The Death of Socialized Medicine

American liberals love to point to Canada as a beacon of enlightenment with regard to socialized medical care. Unfortunately for them, Canadians don't:

TORONTO, June 9 - The Canadian Supreme Court struck down a Quebec law banning private medical insurance today, dealing an acute blow to the publicly financed national health care system.

The court stopped short of striking down the constitutionality of the country's vaunted nationwide coverage, but legal experts said the ruling would open the door to a wave of lawsuits challenging the health care system in other provinces.

Did you catch that? The progressive Quebecois actually passed a law banning private medical insurance and the Canadian Supreme Court (SCOC?) smacked it down. Good for them.

But in recent years, patients have been forced to wait longer for diagnostic tests and elective surgery, while the wealthy and well connected either seek care in the United States or use influence to jump ahead on waiting lists.

The court ruled that the waiting lists had become so long that they violated patients' "liberty, safety and security" under the Quebec charter, which covers about one-quarter of Canada's population.

"The evidence in this case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread and that in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care," the Supreme Court ruled. "In sum, the prohibition on obtaining private health insurance is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services."

I wonder if Hillary Clinton read this, it is in the NY Times.

Socialized medicine will never work because as far as entitlement programs go, that would be the grand daddy of them all.

Let's imagine that Hillary and Bill werre successful in the early nineties (shudder), and Hillary's scheme was put in place. With the aging Baby Boomer generation, we would be paying 10-20% of our salaries just to keep the program going.

Not just the cost would be a concern, America's best and brightest would've turned to fields such as engineering that would not have such draconian government oversight.

Perhaps this will be the end of government provided healthcare on the North American continent.