If Socialized Medicine Is So Bad

There's no if involved. But you don't have to take my word for it:

" At the beginning of 2012, over 281,000 patients in Norway, out of a population of five million, were awaiting treatment for some medical problem or other. Bureaucratic absurdities run rampant."

"And let’s not forget rationing. “Death panels”  are no fantasy. In a series of articles in 2010, Aftenposten reported on the decision by the Norwegian government’s health director to refuse certain treatments to certain “large patient groups” in order to curb costs. For example, “we can extend the lives of patients with heart failure by installing a heart pump…but this is a service we probably can’t offer. It’s too expensive.” The same goes for respirators in cases of emphysema or chronic bronchitis: “It could prolong the lives of patients, but it’s not something we can give to such a large group.” The elderly, likewise, are screwed: “we…spend too much money to extend the last phase of life for dying, often old, people.” Who’s to decide who receives treatment and who doesn’t? That, the health director answered, is a “political responsibility” – the job of politicians, not physicians."

Sweden: Tales From The Healthcare Crypt

"The clinics have security guards to keep patients from getting unruly as they wait hours to see a doctor. The guards also prevent new patients from entering the clinic when the waiting room is considered full. Uppsala, a city with 200,000 people, has only one specialist in mammography. Sweden's National Cancer Foundation reports that in a few years most Swedish women will not have access to mammography."

The truth about Canadian healthcare

"My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks."
"This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week, and in which humans can wait two to three years."

Coming soon to your doctor's office. Hope and change!

It's not like people haven't been explaining this news for thirty years. This sort of thing is only news to people who think Michael Moore makes accurate documentaries, rather than paeans to socialism on the order of Leni Reifenstahl and Sergei Eisenstein.

Now, when it's begun biting some people in the ass, they start to get it.
Welcome to Hell. Thanks for carpooling.