A LESSON FROM CLINTON!

"The speed with which President Clinton received quadruple bypass surgery provides an important lesson in health care reform that voters should keep in mind this election season.....

When government makes medical care "free," people demand medical care without regard to cost. Governments can't keep up with the excess demand and therefore must find some way of allocating care amid shortage conditions. Most choose to make patients wait.

According to Nadeem Esmail and Michael Walker of Canada's Fraser Institute, the median wait for an appointment with a cardiologist in Canada's single-payer health care system was 3.4 weeks in 2003. The wait for urgent bypass surgery was another 2.1 weeks on top of that, while the wait for elective bypass surgery was an additional 10.7 weeks. Canadian doctors reported a "reasonable" wait would be 0.9 and 6.1 weeks, respectively. Great Britain and New Zealand have even longer waiting times for bypass surgery.

Esmail and Walker cite studies confirming that longer waits for heart surgery result in a higher risk of heart attack and death. In fact, they report American hospitals act as a "safety valve" for Canadian patients who face life-threatening shortages: "The government of British Columbia contracted Washington State hospitals to perform some 200 operations in 1989 following public dismay over the 6-month waiting list for cardiac bypass surgery in the province... A California heart-surgery centre has even advertised its services in a Vancouver newspaper."

Had America had followed his lead ten years ago, President Clinton might not have been able to get his diagnosis and surgery appointment so quickly. Instead of waiting overnight for an appointment with a cardiologist, he might have had to wait the 3.4 weeks Canadians do. Instead of waiting three days for quadruple bypass surgery, he might have had to wait over two weeks. Instead of receiving care from what Senator Clinton called "one of the great hospitals in the world," President Clinton might be looking for a safety valve.

Since the Clinton health plan was defeated, untold patients have been aided because America's health care system, whatever its faults, was not subjected to the shortages and waiting lines that plague other nations".

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Socialists block desperately-needed tort reform: "Health care costs are going through the roof, and one of the major culprits is the proliferation of lawsuits that tangle the system. Hospitals face huge legal costs every day in defending themselves from frivolous lawsuits. These lawsuits also bring astronomical insurance premiums as hospitals attempt to protect themselves from continuous legal wrangling and exorbitant monetary fees that juries are awarding. It is estimated that legal fees alone add more than $200 billion a year to our health care system, which eventually gets passed on to patients through co-payments and insurance premiums. The Republicans, who are pushing to get this situation under control through tort reform, have proposed a series of rules and guidelines that would financially define the limits on malpractice and discourage frivolous lawsuits. These efforts have been repeatedly blocked by Democrats in the U.S. Senate."