Bad Medicine

Delaware Governor Pete du Pont's op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today makes several salient points about the flaws in ObamaCare.  Some excerpts below.

"President Obama addressed Congress two weeks ago on the issue of health care, and on the same day an Associated Press GfK poll showed that the proportion of Americans who strongly approve of the way he is doing his job has fallen from 41% in December to 24% now. And the percentage of people who strongly disapprove of his performance has risen from 6% to 35%.

Those serious declines no doubt have to do with many issues--economic decline, the massive spending increases (enacted and proposed) of $6.5 trillion over the next decade, the coming massive tax increases that are presidential and congressional priorities, and currently most important, the proposed governmental takeover of health care. On that matter, more than 1.3 million people have signed and sent to Congress the Salem Radio Network's Free Our Health Care Now! petition to make sure individuals, not the national government, make their health care decisions.

But the Democratic congressional leadership, led by Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, has now offered a bureaucratic, government-intrusive health care proposal. The details change daily as the bill works its way through the Finance Committee, which Mr. Baucus chairs, for there are more than 500 proposed amendments being considered. But the bill would start off by imposing annual fees of $6.7 billion on health insurance companies, $4 billion on medical device producers, $2.3 billion on drug manufacturers and $750 million on clinical laboratories, all of which would surely be passed on to consumers in higher prices. The insurance companies' $6.7 billion fees alone would come to some 60% of the industry's after tax earnings.

But America's health care is not doing badly. Indeed a National Center for Policy Analysis study from last March shows how much better we are doing than countries like Canada, Britain, and other European nations that have government health care control:

• Breast-cancer mortality is 52% higher in Germany and 88% higher in Britain than in the U.S.
• Prostate-cancer mortality is 457% higher in Norway and 604% higher in Britain than in the U.S.
• Eighty-nine percent of middle-aged women in the U.S. have had a mammogram, compared with 72% in Canada.
• Fifty-four percent of men in the U.S. have had a prostate-specific antigen test, compared with 16% of Canadian men.

As for the availability of health care, another study shows that 74% of those in the U.S. meet for scheduled doctors appointments within four weeks, while only 42% of British and 40% of Canadians do. Only 10% of Americans wait longer than two months, while 33% of Brits and 42% of Canadians wait that long.

On average, doctors in a survey say neurosurgery should be performed within 5.8 weeks, but in Canada it takes about 31 weeks. And orthopedic surgery should be within 11 weeks, but in Canada it takes 37 weeks. So it is pretty clear that government health-insurance monopoly is dangerously inefficient."