According to the Census Bureau, the number of uninsured Americans declined significantly in 2007. As David Hogberg reports in Investor’s Business Daily:

The number of uninsured fell to 45.7 million last year from 47 million in 2006, largely due to expanded government coverage. That’s 15.3% of the population, down from 15.8%.

But the advocates of government-run health care are determined to see bad news in the report. They claim that the remaining 45.7 million need a government program:

That’s proof, liberals say, of a health care crisis. There is a case for growth in the safety net,” said Kathleen Stoll, deputy executive director of Families USA.

The problem with this reasoning becomes obvious when one looks at the makeup of the uninsured population. The following chart provides an eye-opening breakdown:

As the chart shows, nearly 10 million of the fabled uninsured are not actual Americans, and a large percentage make more than $50,000 a year. It’s not obvious that the voters want their taxes raised to cover such people.

But that’s exactly what advocates of government-run health care, including most of the people meeting in Denver this week, want to do. They believe universal coverage is a “moral imperative.”

And they ain’t talking about private coverage.

The other day I did a brief post about Michelle Obama and the contract that was awarded by her employer, the University of Chicago Medical Center, to one of her husband’s political cronies. I thought I was done with it, but the Blackwell deal gave off such a stench that I decided to do a longer piece. Here’s a taste:

The people who run the University of Chicago Medical Center may live to rue the day they hired Mrs. Obama. The Post story quotes a UCMC spokeswoman who says that the Senator’s wife “was not involved in the selection process,” and it may well be true that she didn’t put her hands on her hips, smite the floor with her expensive heel, and order cowering underlings to give the intranet project to her husband’s patron. Nonetheless, the Blackwell deal hardly passes the smell test, and CMS has a very sensitive nose.

Read the entire piece in the American Spectator.

Masochist that I am, I’ve been perusing the Dems 2008 draft platform. It’s really astonishing that they could get so many bad ideas into a single document. The one that caught my eye this morning was the call for an “end to to insurance discrimination”:

Health insurance plans should accept all applicants and be prohibited from charging different prices based on pre-existing conditions.

By using the term “discrimination,” the platform committee has couched this provision in the vernacular of “social justice,” but they’re really just rebranding an old regulatory boondoggle known as “guaranteed issue.”

A number of states have already enacted guaranteed-issue laws, and the end result is always a dramatic increase in premiums for everyone. Plus, as Michael New of the Heritage Foundation points out:

Many insurers quit offering insurance in states with guaranteed-issue laws, and the lack of competition results in still-higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

Anyone think it’s a good idea to force the whole country to pay the huge insurance premiums now borne by the hapless residents of guaranteed-issue states like Massachusetts and New Jersey?

Well, a federal law ending “insurance discrimination” would produce that very result. 

By now, everyone who hasn’t been living on a desert island knows that traditional Medicare is headed for a fiscal meltdown. However, as I have pointed out before, there is a silver lining to the black cloud.

One segment of the Medicare program in which the market has been allowed to work, the prescription drug program, has been outperforming cost expectations since its inception. Grace-Marie Turner reports:

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported that average beneficiary premiums for the standard Medicare drug benefit will increase by just $3 a month in 2009, to $28. That is 37% lower than the $44 a month that legislators estimated seniors would pay this year when the Medicare Modernization Act was enacted in 2003.

And Part-D is easier on the taxpayers than past projections suggested would be the case:

And the drug benefit, based upon consumer choice and competition, also is costing taxpayers less than expected: CMS says it will cost $46.4 billion in 2009 vs. $74 billion that had been estimated for this year.

And why is Part-D costing less than predicted while traditional Medicare is blowing the roof off of the most dire projections?

Competition works, even inside a public program, to give people more choices and keep costs down.

Amen.

That’s the conclusion Steffie Woolhandler, Benjamin Day, and David Himmelstein have reached. Why? Because Romneycare expanded coverage to everyone while making no serious adjustments to the other dynamics that affect cost. The inevitable result was a fiscal runaway train:

In sum, neither government, nor employers, nor the uninsured themselves have pockets deep enough to sustain coverage expansion in the face of rising costs.

