He could easily be saying these things to our President about our country. This is where we are headed.

August 12, 2009

Before going on Sean Hannity's "Great American Panel" on Fox News a few weeks ago, I was waiting in the "green room" before the live broadcast. While waiting to go on set, I had the privilege of meeting Daniel Hannan, a British Member of the European Parliament who had just finished a TV interview himself. For those of you who don't know, this is not a Member of the traditional British Parliament. Countries that are part of the European Union (EU) are able to send delegates to the European Parliament in Brussells, Belgium, where the 27 member countries decide what the EU will do and not do.

Anyway, he asked about President Obama's socialized medicine plan and what might become of it. After we discussed that for a minute, he gave me a few facts about the socialized medicine plan in Britain, known as the National Health Service:

1. Britain's National Health Service (NHS) is the 3rd largest employer in the world, behind only the Chinese Red Army and the Indian National Railroad.
2. They have 1.4 MILLION EMPLOYEES in a country with less than a third of the population of the United States. This begs the question, how big would the American NHS be?
3. Among those employees, there are more people with the title of "manager" than there are actual doctors.
4. More than half of NHS employees are purely administrative and have nothing to do with being a nurse, doctor, technician, or otherwise dispensing care to patients.

In other words, Britain's socialized medicine system is enormously inefficient, wasteful, and costly. This is part of the reason why Britons have seen higher costs and the rationing of care. Should we be surprised? Is it really any different than a big DMV or a LA Unifed School District?

And this is the system that president Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and the vast majority of Democrats in Congress want to emulate!!!! This is nuts.

This Member of the European Parliament became quite well known for his speech denouncing the economic practices of Gordon Brown's Labor government in Britain. This speech has received over 2 million hits, and I have included it below. Watch it and you will see why.

Click Here to view

Rep. Campbell's anecdote is an interesting one, but I saw an interesting study on CNN (?) about health care costs in the US the other night.

Although obesity and smoking were the two most expensive outlays for health care costs, there are massive outlays for completing health insurance forms and of course auditing them as well. Apparently, Medicare must deal with 800+ separate health care plans at any given time. These plans exist under the banner of "free enterprise" but in reality, the Health insurers, not the governement, are the ones who are making the life and death dterminations of what are acceptable medical costs. I'm not sure why people think that for-profit companies can do a more compassionate job of "determining" covered expenses than the government could.

Anyway, all these plans have managers, and they have bosses, etc. etc. and it wuld be interesting to know how many health care workers ("Managers") proportionately, are employed for the private-payer system. This would include both the costs to the insurance companies, but also to the private companies that have to monitor their employee plans, as well as payroll employees who need to calculate each employee's deductions, etc.

Then are there are insurance corporations' "plan" salespeople, the hundreds of millions spent on advertising and lobbying, and the outrageous salaries of insurance compnay execs. In 2005, the Heathcare economist reported that the head of United Health Care received compensation of $124.8 million dollars. In 1996, United Health payed it's top exec $2.7 Million, and the very top earner in 1996, Oxford Health Care paid $29 million to is CEO.

On top of that, factor in that "tort reform" doesn't make a lot of sense as long as hundreds of private companies are running the show. After all, there are bound to be a number of bad apples whop are gaming the system or who are blatently unqualified.

I haven't seen such a side-by-side comparison, but all indication seem to say that we spend more per-capita for our health care system than most other industrialized nations.

From the politician's viewpoint, a national health care plan has nothing to do with health care. It's about power and control and patronage and all of the other wonders created by government officials who have no expertise in the program's subject matter.

Amtrak, the Post Office, SSA, VA, and the list goes on. What they all have in common is the inability to effectively reorganize to the times and customer base, as they all need a combination of approvals from various oversight groups, the Office of Management and Budget, and Congress itself. By the time all of this "coordination" is done, the opportunity and incentive is over. Also,, having to insure that no restructuring negatively affects any congressperson's pork delivery, the odds of any "normal" business adjustment is very slim.

Originally Posted by SteveZ

From the politician's viewpoint, a national health care plan has nothing to do with health care. It's about power and control and patronage and all of the other wonders created by government officials who have no expertise in the program's subject matter.

Amtrak, the Post Office, SSA, VA, and the list goes on. What they all have in common is the inability to effectively reorganize to the times and customer base, as they all need a combination of approvals from various oversight groups, the Office of Management and Budget, and Congress itself. By the time all of this "coordination" is done, the opportunity and incentive is over. Also,, having to insure that no restructuring negatively affects any congressperson's pork delivery, the odds of any "normal" business adjustment is very slim.

I don't want to steal KEEDY'S thunder but we can't afford Obama's free health care.

Originally Posted by JUREK

I don't want to steal KEEDY'S thunder but we can't afford Obama's free health care.

Me too!

the new health care plan is deificit neutral? Shame on y'all.

btk

Originally Posted by billethkid

the new health care plan is deificit neutral? Shame on y'all.

btk

Do you really believe that?