live or die.  No — they don't know your name. In fact they don't have a list of names at all, and they wouldn't recognize you on the street if they saw you.  It's not personnal.  You are only a number, a statistic on someone's desk, just one among many.  And when the system decides that it has to cut costs, it is the people on the street like you and me who pay the price. 

We're sorry, but we can't afford to pay this year for the surgery you need to remove that brain tumor.  Maybe next year.  We'll see.

That is the so-called "death panel" in operation.  It's not called that, but the result is the same.  People have died in Canada and in Britain and in every country that has ever tried government controlled health care because of impersonal cost cutting measures like this.

Who among us really wants to see America jump on that band wagon?

Cash-for-clunkers, the Administration's effort to help boost sales for U.S. auto makers has not worked out the way the administration had hoped.  Instead of boosting sales, sales have actually dropped.  To be sure, many people are trading in their large, fuel drinking cars, but instead of buying American, they are buying Japanese made cars.

It seems that in their haste to put the bill through, someone forgot to write in a provision that new sales must be of the American variety, so while GM had 19.6% of the market before the Cash-for-Clunkers program began compared with Toyota’s 16.3%, the market share has changed giving Toyota an 18.9% market share compared to GM's 17.6% share, with Ford coming in 3rd and Chrysler in 5th place behind Honda.

Adding to this ridiculous situation is the fact that government reimbursements to auto dealers have been much slower in coming than the government had promised, putting dealers and their banks in a precarious financial situation.

Here we have a small little program (only $3 Billion) by comparison with most government efforts, and the administration can't even make that work in the intended way.  How then can we trust them to handle much larger programs efficiently.  Surely the American People can now begin to see that the Obama Administration doesn't know what it is doing.

It now seems that the protests over the last couple of weeks have had their effect.  The public health care option is all but dead as President Obama, in the face of mounting opposition, says he is willing "to embrace insurance cooperatives over a government-run plan."  This will help recover the votes from among some of the more conservative Democrats who were pulling away from the system as proposed and ensure that some form of health care modification will pass both the House and the Senate, thus saving face for the administration, which had bet its political future on passage of some kind of reform.

One can not help but wonder if the administration's change of heart on this matter doesn't also have something to do with Obama's talks last week with the Canadians. The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) announced this past weekend that their country's health-care system is sick.  Dr. Anne Doig also said, "We all agree that the system is imploding....there must be change."

"[Canadians] have to understand that the system that we have right now - if it keeps on going without change - is not sustainable," said Dr. Doig.

And Dr. Robert Ouellet, the current president of the CMA, said there's a critical need to make Canada's health-care system patient-centred.  The Canadian Press goes on to say that "Ouellet believes there could be a role for private health-care delivery within the public system."  One way he suggests improvement can be made is to provide "funding based on the patients [hospitals and doctors actually] treat, instead of an annual, lump-sum budget."

Whatever the reason for the Obama Administration's turn around on the issue, I welcome it.  But I would caution all Americans to stay vigilant and see to it that in its haste, the Government doesn't do something equally as stupid as their most recent attempt to force change upon us.  There is still much in this bill that is objectionable.

The administration really put its foot into it when it pointed out that 80% of the cost of medical care goes to providing care for the elderly who are close to terminal.  So what else is new.  The young never need as much care as the senior members of society.  Besides, the medicare system was intended to provide health care insurance for people 65 and older.  Duh!  That's the way it was sold.  You can't even get medicare to cover you until you are 65 or older except under some very extenuating circumstances.

Now Obama says that too much of medicare goes to medical care for the elderly.  He wants to get these costs under control.  To do that, the administration has presented the possibility of cutting up to 40% of the reimbursement costs that go to hospitals providing such care.  That money would be diverted to do the initial funding of the new health care system.

It didn't help the situation when Obama tried to draw an analogy using his grandmother as an example.  For those who didn't hear that remark, you can read about it here, but I'll summarize it for you:  He questioned whether medicare should have paid for a hip replacement for her, since she had been diagnosed as having terminal cancer and was expected to live no more than a year. 

If those aren't the thoughts of a dummy trying his damnedest to shoot himself in the head, then I don't know what they would be.  The man as good as stood there and said he wants to cut medicare benefits that people have spent a lifetime paying for, and he wants them to get used to the idea that they will be allowed to suffer and die beyond a certain point in their life.  That was never in the bargain.  People were led to believe that medicare would ensure that there would be health care for them when they got older.  There was never any expectation that care might be denied because we could no longer serve society.