Being single-payer zealots (they are founding members of the advocacy group PNHP), Woolhandler,  Day, and Himmelstein offer a predictable solution—-a wholesale government takeover of the health care finance system:

We remain convinced that more radical reforms can simultaneously expand coverage and control costs. A shift from our complex and fragmented payment system to a simple single-payer approach could save about 14.3% of total health spending …

Anyone who deals with our proto-single-payer system, Medicare, knows that it is anything but “simple.” In fact, its rules are so Byzantine that they fill 120,000 largely undeciperable pages. 

Arnold Kling has a much more sensible idea. Try the Woolhandler single-payer approach in a few states while simultaneously trying the free market approach in other states.

I would like to see [single-payer] tried, but only in some states. I would like to see other states try radical health reform of the opposite kind, with health insurance deregulated and major rollbacks of licensing requirements. Then we’ll see which performs better over the long term.

My bet is that Kling’s model would beat the stuffings out of the Woolhandler model. Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see if the “news” media and the “progressive” blogosphere continue to pretend Romneycare is a success. 

As I have said before, I believe the market provides the most efficient and humane mechanism for carrying out health care rationing. If you believe government bureaucracies can do a better job, I recommend this story in The Telegraph:

The NHS should not always attempt to save someone’s life if the cost is too much, the medical regulator has ruled.

Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Guidelines (NICE) has recommended that the NHS abandon the ”rule of rescue,” which requires clinicians to treat dying patients without regard to cost. Why?

When there are limited resources for healthcare, applying the ‘rule of rescue’ may mean that other people will not be able to have the care or treatment they need.  

In making this ruling, by the way, NICE ignored the advice of its own Citizen’s Council, which insisted that “a rule of rescue was an essential mark of a humane society.” The NICE bureaucrats were not impressed:

Nice defended its ruling last night saying that the Citizens Council provided useful input to its decisions but that the organisation’s role was to determine how best to allocate the health service’s limited resources.

Giving the government control over health care spending—-whether you call the system socialized medicine, single-payer, or universal health care—-is to give them control over your life.

Think this sort of thing could never happen here? Read this.

Obamacare, as I have pointed out here and here, is a perfect storm of bad ideas. It is, however, downright sensible compared to his plan to address high gasoline prices. Here’s Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek:

Barack Obama proposes to deal with rising gasoline prices by giving a $1,000 “emergency rebate” to consumers - a rebate to be paid for by taxing the so-called “windfall profits” of oil producers.

If it isn’t obvious why this is an extraordinarily dumb idea, Boudreaux explains:

This plan - which increases the demand for gasoline and reduces its supply - makes as much sense as trying to put out a fire by dowsing it with jet fuel.

That Obama’s plan will result in higher gas prices may not matter, however, because his plan to impose health care mandates on businesses will eliminate many of the jobs to which people now drive their cars.

A while back, I asked this rhetorical question: Why wasn’t Edward Kennedy flown to Europe to have his cancer treated? The answer, of course, is that the much-maligned U.S. health care system is the best in the world.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the area of cancer treatment. John Goodman reports on another study published in Lancet Oncology showing that the U.S. has the best cancer survival rates:

A new study of cancer survival on five continents lays to rest the theory that Americans fare poorly compared to other developed countries … in almost every category Americans survive cancer at higher rates than patients in other developed countries.

Here’s a chart showing U.S. survival rates for breast and prostate cancer compared to the survival rates of four countries whose health care systems are often touted as superior to ours:

Wait a minute. How can the U.S. have better survival rates than France? Wasn’t the French system rated the best on the planet by the World Health Organization?

And what the hell are Norway’s survival rates doing so far behind those of the United States? According to WHO, the Norwegian health care system is WAY better than ours.

Hmm. Anyone care to guess where rich Frogs and Norwegians go to get health care care when they are really sick?

Last week, at an event hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, one of John McCain’s health care advisors (Al Hubbard) pointed out the following:

When a third-party pays for a service or product—we consume it as if it was free…It’s interesting, if you would think about, the employers rather than providing health care insurance they provided food insurance. So every time you go to the grocery store you just take out your food insurance card, you give it to the cashier, she scans it, and you’re outta there. Pretty soon, you would start buying caviar, expensive steak, and you start buying more than you need …

For anyone acquainted with basic economics, Hubbard’s assertion is unremarkable. It is blindingly obvious that if consumers are insulated from the cost of something, they will consume more of it than they need.

