Joe Paduda from Managed Care Matters caught my eye with his Top 10 Reasons Universal Health Care is Bad. The thing is that he listed the ten reasons without commentary, although some were willing to go at it over whether these were valid or invalid reasons in his comments.
Friday he followed up with a post examinig Item #1 on his list: "Universal Healthcare Will Lead to Rationing".
I hope he follows up every single item from the Top 10 list in this fashion!
Here's some interesting data to get you hot and bothered to read the whole post:
Here's what a bit of specific data show (excerpted from the Commonwealth Fund report).
- The percentage of U.S. patients who waited six days or more for a doctor appointment when sick was not significantly different from the rate in Canada (23% v. 36%), the worst-performing country
- Only 47 percent of U.S. patients were able to see a doctor on the same or next day when sick, versus 61 percent to 81 percent of patients in the four better-performing nations
- U.S. patients were less likely than patients in Canada (12% v. 24%) but more likely than patients in Germany (4%) to wait four hours or more to be seen in the emergency department
- U.S. patients were less likely than patients in four countries (except Germany) to wait four weeks or longer to see a specialist (23% v. 40%–60%) or to wait four months or longer for elective surgery (8% v. 19%–41%) (Schoen et al. 2005)
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