Inkwell has already turned your attention to the distraught mother of two special needs children who angrily confronted a Democratic senator over the administration’s healthcare system. Her husband’s employer is going to cut benefits in the face of new taxes. Her children will suffer.
Now, Thomas Sowell, one of the best thinkers on the contemporary scene, has a piece on how the system threatens the best healthcare system the world has ever known-ours. I don’t really suppose we can take comfort in knowing that in the future mothers like the one in the video will have less reason to complain of lack of access-the whole system will be shot.
Sowell starts with a basic fact:
The most basic fact is that it is cheaper to remain sick than to get medical treatment. What is cheapest of all is to die instead of getting life-saving medications and treatment, which can be very expensive.
Despite these facts, most of us tend to take a somewhat more parochial view of the situation when it is we ourselves who are sick or who face a potentially fatal illness. But what if that decision is taken out of your hands under Obamacare and is made for you by a bureaucrat in Washington?
Relying on Sally Pipes’ new book, The Truth about Obamacare, Sowell says that our fate, if the healthcare legislation isn’t repealed, “is not a pretty picture.” Here from Sowell is something that won’t be true after 2014:
Americans get the latest pharmaceutical drugs, sometimes years before those drugs are available to people in Britain or in other countries where the government runs the medical system. Why? Because the latest drugs cost more and it is cheaper to let people die.
Our press has misrepresented the truth about our healthcare system, claiming that people in countries with state-medicine live longer-not true. If you don’t count those who die in murders and automobile accidents, Americans have the longest life span on the planet. And here’s another press myth:
The media have often said that we have higher infant mortality rates than other countries with government medical-care systems. But we count every baby that dies and other countries do not. If the media don’t tell you that, so much the better for Obamacare.