One topic that is absolutely essential to my daily life, as I’m sure it is for so many Americans, is health-care. Unfortunately, however, I’m always completely disgusted by the way politicians handle this problem. But for the most part, the majority of my disgust is reserved for Democrats. Why? Because despite the luxury we have of being able to learn from the mistakes of others, we’re completely disregarding the plethora of evidence at our disposal and still pushing for socialized/universal health-care. This completely irritates me beyond belief, which is why it’s taken me so long to write a post about it. I’ve tried several times and just couldn’t get through it.

Before I explain why my life depends on our nation refusing the temptation of socialized medicine, let’s get down to some facts. The reason the Democrats are calling for universal health-care is because of the supposed crisis of the uninsured. They claim that there are so many millions of people in this country who are uninsured that we absolutely must drastically change our entire health-care system. What do they use as evidence to back up this claim? Their oft-repeated statement that 47 million Americans are uninsured.
That number sure sounds big, but there’s an even bigger problem with it: it’s just not true.

They’re pulling this number from the US Census Bureau, specifically their 2005 report on “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States”. Yes, in the report it does have close to that number as being “uninsured”, but the problem is, it’s just not that simple. The Democrats are completely ignoring the very important statistical breakdown of those 47 million people and what categories they fit into. This creates a very, very, very misleading picture of the current state of our country’s health-care system. So let’s break it down, shall we?

First off, the actual number of uninsured people living in this country is 46.577 million. That list happens to include 9.487 million people who aren’t even American citizens. Even Michael Moore, in his movie ‘Sicko’, agrees that being “an American” matters when it comes to getting health insurance. As he says, “That’s the only preexisting condition that should exist. I’m an American. That’s it.” Therefore, even according to one of the most liberal guys out there, the 47 million number is already debunked in one regard.

So now our total is down to roughly 37 million. Still astronomical, but not as bad as 47 million. Another big claim of people pushing for socialized medicine is that people simply cannot “afford” insurance. As Michael Moore said on CNN’s ‘Larry King Live’ on July 10, 2008, “And when you’ve got 47 million people in this country with no health insurance, they don’t go to the doctor because they can’t afford it.”
Surprise, surprise, the Census Bureau study looked at that issue too.
Of the remaining 37 million people who are uninsured, 8.3 million of those make between $50,000 and $75,999 a year. On top of that, 8.74 million make more than $75,000! That’s roughly 17 million people who ought to be able to “afford” health insurance, because they make substantially more than the median household income of $46,326. According to every study out there that compares income, cost of living, and health insurance costs, those 17 million people can afford health insurance! The thing is, they flat out choose not to.

So when we subtract non-citizens and those who can afford their own insurance yet choose not to purchase it, we’re left with about 20 million. That’s less than 7% of the population. Yet even that number is still inaccurate.
Why? Because the overall total of 47 million people also includes those who are temporarily between work. These are people who are going to have insurance within the next four months. A whopping 45% of those 47 million people will have insurance within the next four months. That’s huge. According to my calculator, that’s 21,150,000. That’s more than we’re left with! Of course, that has to be figured in with those who are not citizens and those who make more than the median income. But still, that begs the question, how many of the remaining 20 million were simply between jobs at the time this census was taken?

In addition to those who are simply temporarily between jobs, the fact still remains that the majority of those who are uninsured already qualify for existing government programs. But just like those who can afford it and choose not to buy it, so many people simply choose not to participate in those government programs. Why?! Who knows! But does their inaction warrant the rest of us sacrificing the quality of care we are already blessed with in this country for the woes that exist under socialized medicine? NO!
We already know that the elderly are covered via Medicaid. Every child is automatically covered as well. There are even programs for the disabled as well! I have a friend whose stepdaughter is profoundly disabled. Even though both of her parents and her stepmother could easily – easily – afford to pay for her medical bills, the entirety of her medical bills are covered by government programs. While yes, I’m all for providing care for the disabled, in my opinion, that’s ridiculous. And what’s more, my friend agrees with me! If you can afford health-care for you and your children, there is no reason that burden should be shifted to the American taxpayer. It’s ludicrous and it shows us just how far down that slippery slope we are toward socialized medicine.