But there are soi-disant health care wonks out there who remain stunningly ignorant of economics. Thus, we get this post, in which Ezra Klein fancies himself outing a ”revealing slip”: 

Caviar and oysters … are luxury goods, sensual pleasures that we love to experience when finances permit, but understand we can do without when incomes tighten … By contrast, colonoscopies and MRIs aren’t a good time … Diagnostic tests and medical treatments are not luxury goods.

One would think that even a guy with Klein’s limitations could see that the man wasn’t saying MRIs are “sensual pleasures.” Even dumber is Klein’s assertion about medical decision making:

Hubbard characterizes the purchase of medical tests as “our decisions,” but that’s inaccurate. They are our doctor’s decisions. We don’t want to make those purchases; we’re informed that we need to make them. Then we try and figure out how to pay for them.

It is clear that Klein cannot imagine patients as autonomous entities capable of critical thinking. In this he has a lot of company among “progressives.” They are wrong. These are indeed “our decisions.”

Take Klein’s colonoscopies, for example. They are routinely recommended by PCPs for all patients older than 50. It’s a precaution. There is no reason that you can’t say “Nah, I’ll do it on the next check up.”

Refusing to do the routine colonoscopy does involve a tiny risk, but so does driving an automobile.  And, as adults, we have the right to take that chance, particularly if we must write a check for the procedure.

Under our current (hopelessly perverse) third-party payment system, it never occurs to most people to say “no.” Why? Because, as Hubbard correctly points out, the colonoscopy seems “free.”

Most medical decisions are not urgent. Hubbard’s only point is that, in a system that required us to write a check for medical services, we would be more circumspect about how much we consume.

Is that really so hard to absorb?

The primary difference between those who promote market-based health care reform and the people who prefer a government-imposed solution is their respective opinions of the customer’s intelligence.

The former believe that patients are capable of critical thinking while the latter think we are too dumb to know what’s good for us. An excellent example of the patients-are-dumb view can be found at Health Beat:

85 percent of Americans report being satisfied with the quality of care they receive—despite the fact that patients get, on average, just 55 percent of the care that experts recommend for most major medical conditions.

For the post’s author, Niko Karvounis, the huge number of satisfied patients is not a sign that the system works reasonably well despite its flaws. It is, instead, proof that patient opinion should be ignored.

The lesson here is clear: if you really want to improve health care in the U.S., you need to look beyond superficial preferences and into the nitty-gritty of how health care is delivered in our system.  

In other words, disregard the ”superficial preferences” of the customers and give them what the “experts” say they should have. This is seriously patronizing stuff.

And it gets worse. This post gets truly creepy when the purpose of polls is discussed. Karvounis apparently thinks “getting polling right” means using public opinion surveys as re-education tools:

Clearly we can’t expect polls to be the only—or even the central—way of educating the public on the relationship between care delivery and cost. But they could do a much better job at exploring if and how the public understands this relationship.

Er … Niko … the purpose of public opinion polls involves measurement. Legitimate enterprises use them to gauge public preferences so that products and services can be tailored to consumer needs.

Illegitimate enterprises use polls to manipulate public opinion so that shoddy merchandise (e.g. government-run health care) can be shoved down the customer’s throat.

Health care reform that ignores the opinions of the patients will produce a health care delivery system that will make our current system look like a Swiss watch by comparison.

Americans understand this, so Karvounis (and many other advocates of government-run health  care) conclude that the hoi polloi just don’t get it. But the people are smarter than they think.

I spent last week cycling along the Thames, visiting various towns upriver from London. The Brits were unfailingly pleasant. Wonderful people. Which is why this story from the BBC really pisses me off:

People with rheumatoid arthritis should have access to a particular class of drugs limited, NHS advisers say … The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence said patients in England and Wales should only be able to try one anti-TNF drug.

In other words, the health care commissars of the UK have decided that an arthritis patient whose condition doesn’t respond (or stops responding) to a particular anti-TNF (a drug that helps reduce joint pain, swelling, mobility and fatigue) doesn’t get a second chance:

NICE is systematically taking away clinically effective and proven treatments from patients and giving them just one roll of the dice when it comes to anti-TNF treatment.

And why is NICE taking this cruel position?

NICE said that giving patients two, or even three, anti-TNFs is not cost-effective …

So what if tens of thousands of patients must live with treatable pain? Who cares if these people have already paid (via taxes) for decent health care? Not the apparatchiks at NICE.

I guess this is what is meant by “Perfidious Albion.” The people I met in England deserve better than this.  So do we.

