I think it’s written somewhere that one of the signs of the Apocalypse is government heavy Western Europeans warning America about the dangers of government-run/nationalized/socialist health care and against adopting said government-run/nationalized/socialist health. Certainly, the creation of such an abomination would live up to one of Barack Obama’s campaign promises: Transforming America.
But most Americans are saying, “no thanks,” to that type of change because, quite frankly, they rightly see no hope in it. Eline (pronounced “a-lane-a”) van den Broek of Holland and the European Independent Institute, in this video for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, explains in a crystal clear, by the numbers approach, why such a system is doomed to fail — and has failed wherever it has been tried.
Warning from Europe: Don’t do it like us, America!
Nice try FF. This lady is preaching to your choir because she doesn’t have a choir to preach to in Europe. While in the Foreign Service I lived in the U.K. for 5 years and Germany for 2 and I lived among the populace. I got to know my neighbors in both countries and they were all very satisfied with their respective health care systems. I met my wife in the U.K. and she was a full participant in their NHS. About a year after we got married there she became very ill and had to be hospitalized for a week. Some of it was in ICU. So, we’ve had first hand experience with their care and it was excellent. One thing was conspicuously absent there though – the insurance bureaucracy that eats up around 20% of our health care costs! That in itself was refreshing! Oh, let me add that when my wife first became ill we had a Doctor house call. And the U.K. system is one of the worst systems over in Western Europe! The reality is your followers would rather have a HC system that answers to Wall Street shareholders than a HC system that answers to a government by the people. How many of your followers have even experienced European HC!
Oh, and by the way, I wish I had saved the many snide conservative commentaries from our economic “happy times” whose authors gloated about US economic prosperity. Citing our superior economic model these conservative experts derided the inferior “Euro-socialist”, (government heavy as you put it) economies that were choked by government regulations. Meanwhile Fox News contributors mocked the introduction of a common European currency (the Euro) as if it was play money. Now, with US unemployment higher than that of many of those “Euro-socialist” states, a Dollar much weaker than the Euro and a US economy that struggles to stay afloat, those same economic gurus would have us believe the US meltdown was caused in part by excessive government regulation! Truly amazing.