Chinese Cherry

You hear stories, and a couple years ago a nurse who then worked in a well-regarded east valley hospital told me about a cardiac patient in their emergency room.

They gave the patient aspirin and started a nitroglycerine intravenous infusion, which reduced the patient's chest pain. Then, because they needed the room in the E.R., they sent the patient back out to sit in the lobby, there to presumably either wait for a hospital bed in an intensive care or telemetry unit, or to infarct completely and code in a chair.

Lately Rebecca has been doing a good job of regularly demolishing the not-so-brilliant letters-to-the-editor often gracing the Arizona Republic. We must commend her for taking on such a task, and doing it well. I also personally thank her for apparently saving this one for me. So writes Bob from Prescott Valley:

"Regarding "Code blue for health care" (Republic, Jan. 4):

I find it hard to believe that 81 percent of 602 registered voters polled want universal health care."

I don't.

What's really hard to believe is that so many people still relish the idea of paying exhorbitant insurance premiums, skewed upwards by the fact that those must cover not just the insured and his family, but care for all those who remain without the blessed grace of high insurance costs: 45 million uninsured fellow Americans.

Let us remember that your premiums pay me to care for the uninsured as well as you.

"Are they ignorant of what has transpired in Canada and Great Britain since they instituted health care provided by the government? I have read about the waiting lists for heart surgery and other necessary operations. Also, research and development are stifled by lack of competition. "

Well, for elective surgeries, people wait a little here in the States, too. And if you don't have insurance at all, are you on a waiting list? Not here. But in Canada you are. Unless it's an emergent situation, then surgery is performed immediately. And it's paid for. Free. Ha-ha. Free.

"In British Columbia, more than 400,000 hospital-based surgeries and treatments are performed each year. If you need surgery or treatment that is not an emergency, you will be placed on a wait list. An individual who needs emergency surgery does not go on a waitlist; they receive treatment without delay."

So while you are sitting in a local emergency room, titrating your tridil drip yourself to reduce chest pain and maintain a systolic blood pressure of at least 90, you can kill some time waiting for a hospital bed by reading about Wait Times in Canada by clicking on the link.

Carping about wait times for surgery is ridiculous in light of the millions of uninsured here for whom the only waiting list is the one we are all on: to heaven's gates, with a stop at the E.R. to run up a bill first.

The issue is a canard, and has been debunked many times over, but Rush and rest of the well-insured propaganda slime machine bobble-heads keep repeating the same nonsense anyways, so no wonder the poor guy who wrote this LTTE finds himself repeating it. That's what happens when you drink the kool-aid.

I should stop saying that. I used to really like kool-aid when I was a kid. Now we drink seltzer. Hardly as nostalgic, but sucrose-free.

The letter-writer goes on to spout more parroted lies and untruths:

"We have to quit looking for the government to provide for our needs from cradle to grave. We know from recent history that the government cannot do these kinds of things without making them more expensive."

What a hoot! Of course if we turn over American healthcare to Halliburton through a no-bid government contract then the costs will be even more astronomic, but that will never happen because sick people have no large reserves of petroleum.

The opposite of what the letter claims is really true: Medicare overhead and administrative costs are far lower than what is found in the private insurance industry. Here is a typical article outlining the real numbers.

"Currently, Medicare incurs only 2% for administrative costs and does not need to advertise or pay commissions. According to Bernstein, private insurance spends considerably more on advertising and management. Administrative costs run as high as 30% because providers and insurers have to employ large staffs to cope with thousands of different plans for billions of billings a year. Similarly, federal and state public needs-tested programs must determine whether applicants meet the different programs' eligibility criteria, and these administrative costs run about 7% above Medicare's."

I thought everybody knew that.

From that same article comes this in the next paragraph, and perhaps it explains why so many of the people in that poll say they want universal healthcare:

"Medicare-for-All would eliminate the need to ascertain eligibility for billions of billings," Bernstein says. "Shifting employer, federal and state funds already earmarked for medical care to the new plan would provide huge savings and coverage for the uninsured."

The article also goes on to note that if healthcare were universal here, even your automobile and home insurance premiums would go down, because you would no longer need liability insurance medical care coverage. I'll bet the letter-writer had too much Rush-slush in his head to think of that.

Do the math, Bob, and try Google. And for pete's sake, stop drinking that kool-aid. It rots the brain.