That 47 million statistic is so inflated and I’ve already shown just how inflated it is. But of course, with the Census Bureau’s study, we can’t continue to subtract so easily, since we can’t easily break down how many in each category are temporarily without insurance. So we’re at roughly 20 million, along with the overall 45% who are between jobs.
But that doesn’t mean we’re done. Thankfully, The Kaiser Family Foundation, a liberal non-profit frequently quoted by the media, has done a similar study. They have a figure for the number of uninsured American citizens who do not qualify for current government programs and make less than $50,000 a year. That number is between 13.9 million and 8.2 million. That is one giant leap from at best 13.9 million to 47 million. And that’s a liberal organization.

There you have it, that’s the truth behind the myth of the health-care crisis in this country. Yes, I think it’s so sad that there are people out there who are uninsured. But the government cannot make up for our own choices in life. The government cannot sacrifice the quality of our medical care to make up for the so very few who are without insurance. Especially when there are so many other options already out there to take care of these people! There are many, many answers in the private sector to address this problem.

The bottom line is, inflating the truth will not do us any good. I hate that on such an important issue, both sides have now succumbed to the lie propagated by the liberal left. When John McCain mentioned this save 47 million figure during the debates, I cringed. If we can’t hold on to reason, if we can’t cling to the truth, we are truly lost. This issue is too important for us to lose sight of the truth.

Now that we have the facts out of the way, if you’d like to read about my own personal experience trying to receive treatment in a country with socialized medicine, click “more” to read on. Also, as an extra special treat, I’ve also included a cute – albeit anecdotal – look at the supposed crisis of the uninsured. So go on, click “more”, you know you want to!

What makes this debate about health-care so important to me is the fact that my life literally depends on my access to adequate health-care. I have a very, very rare and potentially fatal genetic condition. If I don’t receive treatment, I will literally die. Not immediately, it’s not that kind. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but basically, if I don’t receive regular treatment – which involves pain management, unorthodox uses of plastic surgery, and regular expensive imaging tests – I would be on a slow and painful path to almost certain death. It can happen one of two ways, either your body eventually overwhelms your cardiopulmonary system, or you can develop a tumor inside the abdominal cavity, which will eventually shut down one or more of your internal organs. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?

Thankfully I live in a country that fosters and promotes private health insurance, because otherwise, I’d be completely stuck. Because my disease is so rare, my family and I regularly reach out to talk to other people who have this disease. The majority of them live in Europe, as the disease primarily affects those of Northern European ancestry. Several of the people my family and I know live in Sweden and the United Kingdom, both countries with socialized or “universal” health-care.
None of these people receive treatment for this disease. They are on that slow and painful descent toward death and there’s absolutely nothing their governments will do to help them. Most of them can’t even receive the expensive narcotics they need just so they can live their lives without the overwhelming pain this disease causes. I’m lucky enough to have those narcotics, yet most days the pain is so bad I can’t even get out of bed. I can’t even begin to fathom the absolute hell these poor people are going through.

But that is socialized medicine. As another friend of mine from London puts it, if the National Health Service can’t fix your problem with a band-aid, you’re screwed. To put it another way, socialized medicine sacrifices those whose lives depend on expensive health-care to take care of people with colds. It’s been that way in absolutely every single nation that has ever adopted socialized medicine. The fact that we Americans refuse to discuss this with those who are dying in those countries because of socialized medicine, because we refuse to learn from their mistakes, we will be dooming ourselves to repeating those mistakes and sacrificing American lives in the process. In my opinion, that is completely unacceptable. And because my own life depends directly on whether or not this country chooses socialized medicine, I refuse to vote for any politician who supports universal medicine. That would be a vote for my own death.

Even though I’m already well aware of the lives being harmed by socialized medicine, I still have my own experience dealing with the National Health Service of the United Kingdom. I didn’t always suffer from this disease as I do now. Yes, it’s genetic, and yes, I’ve suffered from it to some degree since I was born. But the worst aspects of the disease remain dormant until they’re exacerbated by some sort of long-term infection or trauma. In my own case, before my disease got to the point where it is now, I used to travel to the United Kingdom regularly. My last trip there was after a year-long period where I went through five operations to try to reverse the process of the disease. The operations were exceedingly painful, arduous, and downright depressing. My best friend in the whole world happens to live in London and he offered to take me on a vacation once I got through all those operations. It was my light at the end of the tunnel to look forward through as I went through that painful process.