As expected, the Senate has gutted Medicare Advantage, effectively killing the last hope of market-based Medicare reform. The “news” media and the AMA are spinning this act of stupidity as a victory for beleaguered physicians over mean-spirited Republicans and insurance company robber barons.

But the physicians didn’t win a victory. All they got was a temporary stay of execution. The reimbursement cuts will be back with a vengeance, probably in 2010, and they will stick next time.  Instead, the docs were duped into euthanizing their only real hope of escaping the endless cycle of pay cuts and metastisizing Medicare regulations.

And it wasn’t the insurance companies who lost. The real losers were low-income, rural and minority seniors. Medicare Advantage is very popular with these patients because of its lower co-pays, more comprehensive benefits, and the increased primary care access the program provides in underserved areas. Per the Heritage Foundation:

According to a 2007 CMS report, 57 percent of Medicare beneficiaries have incomes between $10,000 and $30,000 annually, compared to 46 percent of beneficiaries in traditional Medicare. Also, 27 percent of Medicare Advantage enrollees are minorities, compared to 20 percent of enrollees in traditional Medicare.

The Senate’s craven and short-sighted vote condemns these patients to the tender mercies of traditional Medicare which, due to its unsustainable fiscal situation, will increasingly be forced to cut benefits, raise co-pays, and restrict access. This is what the Democrats, the AMA, and a few pusillanimous Republicans (a tautology, I know) have accomplished.

Good work guys.

I have written here, here, and here about the British government’s cruel policy of refusing to pay for up-to-date cancer drugs because they are “too expensive.”

And what does the government of Perfidious Albion consider worthy of funding? MailOnline provides a chart showing expenses for which Brit taxpayers must reimburse members of Parliament:

My personal favorite is the last item: “Rent on one additional home in London or constituency.” That’s right. The British government refuses to pay for cancer drugs for dying patients, but it pays for the second homes of MPs.

This is what happens when government officials decide how to allocate health care resources. They always put political or personal considerations ahead of the patients. Always.

As I pointed out last week, state-mandated insurance benefits are an important contributor to health care inflation. Such mandates have also increased the ranks of the uninsured.

There is a glimmer of hope, however, in a piece of legislation introduced by Congressman Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska. Today’s American Spectator contains my article on mandate madness and the Fortenberry legislation.

A variety of Democrats and advocacy groups have been telling us for years that “Medicare-for-All” is the cure for what ails U.S. health care. Well, Congress has just demonstrated why that’s such a dumb idea. Donald Johnson over at The Health Care Blog spells it out:

Under a “universal health insurance system,” which is advocated by the Democrats, political fights like this would happen every year. Doctors and insurers, if they were still in business, would face payment cuts. Patients would face uncertainty about who their doctors and insurers would be. And relationships between doctors, insurers and patients would become more strained than some of them already are.

The kind of political skullduggery that I describe here will be much MUCH worse if the whole health care system is turned over the the federal government. Government-run health care is politicized health care.

Claude Castonguay is known as “the father of Quebec Medicare.” However, as David Gratzer points out in IBD, Castonguay can be more accurately described as the “father” of the Canadian single-payer system:

Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec adopt government-administered health care … Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Now, however, Dad is not happy with the way his child turned out:

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

And how does Castonguay propose to get Canadian health care back on track?

We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.

That’s right. While our leading politicians advocate turning more and more of U.S. health care over to the government, the father of Canadian health care is advocating less government involvement. Which prompts Gratzer to ask:

If Claude Castonguay is abandoning ship, why should Americans bother climbing on board?

Why indeed.

Barack Obama often says, ”the reason people don’t have health insurance isn’t because they don’t want it, it’s because they can’t afford it.” He is right in this. Unfortunately, like the rest of his Democrat brethren, he has offered no plausible plan for reducing health insurance premiums.

One of the most significant contributors to the high cost of health insurance, and thus the uninsured problem, is the increasing trend toward state-mandated benefits. Many states dictate the services that must be covered by insurance policies, often requiring coverage for all manner of odd items such as chiropratic care and accupuncture.

Studies commisioned by AHIP and CAHI suggest that at least 20% of uninsured Americans lack coverage because of state-mandated benefits, and that such mandates add as much as 50% to the cost of individual insurance plans. Yet politicians of both major parties routinely advocate even more mandates.

