Government Health Care is Not Actual Health Care

Government Health Care is Not Actual Health Care

Government Health Care is Not Actual Health Care

Access to health care is not what the government thinks it means. It means more government and less actual health care. In the era of a global pandemic, it isn’t pretty.

President Biden put out another doozy of a press release today when he announced the extension of the health insurance enrollment period. In a declaration much like a king would make, he declared “health care is right, not a privilege” and “No one should have to lay awake at night staring at the ceiling wondering what they are going to do to get the care they need.” We won’t split the very important hair that healthcare is not listed in the Bill of Rights or its Amendments. As the king’s proclamation continues, the lines between actual healthcare and COVID blur significantly.

Fine. The deadline to sign up for Obamacare has been extended. Plan accordingly.

But what healthcare doth the king speak of? Getting needed care? Really?

Word amongst the peasants says that isn’t happening. At all. Pandemic lockdowns requiring health care providers to cancel preventative and elective procedures and surgeries is resulting in tragic and deadly consequences.

Preventative care such as mammograms, non-COVID vaccines, colonoscopies, and PAP smears plummeted in 2020.

“…preventative care procedures generally have not returned to pre-pandemic levels, said Daniel Kurowski, senior researcher at HCCI (Health Care Cost Institute)”.

How does one get access to the healthcare they need if the same government espousing access to healthcare won’t allow access to the healthcare one needs? Great question.

Scientists–you know, the ones Kamala said she trusts—are projecting sobering outcomes after almost a year of deferred access to healthcare other than COVID related health care.

“Due to delayed diagnosis and care issues caused by COVID-19…the model suggests almost 10,000 excess deaths from both types of cancer over the next decade, or about a 1% increase…This analysis is conservative…as it does not consider other cancer types, it does not account for the additional nonlethal morbidity from upstaging, and it assumes a moderate disruption in care that completely resolves after 6 months. It also does not account for regional variations in the response to the pandemic, and these effects may be less severe in parts of the country with shorter or less severe lockdowns.”

A recent study breaks down the impact of increased time-to-treatment initiation (TTI), the interval between diagnosis and therapy, delays.

“We found that all benefitted to some degree from a short interval between diagnosis and therapy.”

Kind of hard to do when places those procedures are performed continue to be closed—because COVID. Yes, even now—eleven months later after hearing the term “flattening the curve”—medical facilities are closed to elective and non-essential procedures. As recently as January, Texas health officials closed facilities. Cleveland closed shop in November. Access to health care? How does that work when health care is shuttered?

Other areas of medicine are impacted. Vision care. Certainly not as deadly as foregoing cancer screenings, but certainly tragic.

A USA Today opinion piece from last summer touts the risks to public health when patients can’t access health care either by closed doors or fear.

“…some patients are fearful of the risk of COVID-19 associated with visiting hospitals and clinics.”

Amongst Team Victory Girls, we have our own stories amongst family and friends where delayed or sub-par preventative care had undesired outcomes with sad consequence, and yet preventable.

Access to health care, Mr. President, is not achieved by simply extending a deadline for government run health care. Far from it.

King Biden is not finished yet, today’s press release goes on to say he’s pushing Congress to pass the American Rescue Plan.

“…which will ramp up testing, tracing, and our national vaccination program to get shots into as many arms as possible as quickly as we can. The American Rescue Plan will also take big steps to lower health costs and expand access to care for all Americans, including those who have lost their jobs. It will increase federal subsidies and decrease premiums in order to ensure that no one pays more than 8.5 percent of their income to purchase meaningful and comprehensive health coverage.”

Ah yes, don’t let a good crisis go to waste—use it to expand an already broken health care system. Expanding government health care does not mean access to health care, as we’ve tragically found out. Take a quick look around family. Anyone who has deferred a preventative procedure, please pick up the phone and get on the appointment books. Don’t let the current crisis become a tragedy that hits too close to home.

Feature Image credit: wp paarz via Flickr; CC BY-SA 2.0 license; image cropped

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6 Comments
  • Maureen Matthew says:

    Welcome to health care in Canada – our supposed ‘free’ system allows you to wait and wait and wait, And the free aspect is questionable since it is only free if you are in the hospital for a procedure. Any expenses outside of the hospital cost – drugs, therapy, equipment etc. Sure you can deduct some of it off your income taxes, but the out of pocket is still huge. Unless you are a public employee with a bitching hot benefit plan.

    And you only get into the hospital for a procedure if your primary care doctor can connect you with a specialists. However getting an appointment with a specialist is not really worth much – you can see a specialist but if he/she has no operating time allocated he puts you on ‘the wait list’ and sometimes not even that because the bureaucrats have determined that the wait list is too long (optics you know) so they halt getting put on the wait list so it appears that it not getting longer – all a big game.

    And you know what is missing – family doctors!! because under our single payer (government) system family doctors make almost no money unless they book a patient in every 5 minutes. I have an excellent one, but it still takes me over 1 month to get an appointment with her. My sister doesn’t have a family doctor, but goes to a clinic and it is a crap shoot which doctor she gets – she spends most of her time explaining her health issues because the doctor has never seen her. Consequently the clinic doctors missed that she was rapidly losing red blood cells which explained her rapid heart rate and inability to walk more than 20 feet without losing her breath. Which she brought to their attention – they recommended that she lose 30 pounds. Finally someone caught it on a simple blood test and directed her to the ER – where they were stunned that she was still upright (her red blood count was in the low 50s, for a woman her age it should have been 120-130; they start blood transfusions on people if their count is in the 80s). In the hospital for FIVE days and has to go for iron infusions every couple of months. I watch her very carefully because clearly the health system could care less – she is approaching 70 and is becoming one of the cases that cost the system money. At some point, she will get a DNR order.

  • Scott says:

    The only thing the government has ever done in a mostly successful fashion has been the military.. (and the new SecDef is doing what he can to change that)…
    More government control is NEVER the answer!

  • teejay says:

    Social security and medicare work well

  • GWB says:

    in order to ensure that no one pays more than 8.5 percent of their income
    Impossible, since I’m already paying over 8.5% of my income in federal taxes.

  • Micha Elyi says:

    The Obammunists promised a gullible, something-for-nothing seeking voting public health care plan “coverage” not health care. Really. Go back and re-read the 2008 to 2010 speeches of BO and his stinky minions.

    Think about it. No one really wants “coverage”. What we want is to be able to see a physician.

    In Canada, the public has “coverage” yet ill people must wait and wait to see a physician.
    Canuck care and Obamacare are both bait and switch schemes, illegal in the USA if a non-governmental purveyor of goods attempted such a scheme.

    —-
    Greed is the desire for the unearned. Dads, read The Story of the Little Red Hen to your small children. Read Pinocchio to your children when they’re a little older and pay particular attention to what happened when Pinocchio ran off to the Land of All Play and No Work. Discuss each story’s moral(s) in an age appropriate way with your children.

  • Anna A says:

    I find it interesting about mammograms. I’m in Cleveland, but not the clinic, and my medical group is pushing me to get on. I don’t intend to, because they are unable to get a good one, due to the way I am built.

    I keep saying “No” and they keep pushing in various ways.

    But what I want is a Covid 19 vaccine, and that is impossible.

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