The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
“The United States will require at least 52,000 more family doctors in the year 2025 to keep up with the growing and increasingly older U.S. population, a new study found,” reports ABC News:
The predictions also reflect the passage of the Affordable Care Act–a change that will expand health insurance coverage to an additional 38 million Americans. . . .
“It’s pretty tough to convince medical students to go into primary care,” said Dr. Lee Green, chair of Family Medicine at the University of Alberta, who was not involved with the study. . . .
“[Patients] won’t be able to see a primary care physician hardly,” he said. “Primary care will be past saturated with wait times longer and will not accept any new patients. There will be an increase in hospitalizations and increase in death rates for basic preventable things like hypertension that was not managed adequately.”
But at least a lot more people will have insurance!
The Montreal Gazette [of Canada} reports on how this works out in a country where everyone has insurance courtesy of the government:
Surgery wait times for deadly ovarian, cervical and breast cancers in Quebec are three times longer than government benchmarks, leading some desperate patients to shop around for an operating room.
But that’s a waste of time, doctors say, since the problem is spread across Quebec hospitals. And doctors are refusing to accept new patients quickly because they can’t treat them, health advocates say.
A leading Montreal gynecologist said that these days, she cannot look her patients in the eye because the wait times are so shocking. Lack of resources, including nursing staff and budget compressions, are driving a backlog of surgeries while operating rooms stand empty. The latest figures from the provincial government show that over a span of nearly 11 months, 7,780 patients in the Montreal area waited six months or longer for day surgeries, while another 2,957 waited for six months or longer for operations that required hospitalization.
The worst cases are gynecological cancers, experts say, because usually such a cancer has already spread by the time it is detected. Instead of four weeks from diagnosis to surgery, patients are waiting as long as three months to have cancerous growths removed.
Barack Obama’s re-election pretty well ensures that we’re stuck with ObamaCare. And as the Hill notes, “Obama won women by 12 percentage points, while Mitt Romney won men by 8.”
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