There are, however, a few politicians who understand how much damage is done by mandated benefits.  Among them is GOP Governor Charlie Crist of Florida, who has pushed through legislation that will allow mandate-free policies to be sold in his state:

Insurance companies will be permitted to sell stripped-down, no-frills policies exempted from the more than 50 mandates that Florida otherwise imposes … The new plans will be designed to cost as little as $150 a month, or less.

This kind of state legislation won’t completely solve the uninsured problem, but it will put a serious dent in it. Unfortunately, only about a third of the states allow their citizens to buy mandate-free individual policies. More state governors should follow Charlie Crist’s lead.

Robert Goldberg has a mordant op-ed in the Washington Times about Barack Obama’s plan to “reform” U.S. health care. Here is his succinct description of Obamacare:

Mr. Obama plans to make Medicaid and State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) expansion the foundation of his proposal to expand coverage. He would make private health insurance affordable by having the government force doctors to accept below-cost rates for their services and impose a 4 percent tax on physician earnings. Then he would have a national health board determine which drugs and procedures the government would pay for under his new plan.

If it’s not obvious that this is bad news, consider what has happened in states where such policies have already been tried:

Many states have used the same approaches to cover the uninsured and to make existing premiums less expensive. Instead of doing so, such proposals have driven many doctors out of government-run programs and have rationed access to new medicines. Private insurers are leaving markets. And patients who are forced to wait months for needed care often wind up not getting the medicines they need.

This last issue relating to the denial of proper medications will certainly become a serious and widespread problem if Obama’s wrong-headed policies are enacted:

Mr. Obama would also create a new health board to create lists of “cost effective” new drugs and medical devices, and set prices for their payment. Similar review boards in Canada and Europe delay access to new medicines by months or years and are biased by cost-containment considerations.

This “health board” would emulate Great Britain’s ironically named NICE, whose many outrageous policies include the refusal to provide up-to-date cancer drugs to desperately ill patients.

This is the kind of “change” we’re going to get if the voters are foolish enough to put Barack Obama in the White House.

In response to this post, commenter Groetzinger asks the following question: “If you believe [the health care problem] is fixable what is the fix?” 

Well, if I were appointed Grand Imperial Poobah for Health Care and Bottle Washing, here’s what I would do:

Decouple employment from health care by eliminating the tax advantage that exists for employer-provided health insurance.

Create a national health insurance market by knocking down the state-imposed barriers that prevent people from buying insurance across state lines.

Encourage the spread of HSAs that incentivize consumers to economize on unnecessary medical expenditures.

Reform Medicare/Medicaid/SCHIP by moving the whole system to a market-based model similar to the Medicare Advantage program.

Pass nationwide tort reform to reduce the huge number of unnecessary tests and procedures that now result from defensive medicine.

Remove the stealth price controls (e.g. MS-DRG, APC, RBRVS) that have gradually been imposed on the system by the federal government.

Repeal EMTALA, HIPAA, and all other federal statutes that add huge costs but no real value to the health care system.

Eliminate all state and federal barriers (e.g. certificate of need statutes) to provider entry into the market.

Eliminate all state and federal barriers (e.g. the Stark law) to provider combination and competition.

Allow all hospitals, doctors, and other health care providers to charge what the market will bear.

Having thus cured the health care crisis, I would move on to world hunger and world peace. Then I’d go to lunch.

Anyone doubting that contemporary Progressivism is intellectually moribund should consider the credulous reaction of the Left to Barack Obama’s recent victory speech. Does one not have to be totally brain dead to take the following seriously?

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal …

How could ”progressives” fail to ”laugh until their ribs squeaked,” as George Will phrases it,  when Obama threw in the bit about the oceans? There is only one plausible explanation—-they no longer possess the capacity for critical thinking. 

This goes a long way toward explaining why these people favor so many bad ideas relating to health care reform and strongly suggests that it would be a monumental blunder to trust them (or their candidate) with any important matter of domestic or foreign policy.

So, we should definitely not allow “progressives” to meddle with health care.  Come to think of it, it might be a good idea to keep them away from sharp implements as well.

Pete Stark apparently resides in an alternate reality. There is no other explanation, beyond sheer mendacity, for the op-ed he recently wrote for The Hill. The piece contains so many erroneous assertions that no single blog post can address them all, so I’ll focus on the following representative passage:

Shifting more cost and responsibility to the consumer as a strategy for reform or cost-containment is useless. 

