Disaster in the Making – by Jacob Laksin | FrontPage Magazine

Disaster in the Making – by Jacob Laksin | FrontPage Magazine: "With the Senate’s vote this Saturday to begin debate on health care legislation, the most contentious of the Obama administration’s domestic policy initiatives is back in the national spotlight. And with the Senate bill set to follow in the footsteps of its House predecessor by dramatically increasing the government’s role in health care, David Gratzer’s new pamphlet, “Why Obama’s Government Takeover of Health Care Will Be a Disaster,” the first in a series from Encounter Books, could not be timelier.

As a Canadian, Gratzer, now a physician and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, well understands what he calls the “government temptation.” Since youth, he writes, he was taught to believe that Canada’s government-run system was the envy of the world. He learned differently when he attended medical school. Where the Canadian system’s supporters saw success, Gratzer saw rationed care and long waits for important medical procedures.

Not much has changed. In 2006, for instance, Ontario woman Sylvia de Vries had to travel to the United States to have a 40-pound tumor removed by an American surgeon. Although she was within weeks of dying, she was still on a waiting list to see a specialist in Canada. Government-run health care, it turns out, doesn’t live up to its billing.

All the more incongruous, then, that the Obama administration, abetted by Congressional Democrats, has taken health care systems in which government plays a large role as the model for its reforms. Gratzer makes a compelling case that this model is fundamentally flawed. Not only is it wrong in its core assumption that an expanded role for the federal government will improve health care, he writes, but the actual experience of the countries that the administration hopes to emulate argues against any attempt to follow their example."