That vacation was a trip to Scotland. We went to a small village about an hour outside of Aberdeen. It was absolutely beautiful! The trip was going so well, and believe me, I really needed it. We were staying at a Hilton hotel that had a bunch of nice little timeshare cabins situated on a hillside. Unfortunately, late one night as I was walking back to our cabin from the main hotel, I slipped on the stone stairs that led to our door. They were in a state of disrepair – they were uneven, far from level, and the only light in the area was broken. Unfortunately a large stick, about an inch in diameter and at least a foot and a half long, had fallen from a tree near the steps. It was sitting on one of those steps, hidden by the shadow cast by the step above it. Worse still, the bark of the stick was the exact same shade as the step itself. So even though I was carefully watching where I walked, I couldn’t see the branch at all, thanks to the poor lighting conditions and where the stick was situated.
I slipped. Worse still, the way I landed, my tailbone took the brunt of the force as I landed straight on the razor edge of one of the stone steps.
It hurt like hell. It hurt SO badly. After the initial shock wore off, I had to crawl all the way to the cabin on my hands and knees.

The pain just kept getting worse, and I have a huge pain tolerance. I’ve gone through amputation, bone debridements, those five operations that year; I’m a tough cookie. My friend knew it, and as he watched my face as I laid on the couch, he decided to call an ambulance.

After I was loaded in the ambulance, the paramedic whispered in my ear. He asked if I was married to my friend. I told him no, we were just platonic friends. He got a concerned look on his face, then whispered again, “Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but you need to tell the hospital that he’s your husband, otherwise they won’t let you leave the hospital in his care.” I was shocked and I asked him why. All he could say was, “That’s the law. Otherwise, I don’t know how you’d get out of that hospital.”
That was my first warning that this was not going to be a pleasant trip to the hospital in Aberdeen.

The second sign again occurred in the ambulance. Considering all the procedures I’ve been through, as well as the amount of pain medications I’d had to take due to the disease, I’m rather well acquainted with pain medication, narcotics, anesthesia, and the protocols that surround them. Because of that, I was quite surprised when the kindly paramedic pulled out an entire can of gas, stuck on a mask right on the end of it, and just handed it to me. Without hooking me up to any machines, he just handed me an anesthetic gas. No blood pressure cuff, nothing to check my oxygen, nothing. Just here, take this, it’ll knock you out, consequences be damned.
At that point, I was on a huge dose of narcotics for the pain, so I’d already built up a hefty tolerance to the stuff. I breathed in that can, trying to monitor myself as I went. But the pain was so bad that I breathed in enough to help with the pain. Still, adding that on top of my regular narcotics dose, I was loopy. Really loopy.

By the time we reached the hospital, I was pretty well drunk on the gas. Even my vision seemed a little impaired. Even so, they stuck me in a room all by myself, and refused to let my “husband” go with me. At first they said it was because he had to fill out a couple forms at the front desk. I asked if they needed my American ID or insurance cards or anything. I’ll never forget the look on the nurse’s face – she puffed up with pride, smiled broadly, and said, “No, no, you don’t need any of that here, we have socialized medicine! You’re completely covered, even though you’re an American!”
They wheeled me back to the room, put me in a gown, and left me there. Again, no blood pressure, no oxygen thingie on my finger, nothing. And let me tell you, that room was disgusting. The entire Casualty department was disgusting. There were piles of dust and grime along the baseboards and on the floor. The walls were bare and in obvious disrepair. The paint was so chipped and dirty it looked like it was leftover from the 1970s. The linoleum on the floor was peeling up. It was seriously, seriously bad. And that smell… bleugh. The only thing that looked halfway clean was the paper sheet on the gernie I had to lay on. Even that didn’t have any railings on it.

I waited in that room for hours. Hours. I never saw a sign of anybody, except the people who occasionally walked by my door. (Yup, no curtains, the door had to be left open, even though I was sitting there in a gown. No patient privacy at all.) Every so often I’d shout out at a passing nurse, asking if my “husband” could come back. Each and every one of them shouted back, saying they would ask about it. Hours went by before I ever saw anyone. Thankfully they did at least leave me a new gas can that the paramedic had given me, otherwise it would have been pure torture pain-wise.
Finally, about five hours later, a nurse finally came into my room. A nurse. Keep that in mind, not a doctor, not even an a physicians assistant. Just a nurse. She asked if it still hurt, I said yes. She asked if it had gotten any better, I said no. She asked if I had any conditions she should know about. I explained that yes, I did, and that I had spoken with my doctors back in the States. I relayed to her that because of the condition I have, my doctors were incredibly, incredibly concerned that I might have broken off the end of my tailbone. Considering I had to get on a plane in a few days, they requested that an x-ray be done and that I receive a copy of the report, so that it could be faxed back to my doctors.
The nurse listened to all of this, writing down notes all the while. She looked up at me and asked me again if it hurt and how badly. I described the pain, I told her about my pain threshold, how much pain I’d endured before. I went through all of that and what did she say?