Obama's idea is that you can pay for that late life surgery out of your own pocket if you want to, but the insurance premiums you paid during the 40 years you worked prior to retirement should not pay for it.  That is a major breech of faith with all americans.  Is it any wonder that americans are up in arms over this?

I paid the maximum amount of medicare premiums every year since medicare was first introduced in 1965.  And today, I still pay for coverage with each Social Security check I am issued.  That's right.  After 45 years of payroll deductions, the government now charges me almost $1200 per year, collected as a deduction from my Social Security.

Why?!  Why did I pay all those premiums for medicare through payroll deductions, if I am now to be denied care if someone in the government decides that I should just get used to the idea of dying?  Why do you continue to pay the medicare withholding tax if not for the expectation that you will have coverage when you can no longer work?  And now the Democrats want to change the game with a wave of the hand.  Why should anyone pay if the government can so easily break faith with the people?   Maybe I should sue for the return of my premiums.

Old Sliver Tongue (Barack Obama) is out there stumping again, this time trying to salvage his health care intuitive.  He's trying to assure everyone that they will be able to keep their doctors and their present insurance carrier if they wish.  Yet everyone, including members of his own party, knows very well that this just isn't so.

To be sure, there is nothing in the five different drafts of the bill that explicitly says you would have to use a government provider.  That much is true, but what happens when my insurance company can not make a profit because it is being undercut by a government subsidized organization?  And what happens when my doctor is not on the approved list of service providers that the government will deal with?  Is the administration too stupid to realize this?  I don't think so.  That only leaves one thing left.  The administration is lying to us by telling only half-truths.

The President is also quick to assure that there is no provision whatsoever in any of the drafts that provides for a so-called "death panel" that will decide who will live and who will die.  That is also true, as far as it goes.  But such panels don't have to be given explicit authority by a formal seating of judges.  They spring into existence spontaneously as part of any cost cutting intuitive.  We have already seen how this has happened in Oregon when that State's Health insurance program denied certain costly drugs to a patient who could no longer serve society. We have seen it time and again in various HMO plans that have refused to pay for operations that were recommended by doctors. 

Obama cannot articulate a plan.  His administration cannot articulate a plan.  Yet they would ram something down our throats without any public debate.  Why?  Because they see the 1st year of the administration as the only time when they might have a chance to force their views on the public.  Push it through before the public has time to realize what is happening, and worry about fixing the problems later -- that's their plan.   The sad thing is that they might have gotten away with it if they hadn't already rammed bailouts, stimulus packages, and cap and trade down our throats.  In an economy that is already faulting, they don't seem to realize, or they just don't care, that the transition period would be a nightmare of screw-ups in a country where many of our individual States are larger than most European nations.

But something went wrong with their plan.  The American People reacted faster than they thought, and Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, appear to have let health care reform slip through their fingers for a second time.  And now, they have been reduced to calling dissenters racist, unamerican, Nazis, and unruly mobs. And they have encouraged neighbors to report to the White House  all causal conversations that sound like they might disagree with the administration's ideas.  That's a facist idea that the President should have immediately disassociated himself from -- which he has not done.

Where is the liberal press in all of this.  They would be all over a Republican administration that acted this way.  They would be demanding the immediate resignation of the House Speaker for her appalling and disgusting treatment of the American People.  They would be labeling the President as an incompetent fool incapable of actually putting a real plan together to go with his ideas.  But when it's their fair-haired boy on the hot seat, they are as quiet as a mouse.  Talk about unethical. 

In all of my life, I can not recall any other time when I have seen the American People so engaged.  Even the Vietnam era protests did not come close to matching this for sheer outrage with our government.

Oh! One more thing.  Congress should share our burden.  If the administration's plan should happen to go through, I think it would be a very good idea if it includes a specific requirement that mandates that all members of the Congress be participants.  That would mean dismantling the special insurance plan that they put in place just for themselves.

Original ABC News Article by Susan Donaldson James

The news from Barbara Wagner's doctor was bad, but the rejection letter from her insurance company [The state-run Oregon Health Plan ] was crushing. The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the State run insurance plan refused to pay.

What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50.

"It was horrible," Wagner told ABCNews.com. "I got a letter [an unsigned form letter] in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won't give you the medication to live."

Critics of Oregon's decade-old Death With Dignity Law -- the only one of its kind in the nation -- have been up in arms over the indignity of her unsigned rejection letter. Even those who support Oregon's liberal law were upset.

