Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is getting more aggressive with his single-payer approach to health care. He’s cobbled together 15 Senate Democrats to sign onto his $32 trillion plan to expand coverage at the cost of reduced access to specialists and other treatments to reduce costs. Oh, and taxes are definitely going up. More taxes for degraded care, sounds like a Democratic plan to me because we all suffer together—equally. The Republican National Committee released a video showing how other countries that have enacted single-payer have fared. To put it bluntly, it’s yielded results that would not be tolerated by American voters. In fact, it’s an outright horror show. Patients dying, doctors leading protests over pay, which is reduced to keep costs down, and elderly patients being deprived of basic items, like water and food. Sounds like paradise, right? More than one million Canadians cannot find a general practitioner, while two hospital workers interviewed in the video admit that conditions are dangerous when the hospital is active with patients.
DR. DANIELLE MARTIN: “If I have a patient who’s got migraines and I need advice about how to manage it, they might wait several months to see a neurologist for a non-urgent problem like that. Or non-urgent surgeries, the classic example being a hip or a knee replacement.”
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: “So how long will it take me in the average?”
MARTIN: “It depends on where you are in the country. Sometimes it’s a few months, sometimes it’s a year. In some places, it’s sometimes it’s been even longer than that, that people wait for a hip or a knee replacement. And I think that is totally unacceptable. I don’t think that we should stand for it in our system. I think that there’s no reason why people should have to wait.”
Oh, and in the United Kingdom, at least a million people can’t find a general practitioner either. This was reported in the Telegraph back in July:
One million patients a week cannot get appointments with GPs, amid the longest waiting times on record, new figures show.
Doctors said they were working “flat out” but under “unsustainable” pressure, leaving “worrying” numbers of patients without any help.
The NHS figures show the number waiting at least a week to see their GP has risen by 56 per cent in five years, with one in five now waiting this long.
The pressures left 11.3 per cent of patients unable to get an appointment at all - a 27 per cent rise since 2012. This amounts to around 47 million occasions on which patients attempted but failed to secure help from their GP, forcing them to give up, try again later or turn to Accident & Emergency departments.
Yikes.
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