Why Public Option Scares People

Why Public Option Scares People

The reason that the public option scares people is a fear that if directly subsidized, it will drive private insurers out of business, leaving us with a Canadian health care system. This opinion piece from the August 13, 2009 Calgary Herald does a good job of explaining the concern:

You've been noticing for a couple of months that your vision is deteriorating. You've been having headaches and unexplained vomiting. You feel tired all the time.

You know your doctor is busy so you don't trouble her for an appointment immediately, hoping you'll get better. When you finally do go, she's alarmed by your vision loss and your skyrocketing blood pressure. She orders an MRI scan. Five weeks later you get the report: There's a lesion on your pituitary gland, just below your brain. The doctors aren't sure what to call it. It could be a meningioma, a pituitary adenoma, a craniopharyngioma, an epidermoid adenoma, or a Rathke's cleft cyst, they say.

You ask what these are. Several are types of brain tumour, one possibly malignant. Uh-oh. Your doctor refers you to two specialists. The earliest appointment you can get with a neurologist is more than seven weeks away. The earliest appointment with the endocrinologist is 16 weeks away.

But this thing is growing in your head. Your optometrist's tests confirm you are getting progressively closer to blindness. What to do?

Shona Holmes, the woman who has been criticized in some quarters recently for jumping into the U. S. debate on health care reform, faced exactly this situation. She decided to take matters into her own hands. If Canada's health-care system didn't care enough about her to alleviate the unbearable anxiety that anyone would feel under such circumstances, there were other places in the world that would.

The Mayo Clinic managed to get her in and identify the cause of the problem in seven days. But even though it was urgent to get the non-malignant growth removed, or she would go blind, that wasn't enough to get the Canadian health care system to step in and do the surgery. She had to go back to the U.S. for the surgery that saved her sight.

What's really tragic is that the Canadian system, until 2005, actually made it illegal for a health care provider to operate outside their single payer system. Not just "the government's health insurance won't pay for it"--but illegal to provide care. The Canadian Supreme Court in 2005 ruled that "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care," and struck down the Quebec health insurance monopoly. That Calgary Herald piece explains that the doctors at the Mayo Clinic that did the surgery that restored Shona Holmes' vision? They were Canadians, too--who had moved to the U.S. to practice medicine.

So if the crowd that wants Canadian style single payer gets its way--either openly or in a roundabout way, as I pointed out last month that Obama seems to be taking us--where will Americans go to get medical care? Of course, when I say, "Americans," I really mean, "rich Americans." Most Americans, if confronted with a serious problem like Shona Holmes, won't have the resources to pay for medical care in another country, or the cost of traveling there. But the people that Obama represents--George Soros, Nancy Pelosi, and the other obscenely rich--they won't have that problem, will they?