This is, of course, an allusion to consumer-driven health care. Stark’s assertion is refuted by every serious study of patient behavior in cost sharing situations, including this one which showed that high deductible plans reduce expensive ER utilization for minor complaints:

Traditional health plan members who switched to high-deductible coverage visited the emergency department less frequently than controls, with reductions occurring primarily in repeat visits for conditions that were not classified as high severity …

Visits to the ER for minor illnesses constitute a significant driver of health care inflation. So, anything that reduces such visits will be far from “useless” as a cost-containment measure. And, contrary to claims made by enemies of the free market, high deductible plans have no effect on ER utilization for real emergencies: 

HDHPs may be associated with reduced overall emergency department utilization without significantly affecting the highest-severity visits.

So, Stark either lives in a fantasy world or he’s a profoundly dishonest man. Either way, as the chairman of the Health Subcommittee on the Ways and Means Committee (in the House of Representatives), he exerts a very unhealthy influence on national health care policy.

I have written before about how Great Britain’s National Health Service compounds its disgraceful refusal to provide up-to-date cancer drugs by punishing patients who are willing to pay for these medications out of their own pockets.

That’s right. If a patient buys a drug like cetuximab or Avastin with her own money, she is no longer entitled to free care via the NHS. The Telegraph reports on a case that illustrates how this sadistic policy affects real people:

A woman who was refused free NHS cancer treatment after she paid for extra drugs has died, reigniting the debate over whether patients should be allowed to “top up” their care.

The government bureaucrats who run Britain’s dilapidated system of socialized medicine would rather let a patient die than allow her to break the rules. And what is the overarching principle at work here?

Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, claims that co-payment will create a two-tier NHS, with preferential treatment for patients who can afford the extra drugs. 

Cancer patients are, in other words, being sacrificed on the altar of “equality.” Mr. Johnson and his fellow bureaucrats are determined that British patients will all be “equal,” even if it kills them.

This is government-run health care, folks.

The WSJ reports that the Garden State is becoming “a microcosm of the national debate on health care.”

Democrats in Trenton are rallying behind a plan to require that every uninsured individual in New Jersey purchase health insurance from a new state-administered program.

Meanwhile: 

Jay Webber, a Republican Assemblyman in Trenton, will introduce legislation to let Garden State residents buy low-cost health insurance from any registered policy in any of the 50 states.

Thus the battle lines have been drawn between free market reformers and advocates of government-run health care:

The Webber proposal offers lower costs and more choices for consumers, while the Democratic plan mandates public coverage and no choice, while putting a new burden on taxpayers.

More choices and lower costs versus fewer choices and higher taxes. Can someone please explain to me how any sane voter could possibly prefer the latter?

A few days ago I wrote about the denial of state-of-the-art drugs to desperately ill British cancer patients.  Treatments widely used in Europe and the U.S. are being withheld from patients who badly need them.

This disgraceful policy was justified by the NHS on the grounds that there simply wasn’t enough money to pay for the expensive treatments. Well, according to the London Times, this was a lie:

Hospitals and NHS managers were pressured into spending hundreds of millions of pounds before the start of the financial year to “hide” a £1 billion surplus.

That’s right. The health care bureaucrats of Great Britain were sitting on a gigantic surplus while refusing to pay for much needed care. Needless to say, patient advocacy groups are not amused:

Patient representatives have criticised NHS managers for underspending while patients were still being denied vital treatments.

This is government-run health care—-cruel and dishonest.

Well, I guess it’s up to me to ask the uncouth yet obvious question: If U.S. health care is inferior to the systems of Canada and Europe, why wasn’t a rich and famous man like Senator Kennedy immediately sent to one of those places so that he could get the best care available?

Senator Kennedy was indeed transferred from Cape Cod Hospital, where he was initally admitted, and airlifted to … Massachusetts General Hospital. Why didn’t they take him to Europe, where the care is allegedly so much better? Perhaps the answer lies in this international comparison of cancer survival rates for males:

This table is from The Telegraph, which reported the results of a study first published in The Lancet. Despite the mountains of BS piled up by single-payer advocates (including Kennedy himself), it clearly showed that the U.S. health care system outperforms the “superior” systems of Europe.

A couple of weeks ago, John McCain was lambasted for having the audacity to say that U.S. health care was still the best in the world. It would appear that the Kennedy family agrees.