The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Other Than That, the Glass Is Half Full
“So basically, here is where we are. Policymakers have spent the last three years tossing not millions, not billions, but trillions of borrowed dollars at the output gap in the American economy. And what is the result? A fair measurement of unemployment comes in higher than anything we’ve seen since the Great Depression. Real wages are in decline. Food stamp enrollment is at an all time high. Jobs are coming back, but at a painfully slow rate and without very good pay. Growth for this year and next are expected to come in below the historical trend. We’ve created a huge budget deficit, as we’ve borrowed from future generations to cover the output gap from the last couple years.”–Jay Cost, The Weekly Standard website, April 6
Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
“In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors,” observes [New York Times columnist] Paul Krugman, the Baghdad Bob of socialized medicine. “We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.”
According to one such story from the BBC, “new thresholds for hip and knee replacements have been introduced” as “part of the NHS [National Health Service] drive to find £20bn [about $32.5 billion] efficiency savings by 2015.” That means “patients now have to be more disabled or in greater pain” to qualify for a hip or knee replacement.
Peter Kay of the British Orthopaedic Association tells the Beeb that “simply delaying surgery by one means or another does not improve the outcome for patients as their condition can deteriorate.” He adds: “The double jeopardy is that patients wait longer in pain, and when they have the operation, the result might not have been as good as it otherwise would have been had they had it early.”
We’ve heard that before–in 2009 from Derek McMinn, inventor of the Birmingham Hip Resurfacing implant:
“In Europe, of course, long delays for health-care-provision reasons are terribly common,” Dr. McMinn says. While patients wait, they relieve the pain with anti-inflammatory drugs, the regular use of which causes bone damage. “By the time you come back, it’s all destroyed, so you’re forced into a total hip replacement as the first option, even though on age reasons you may well have wanted to do a resurfacing.”
That was before ObamaCare. It may prove to have been a look into America’s future as well.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for thef “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
