You Sure You Want Socialized Medicine?

Are you old? A little chubby? A smoker? Well then, no cancer treatment for you. You can’t be surprised. This is the inevitable end of socialized medicine and a British cancer specialist is spelling it out pretty clearly.
Times Online reports:

A leading UK Cancer Specialist warned that the National Health Service (NHS) is facing very difficult choices about which diseases would be treated and which would not in the coming future. Professor John Smyth of Medical Oncology at the University of Edinburgh, gave a speech at the International Science Festival, Edinburgh. In his speech “The Future of Cancer Treatment – can we afford it?”, he stressed on the fact that in the wake of limited public funding, very stringent decision can be made over the types of diagnosis and drugs to use in the future.

He questioned as to how to allocate funds towards treating over one disease over another. He enquired about what was to be the criterion of giving preference. He elucidated on the fact that the NHS had been stretched to its maximum value treating people suffering from heart disease, cancer and stroke. The breakthrough of new medicines was putting amplified pressure on the limited resources of the health services.

So get that. New medicines are bad in a socialized healthcare framework because those pesky people actually want new medicines.

And BIG GOVERNMENT will be deciding which diseases get treated and which people get the treatment? Something tells me that our representatives in the House and Senate will be taken care of rather well.

I’m not criticizing Smyth here. He’s right in what he’s saying. The government can’t afford to cover everything and costs will eventually lead to rationing. But that’s because government healthcare doesn’t work. At some point they’ll be rationing.

Just a quick question here. One argument says that because someone allowed themselves to become obese then they don’t deserve to be treated because they essentially brought it upon themselves or they’re not a good risk in the future. Now, I have to wonder, will the government say that many AIDS patients shouldn’t be treated because it’s likely they either persisted in the homosexual lifestyle or had unsafe sex which is considered high risk behavior? You think? So in reality, the government would be disallowing treatment for the politically incorrect.

With government controlled health care you would ultimately end with groups lobbying for the government to cover diseases.

Professor John Smyth said that the country was already saddling with ageing population. Therefore, there are very few people who are contributing towards the health care budget, this is aggravated by the financial recession. Hence the Health Services are under a lot of pressure. As strides are being made in Medical Sciences, a way needs to be found to properly apportion available resources and funds to the patients.

Man, it’s almost like we need more babies to be born to grow up and financially support the country. The interesting thing here is that socialism might actually work for a little while as long as each generation was bigger than the last but the socialists just can’t help themselves. Babies are a burden and must be…thinned. But with people having less children the taxpayer base is gone so there’s nobody to support the generation that aborted millions of babies. So it turns out that their own selfish ideology is their destruction. Unfortunately, we’re all victims too.