Opponents say the law presents all involved with an "unacceptable conflict" and the impression that insurance companies see dying as a cost-saving measure. They say it steers those with limited finances toward assisted death.

In the UK the situation is no better.  A recent article in The Telegraph reports that a new study says, "Children with brain tumours are at risk of going blind because it take three times as long to be diagnosed on the NHS [National Health System] than in other countries. "

Another article in The Telegraph says that in 2011/2012 hospitals will have to cut 60 billion british pounds ($99.87 Billion US Dollars) from their services budget in order to cover the bad financing deals made back in 1997 by the National Health Service.

And The Daily Mail Online reports that 140 security breaches were reported within the NHS between January and April this year.  These resulted in loss of tens of thousands of personal medical records.

Several more articles I could quote complain that while health care for the young in the UK is generally good, health care for the aged and the dying is hard to get.  You have to fight hard for everything you get, because the attitude seems to be 'The gentleman is dying so it is not worth doing anything.'

In Canada, Michael Walker and Greg Wilson published research results showing that  "Canadian health care waiting lists conducted by the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute found that the median waiting time for non-emergency surgery and treatments in Canada increased from 13.1 weeks (3 months) in 1999 to 16.2 weeks (3.7 months) in 2000-01...  Of the 10 Canadian provinces, Saskatchewan had the longest median waiting time at 28.9 weeks, (6.7 months)...  However, in some provinces typical waiting times for some procedures can be more than a year. For example, the median wait for neurosurgery in Manitoba is 66 weeks (15.2 months), while the wait for orthopedic surgery is 67.4 weeks (15.6 months) in Saskatchewan and 70.8 weeks (16.4 months) in New Brunswick."

The estimated number of Canadians waiting for medical care also rose from 840,358 in 1999 to 878,008 in 2000-01, or over 2.85% of the total Canadian population of 30.8 million. To put these figures into perspective, if the U.S. had the same health system as Canada almost 7.9 million Americans would be waiting for treatment.

As a consequence of this, "Canadian physicians reported in the survey that 1.7% of all their patients" (523,600) prefer to seek treatment in other countryies - presumably most in the U.S. rather than wait.  That number increases to "5.6% of all Canadians needing radiation therapy for cancer."

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Update: Fortunately for Ms. Wagner the hue and cry over her situation has a happy ending for her, but not because the state of Oregon relented.  A representative from the company that manufactures the treatment called the cancer patient to say they would give her the medication for free.  Dr. Walter Shaffer, medical director of the state Division of Medical Assistance Programs, which administers the Oregon Health Plan, attempted to defend the health plan's decision. "We can't cover everything for everyone," he said. "We try to come up with polices that provide the most good for the most people." Shaffer then addressed a priority list that had been developed to ration health care. "There's some desire on the part of the framers of this list to not cover treatments that are futile," he said, "or where the potential benefit to the patient is minimal in relation to the expense of providing the care."

Eight-year-old Daniela Earnest put the town of Tulare, California, on the map this past Monday when one of its code enforcement officers decided to put her out of business, saying that her lemonade stand was not safe and that she lacked a valid business license to sell lemonade.

If Daniela set up shop at a busy intersection, I can understand that it may have been unsafe, depending on other factors, but a business license?  For a little girl trying to put some money together for a trip to Disneyland?  Once again we see the death of common sense in action.

In recent years, the Americans have almost become obsessed with the idea of body counts and ways to avoid them when engaged in fighting an enemy.  This obsession lead our military to develop weapons that are highly automated.  Now we have robot planes that can fly missions over enemy territory and can be directed by remote control to fire missiles.  Automation extends into so many systems that the average citizen is completely unaware of what is possible.  We have remotely controlled submersibles and remotely control boats, while cruise missiles use GPS systems to fly themselves to their targets; and who knows what else.

My fear is that we will give these robot fighting machines the capability to decide for themselves whether or not to launch an attack.  It has already happened on WallStreet, with computers automatically deciding to sell or buy stocks.  A few years ago, auto-sell software caused millions of dollars in losses for major companies and forced WallStreet to suspend trading for several days. 

Today, there is talk of allowing Predator drone aircraft to fire air to ground missiles without first getting human approval.  Onboard software would evaluate what the Predator's cameras are seeing and decide what action to take.  Carried only a few steps further, these machines could initiate a full scale war without asking permission of anyone. 

War is a human activity, and the decision to start a war should remain a human one.  The decision to shoot or not to shoot should also remain a human one.

What is your most prized possession?