Sorry OceanGoingGal. I have even more hot air to share:
I am going to use Switzerland as my example. I don't actually consider Switzerland's system to be socialized health care, but then neither do I consider the PPACA to be. They are quite similar. Both systems are only about paying for care. Actual care is provided by private doctors and hospitals (with the exception of the odd county hospital or the VA). Both systems use private insurers. People are required to buy insurance, but there is a subsidy for those with low incomes to make broad participation possible. The big difference is that the PPACA keeps three old systems of coverage: employer group coverage for those whose employers provide it, Medicaid for the very poor, and Medicare for what I used to think of as the elderly but now think of as the upper middle aged. Essentially, the PPACA keeps what we have and adds the Swiss system for those not covered, so I think I am justified in using Switzerland as my example. The Swiss insurance system is described well in an article entitled "Swiss Health Care Thrives Without Public Option," at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/healt ... swiss.html. It notes that there is no rationing of healthcare in Switzerland. The story was written in 2009 before the public option was dropped from the U.S. legislation. I should add, I don't consider stories about the U.K. or Canada to be relevant to the PPACA, so please don't bother to claim that there is rationing in one of these. Those systems are completely different.
I am glad kempo cited the mammogram article as proof that socialized health care's main objective is to save money, not lives. It claims that a government panel decided that mammograms are no longer necessary for women in their forties because too much money is spent on unnecessary tests. This is simply a falsehood. The panel's work, which I will describe, was not based on the cost of care. It was based on clinical considerations: what is best for patients. One of the great things about the internet is that usually you don't have to take people's word for things. You can check out the accuracy of what I have to say at
http://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforc ... psbrca.htm. The panel's recommendations and the reasoning behind them are there in black and white. It still surprises me, somehow, when people just flat out lie about something anyone can look up, but in the healthcare debate, it has been distressingly common to see ideologues and industry shills do this as they twist each scrap of news that comes along into a new way to frighten and mislead the public about the PPACA.
In 2009 an independent panel of experts, called the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, revised its recommendations about breast cancer screening. The Task Force has been around since the 1980s and covered dozens of topics. Doctors rely on panels of experts like this one to sift through research and advise them about current best practices. The members are not federal employees, and the staff work is done by contract with medical schools and similar institutions. For example, most of the work on the breast cancer screening study was done at Oregon Health & Science University. The panel has nothing to do with the PPACA or socialized medicine. The members of the Task Force and the work on this project all go back long before the start of the current administration. Its recommendations come with a disclaimer that they do not represent government policy. The Task Force has no power to tell anyone what to do.
The critical point, though, is that the panel did not conclude that the testing cost too much money to be worthwhile. It considered the low rate of lives saved by universal screening before age 50 compared to factors like the pain of testing, the increase in radiation risk, and most of all, the high rate of false positives. These lead to unnecessary further testing, including biopsies of suspected cancer, and unnecessary anxiety in those told that they might have cancer. The cumulative risk of a false positive in ten years of annual testing has been estimated at 56 percent.
There isn't anything magic about age 40 or any other specific age when screening should begin for any disease. These are legitimate empirical questions. It is reasonable to ask, would 30 be better? or 50? I don't care whether this particular conclusion is right or wrong. My point is that it is completely reasonable for scientific experts to study this, and it shouldn't be tossed around as evidence that "socialized medicine" intends to sacrifice our health to save money.
The Task Force, by the way, didn't say that women age 40 to 49 shouldn't have mammograms. It only said that doctors should not urge every woman to have one. It said, "The decision to start regular, biennial screening mammography before the age of 50 years should be an individual one and take patient context into account, including the patient's values regarding specific benefits and harms." This is the very opposite of telling people what they must and must not do. Moreover, when the recommendation was reported, Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, said that federal government insurance programs would continue to pay for annual mammograms starting at age 40, as before. A year has passed, and they still do. So much for rationing.
In short, the source of the information, Americans for Prosperity, part of the web of so-called Astroturf organizations bankrolled by the Koch brothers and their allies, latched onto a study that happened to come out during the healthcare debate and lied about what it said. It was a well respected clinical study about the advantages and disadvantages of different breast cancer screening protocols, but these people decided to use it as a scare tactic to influence the debate by falsely claiming that it was about rationing.