Motorists when presented with the option of staying on the regular highway and enduring time-eating traffic jams or paying to take a toll-road, possibly saving time, often opt to pay the money hopefully saving some valuable time.
The "free" road isn’t as attractive when you factor in your time lost. The same logic applies to the left’s persistent dream of single-payer, giveaway government healthcare.
Government healthcare invariably makes up for revenue shortfalls by rationing care.
As a painfully relevant example across the pond, the UK provides us with a vivid picture.
Fox News reports , "More than 7 million U.K. citizens are on a waitlist for routine care procedures under the country's state-run health care program, a new record for the country.
"Of the 7 million people waitlisted at the end of August, 387,257 had been waiting for more than a year to begin health care treatments, according to Sky News.
"The August waitlist numbers are up from 6.8 million people in July, which was the previous highest record since the U.K. started recording the statistic in 2007."
If the same situation was applied to the United States, the waiting list would contain 33 million people waiting for help.
You get better service from the cable company.
The National Health Service (NHS) was able to find a professional liar to make its case:
"Despite huge pressures on the NHS this summer, the incredible work of colleagues across the country meant that in August we delivered more potentially life-saving cancer checks than ever before and cut 18- month waits by 60 percent over the last year."
Since reporters are math-challenged — and sadly so are most Americans — this means the spokesliar is pleased that people are only waiting eight months now.
The reflexive response of leftists to this deluge of facts would be to point out that it happened in the UK and the U.S different.
Sorry. No.
We’ve had a government "free" healthcare pilot program for over two centuries and it’s just as bad — if not worse — than the NHS.
It’s the Veterans Administration (VA).
The feds had 205 years to work out the kinks in a healthcare system that serves only a small portion of the U.S. populace.
The result is a third-world healthcare system at three times the cost.
It’s non-profit and non-compos.
Over 100 veterans died on a waiting list at the Los Angeles VA hospital. In its two-century shakedown cruise the VA has adopted all the features of failed government healthcare in progressive nations: rationing, indifference, and no other medical options unless you’re rich.
The VA is the TSA with a scalpel.
Incompetence permeates the VA like the odor of burned popcorn in a break room microwave.
If the left has its way, everyone will experience this type of health care.
The VA hospital system is essentially the pilot program for single-payer, government healthcare. It’s been a single-payer system from the beginning, designed to accommodate a smaller subset of the population.
It was immune to competition from the private sector.
Think of it as the United States Postal Service with syringes.
The theory is after the bugs have been worked out of the pilot program, then a benevolent government can expand it to accommodate the entire country.
Unfortunately, with leftist big government, when a pilot program fails the verdict is always the failure was due to a lack of resources.
The left’s idea of a cure is to take the same program, bulk it up with taxpayer dollar injections and make it mandatory for the entire country.
My family has its own story of an encounter with the VA.
One of my uncles — a WWII veteran — fell ill and went to the VA for treatment in the 1950’s. The good doctors said he had suffered a nervous breakdown so they hospitalized him in the mental wing.
Today suffering a nervous breakdown means you are forever immune to negative job performance reviews and the Angel of Downsizing will probably pass over you, too.
But in the 1950’s a mental problem was the kiss of death.
My uncle lost his career, his wife and his future.
He was in and out of VA hospitals for two decades trying to find a cure so he could reassemble the shards of what had been a normal life.
Then one fine day he got a new VA doctor.
This doctor announced that my uncle had never had any mental problems and that all his difficulties had been caused by an undiagnosed and untreated brain tumor that had been growing in his skull since the first time he saw the inside of a VA hospital.
So, my uncle went home to the bedroom he’d inhabited in my grandmother’s house since he lost everything he held dear.
And he thought about his life. And he thought about what he had lost. And he carefully took a blanket off his bed, went over to the gas space heater, sat down on the floor, covered his head with the blanket and turned on the gas.
Our veterans have been the canary in the healthcare coalmine for decades, but Uncle Sam just keeps replacing the dead canaries with new ones.
Michael Reagan, the eldest son of President Reagan, is a Newsmax TV analyst. A syndicated columnist and author, he chairs The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Michael is an in-demand speaker with Premiere speaker's bureau. Read Michael Reagan's Reports — More Here.
Michael R. Shannon is a commentator, researcher for the League of American Voters, and an award-winning political and advertising consultant with nationwide and international experience. He is author of "Conservative Christian's Guidebook for Living in Secular Times (Now with added humor!)" Read Michael Shannon's Reports — More Here.