In a presidential election year, with the Democrat candidates promising to pursue universal healthcare (aka socialized medicine), transplant patients need to understand the implications and ramifications of a government run healthcare system.
In spite of its myriad flaws, our current healthcare system provides the best transplant opportunities, the best trained and most highly skilled surgeons, and the best pharmaceutical innovation in the world. In fact, our single biggest transplant issue is a lack of living organ donors, not capacity or quality of care.
In every country that celebrates their universal healthcare system, patients wait longer for fewer transplants, the quality of care suffers, the system becomes increasingly bureaucratic and unresponsive, medical innovation atrophies and more patients die.
Consider the following:
- More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months
- Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren't available.
- For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50%; the European rate is just 35%. Esophageal carcinoma: 12% in the U.S., 6% in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2% here, yet 61.7% in France and down to 44.3% in England — a striking variation.
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Cancer survival rates in Britain are among the lowest in Europe, according to the most comprehensive analysis of the issue yet produced.
- Britain's Labour Party — which originally created the National Health Service — now openly favors privatization.
From the Headlines
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