Sunday, August 9, 2009

Barack Obama: Setting The House On Fire

"When Laure Cuccarolo went into early labor on a recent Sunday night in a village in southern France, her only choice was to ask the local fire brigade to whisk her to a hospital 30 miles away. A closer one had been shuttered by cost cuts in France's universal health system.

Ms. Cuccarolo's little girl was born in a firetruck.

France claims it long ago achieved much of what today's U.S. health-care overhaul is seeking: It covers everyone, and provides what supporters say is high-quality care. But soaring costs are pushing the system into crisis. The result: As Congress fights over whether America should be more like France, the French government is trying to borrow U.S. tactics.

In recent months, France imposed American-style 'co-pays' on patients to try to throttle back prescription-drug costs and forced state hospitals to crack down on expenses. 'A hospital doesn't need to be money-losing to provide good-quality treatment,' President Nicolas Sarkozy thundered in a recent speech to doctors.

And service cuts -- such as the closure of a maternity ward near Ms. Cuccarolo's home -- are prompting complaints from patients, doctors and nurses that care is being rationed. That concern echos worries among some Americans that the U.S. changes could lead to rationing.

The French system's fragile solvency shows how tough it is to provide universal coverage while controlling costs, the professed twin goals of President Barack Obama's proposed overhaul."


-- David Gauthier-Villars, highlighting the utter brain-dead stupidity of America following in the lying footsteps of socialist France's "water is medicine" system - or Canada's - for our healthcare, in The Wall Street Journal.

2 comments:

  1. My job as a business analyst has led me to research a little government health agency from New Zealand called the Accident and Compensation Corporation.

    The ACC is so many billions in the hole in terms of liabilities that it's threatening the ratings of New Zealand itself:
    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/government/news/article.cfm?c_id=49&objectid=10561651

    See this related article: "Will NZ Become Iceland?" http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/economy/2016117/Will-NZ-become-Iceland

    Then disclosing this debt becomes a political football:

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/politics/744573

    ReplyDelete
  2. A great deal of effective info for me!

    ReplyDelete

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