“Sorry, we’re going to have to send you home.”

After five whole hours of laying in that cold, dirty, disgusting room all by myself, they did absolutely nothing. I was never one examined by a doctor. Hell, I was never once examined by anyone! No one even bothered to touch me. I never had my blood pressure taken, I never had my oxygen checked, no one even bothered to pull out a stethoscope and listen to my lungs. Nothing. They did nothing.

When I got back in the car with my “husband”, I told him about all the times I had asked for him. He said that no one ever came out to tell him how I was doing, no one ever once asked him to come back, and that the whole time he was completely worried and clueless. He kept asking people to tell him how I was and they wouldn’t say anything.
Not only that, but he also said that he’s not surprised no one told him to go back with me as I had asked, because it was illegal for anyone to be in the room with the patient. Yes, even spouses, even family members.

The more I think about this, the angrier it makes me. Why? Because not only did they do absolutely nothing, but if you think about it, they doped me up and then refused to have someone speak for me. They incapacitated me. They gave me enough gas to make me so loopy and delusional that if it had been someone without a tolerance for that sort of thing, they probably wouldn’t have even remembered that they were never examined. And since my “husband” wasn’t allowed back with me, no one would have ever known. No one was in there to speak for me, no one was in there to demand that something be done. They housed me for five hours, leaving me there alone, in an unsafe environment, giving me dangerous anesthetic gas without monitoring me, before finally kicking me out the door with nothing to show for it.

Thankfully when I got home, we confirmed that my tailbone was at least intact. Thank goodness for that. But still, in an emergency, nothing was done, and even if I had been a British subject, I would have had no legal recourse for what was clearly medical malpractice.

Now ask yourself, would any American have stood for such treatment?

And believe me, my experience was not unique. I am not the exception to the rule. That same friend that I was in Scotland with, he had a similar – albeit more dangerous – experience. A few years ago, he was randomly attacked by a football fan. This man opened my friend’s car door in the middle of the street, kicking him and beating him as my friend’s car stalled. My friend has bruises and lacerations all over his right side. When he got to the Casualty, after waiting several hours, they finally scanned him and found that his lung had been punctured. They told him he needed an operation within the next twelve hours or his lung would collapse, killing him. But they couldn’t operate on him within that time frame, instead telling him the next opening available would be in two weeks. Of course, he’d be dead by then, but that was all they had to offer him.
Thankfully, his family realized long before that the National Health Service was worthless. All this time they’d been paying through the nose for private health insurance, precisely for instances like this where their lives depended on it. Britons pay at least four times what we do for private health insurance, and in this instance, if my best friend hadn’t had private health insurance, he would have been dead at the hands of the NHS.

The same stories happen in every single country with health insurance. They’re not the exception to the rule, they are the every day reality of socialized medicine. In Australia, an elderly friend of mine suffered a serious head injury, yet was left in an emergency waiting room for about twenty hours. Again, just as in my instance, would an American have stood for such treatment? If we finally understood the realities of socialized medicine, would we still tolerate the Democratic party’s push for it in our own country?

We need to wake up, talk to the people in these countries, talk to the chronically ill, and realize what we’d be getting into if we accepted this form of health-care in our own country. We need to realize that we would be sacrificing the world-leading quality of our health-care. We need to realize that we would no longer be able to cure diseases as we have in the past. We would no longer pioneer new drugs, new treatments, no surgeries, new life-saving techniques that are vital to our very existence. That’s what we’d be giving up, and for what? The Democrat’s constant cry about the 47 million uninsured is nothing but a lie. Should we sacrifice everything we have for that lie? No.

Yes, we should do what we can to get the 8-13 million uninsured Americans cared for. But socialized medicine is not the answer. The sooner we realize that, the sooner we can address the reality of the situation and come up with a real viable solution. Until we can get past the lies, look at the honest truth, and face reality, the sooner these people will get real adequate coverage. In this case, government health-care is NOT an option, because it just flat out does not work.

(helpful source)