Ten More Questions for Town Hall Meetings
Lawyers say: when you have the facts, argue the facts; when you have the law, argue the law; when you have neither, throw food. On health care, they’re throwing food. By calling us “misinformed,” “angry,” “unruly,” and my personal favorite, “a mob,” Democrats are trying to change the subject. Don’t let them. Continue to focus on their failed ideas and their misery-making health care legislation. Here are more questions to ask your legislators at town hall meetings.
1. Free markets work because of the thinking, research and decisions of thousands of your fellow citizens. You said famously, or infamously, “I will vote adamantly against the interests of my district if I actually think what I am doing is going to be helpful.” Are you saying your judgment is superior to the individual and collective wisdom of your district?
2. The House health care bill creates a “Health Choices Commissioner” who will decide what private insurance companies must cover and what services they must offer. The commissioner will have the power to audit and fine anyone, employer or insurer. The audit target will be forced to pay for the cost of the audit. There is no trial or appeal. How will this encourage competition between private insurers and get costs down?
3. A survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 89 percent of Americans are satisfied with the health care they receive. Seventy percent of the uninsured report being satisfied or very satisfied with their health care. Given these numbers, why would you support such a radical overhaul of American health care?
4. In 1948, the UK began single-payer health care. The sytem’s founder, Aneurin Beven, said, “We now have the moral leadership of the world.” The BBC reports that the 2009 wait time for hip replacement is 11 months, cataract surgery is 8 months, knee replacement is 12 months, slipped disks and hernia surgery are 5 months. Since you favor single-payer, do you consider these waits for care to be “moral?”
5. Most American doctors say CT and MRI scans are the most important technical leap in patient care. The US has 34 CT scanners per million Americans; Canada has only 12 and Britain has 8. The US has 27 MRI machines per million people, compared to only 8 in Canada and Britain. Why should we accept the substandard level of care offered in counties with government-run heath care?
6. Canada has a single-payer health care system. The Vancouver Sun reported that 6,250 surgeries will be cancelled in Vancouver to close a budget shortfall of 200 million dollars. If this is how a single-payer system operates in a country of 33 million people, wouldn’t it be worse in a country of 300 million? Why would you support such a system here?
7. The UK has a population of about 59 million. Their health care bureaucracy, the National Health Service, employs 1.5 million Britons. In our country, with a population of 300 million, that works out to 7.5 million new Federal employees. Given our current enormous budget deficits, how can you justify a huge increase in the size of the Federal government?
8. Medical malpractice suits drive up the cost of health care. One study (Towers Perrin 2001) found that the tort liability system costs each US citizen $721 per year. The health care “reform” bills do nothing to reduce this cost. Why are you not insisting that this be addressed?
9. The top 5 US hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other developed country. In the past 34 years, Americans have won 29 Nobel prizes for medicine. Are you concerned in the least that if America adopts a single-payer system, we will lose our technological edge in health care, costing American lives?
10. The stimulus bill, which you voted for, created the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. This is modeled after Britain’s National Institute of Clinical Effectiveness, or NICE. In 2006 NICE denied the use of a drug to prevent macular degeneration until patients went blind in one eye. Why should we think this will never happen here?
Democrats have been beaten up, but they are not giving up their dream of government-controlled health care. They will roll out a new marketing strategy and 150 million dollars of advertising to back it up. Please consider giving to these organizations running health care ads to counter the Democrat ad blitz:
www.joinpatients.com
www.conservativesforpatientsrights.org
