

Congratulations America! You’re becoming yet another nation on the socialised medical bandwagon, along with lucky Brits like myself! Thanks to a semantical ploy that only statist fiction could ever consider logical, the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare as constitutional, on the basis that Americans aren’t being forced to buy it because it’s a tax. Technically the US constitution doesn’t allow the government to penalise Americans for not buying health insurance, but by taxing them the Supreme Court has deemed the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) constitutional. So you see, Obamacare isn’t considered a penalty because it’s a tax. Doublethink anyone?





Thus Americans must now sign up for Obamacare if they don’t have alternative medical insurance, thanks to a work of subjective legalese that could never pass in any objective sense. But what’s worse is that the US government only has the authority for very specific taxation, be it directly (such as income tax) or indirectly (such as VAT). This truly is a sad state of affairs for the America people. The US constitution, once the crowning glory of a pioneering constitutional republic, has become nothing but a token parchment that holds no moral or objective value. Statists everywhere must be rubbing their hands in glee, since the US was once the closest that humanity has ever gotten to a truly free society, based on the unalienable rights of people. Today it’s just another land where these rights are reinterpreted as others see fit.





Admittedly there is a lot wrong with US healthcare. But it’s a typical story of lobby groups breaking down regulation until this becomes a mere shadow of any initial intent. This is nothing new though, as all societies voting for representatives, while giving lobby groups the chance to bribe politicians into compliance, is never going to be efficient in the long run. Add to this the donations for those campaigning for office, and representatives are never going to serve anyone but the most powerful special interest groups overall.





In spite what those on the left might tell you, it’s not just corporations that hold sway in this respect. Labour unions like the Service Employees International Union, and feminist lobby groups like the National Organisation for Women, are also very influential . Sure, the obvious culprits like financial institutions and oil companies are always in the mix, and of course there’s drug industry lobbyists, highly relevant to the present topic.





Drug industry lobbyists have been pushing for medical prices to remain higher in the wake of Obamacare, a consistent lobbying pattern that leads to anything but a free market of supply and demand. What this does lead to is exploitable red tape in the terms and conditions of policies. Obamacare will purportedly rectify this, though all this regulation will inevitably lead to artificial price fixing, with only slightly less complexity in the terminology that sets out in policies. Obamacare simply prevents a free market of competition between insurance companies from ensuing, contributing to a crony capitalist society.





The slippery slope of inefficiency, leading to a gradual socialisation of the healthcare system, seems unavoidable now in the US – it’s only a matter of time. But what would this result in? For starters you can expect more and more cronyism to be adopted. One such example would be cleaning contracts for hospitals. In the UK this is notoriously bad. Contracts are sold to the lowest bidder in a tender offer, over extended periods of several years. The company that wins the contract, often having made the lowest offer, will cut corners in order to make a profit, with disastrous effect. Recently there’s been an outbreak of legionnaires disease in an Edinburgh hospital , linked to a contaminated water supply. To date one person has died, and several were put in intensive care.





Legionnaires aside, in the UK there’s also the outbreak of MRSA that resurfaces from time to time, again strongly associated with lack of hospital hygiene. UK Hospital waiting times are also a serious issue, up to 7699 people waiting over 36 weeks in Wales, where I live in the UK. These statistics are often worse than they’re made out to be, partly because there’s a low, medium, and high priority system when being referred to a hospital. Of course, when the pressure on waiting lists is up, the definition of ‘priority’ is re-evaluated.





Canadian waiting times for socialised healthcare

are also very poor (click for full sized image):





Speaking from personal experience I have very little to say that’s positive about public healthcare. My father suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack two years ago, and though he was blatantly overweight, his doctor basically allowed him to self-diagnose for years as a sufferer of heartburn, playing along with this absurd suggestion, no doubt because it meant one less person on a hospital waiting list. I would regularly say to my father that he was overweight, but others humoured his delusions, including professionals. As an overweight man my father had to take responsibility for not being here today. Nonetheless, in a private healthcare system medical check-ups are far more readily available, since there’s no pressure on quality of service, and doctors can be safe rather than sorry when diagnosing a patient.





My wife also had a tough time when giving birth to our daughter. We were told on the week of Christmas that our daughter had situs inversus, or in other words that the organs in the body are reversed. On New Years Eve it turned out that the nurses doing the ultrasound scan, which doctors do in the US, most likely had the machine aligned incorrectly, therefore mirroring the organs of the body. The moral of the story? Don’t send a nurse to do a doctor’s job!





During labour, my wife was hoping to have a water birth, but this was abandoned when the running water became discoloured (*cough* legionnaires). She went through around ten hours of labour, only to be told that the baby was back-to-back with the mother, which makes it impossible to push the baby out. She then had to have an episiotomy (look it up - it’s not nice).





As a result my wife then spent several days in a dirty ward, where even a second pillow was considered a big ask. My newborn daughter, having contracted jaundice, was struggling to stay awake long enough to feed, while my wife, having never had a child, was simply left to her own devices, unaware that she had to practically force our daughter to stay awake just so she could drink enough milk. All the while the severity of my wife’s stitches made it difficult for her to move. I was only allowed to be around this particular ward at certain times of day, which meant my support for her was limited until she got home a few days later.





It took weeks of intensive feeding routines to get my daughter’s jaundice to diminish, warned by nurses that she would have to go back into hospital if it didn’t get better. It would have helped if the nurses had given my wife the right feeding advice as soon as my daughter was born. But you see, that’s the thing with socialism - no one’s responsible for anything. As Winston Churchill once said:



