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  • Media Fail Marvelously in Mocking Rand Paul for Surgery in Canada, “Land Of Universal Health Care”

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Senator Rand Paul is no stranger to public criticism. As one of the few principled members of Congress and an heir to his father’s legacy of anti-authoritarianism, he has grown accustomed to falling under public scrutiny for standing up for his beliefs. But this week he isn’t being condemned for his foreign policy views or his stance on criminal justice reform. Instead, the progressives have chastised the senator from Kentucky for going outside of the United States for medical treatment.

    When Paul was attacked by his neighbor while doing yard work in 2017, he was left with six broken ribs, a bruised lung, and a hernia, which has since been left unresolved. Needing surgery and being well-versed in the atrocity that is our overpriced and overregulated American health care system, Paul decided to join the 150,000 to 320,000 Americans who travel abroad each year in search of lower costs and high-quality health care. But since the medical facility in question happens to be in Canada, Paul has suddenly found himself a target of those accusing him of utilizing the same socialist system he so fervently decries.

    It wasn’t long after Senator Paul announced his intention to travel to Canada for surgery that the accusations began to make their rounds on social media. Democratic Coalition tweeted, “Oh, the irony: Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, one of the fiercest political critics of socialized medicine, will travel to Canada later this month to get hernia surgery.” Likewise, Talking Points Memo also took a jab at Paul when it tweeted, “Rand Paul, enemy of socialized medicine, will go to Canada for surgery.”

    The media also had a field day attacking Senator Paul. Deceiving headlines intended to mislead the public read, “Rand Paul Heading To Canada, Land Of Universal Health Care, For Surgery” and “Sen. Rand Paul Is Having Surgery in Canada, Where Healthcare Is Publicly Funded.” But there is just one major problem with these tweets and headlines: They inaccurately assert that because the senator is traveling to Canada for surgery, he must be utilizing the country’s infamous socialized medical program. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    Had any of these overzealous Twitter users bothered to do some research, they would have quickly discovered that contrary to their claims, Senator Paul was not being a hypocrite at all. In fact, staying true to his beliefs, the senator plans to go abroad next week to make use of a top-notch private medical facility that offers competitive rates to patients.

    The Shouldice Hernia Hospital is a private facility in Thornhill, Ontario, that prides itself on being “the global leader in non-mesh hernia repair.” It also offers competitive pricing for those paying out of pocket, which is a huge plus for the uninsured. And since it is private, the facility also has more control over its pricing structure, giving it more autonomy to work with health care consumers.

    Paul, who has likened socialized medicine to slavery and who himself is an ophthalmologist, has always been an advocate for private solutions to our health care woes. And while many would like to condemn this decision to go to Canada as hypocrisy, it is actually right on brand for the senator.

    Kelsey Cooper, a spokesperson for Paul, defended his decision and wrote in an email to the Courier Journal, which broke the story,

    This is more fake news on a story that has been terribly reported from day one—this is a private, world-renowned hospital separate from any system and people come from around the world to pay cash for their services.

    While the media and talking heads continue to waste their breath gossiping about Paul’s personal medical decisions, the senator is demonstrating what a truly free market health care system could look like.

    In an interview with Wave 3 News in Washington, DC, Paul commented on his decision, saying:

    I looked for a place that did primarily that type of surgery. A place that actually accepts Americans who pay cash. It’s a private hospital. The funny thing is, people had an agenda that wanted to attack me said, “Oh, you’re going to choose socialized medicine.” I’m actually choosing capitalistic medicine because they only take cash from foreigners.

    He continued:

    We have some centers like this. Oklahoma has a center like this but doesn’t specialize in the surgery I need. I chose (Shouldice) because they are good at it and actually the price is right.

    Once it was made widely known that Paul would not be partaking in Canada’s socialized medicine, the critics switched to condemning the senator for going outside of the US for treatment, as if doing so was somehow anti-American in nature. And while many are using this instance as a means of shaming Rand Paul, his actions offer a great teaching moment for the country.

    It’s a mistake to view health care as some sort of phenomenon unrelated and immune to the market process. Health care is a commodity just like any other consumer good. And when choice in medical treatment is limited, health care consumers suffer greatly.

    Keeping health care options confined only to one’s own country of origin is an outdated concept. Medical tourism is a booming industry that gives patients more control over their health care by giving them the opportunity to go wherever the best possible care is available at the lowest costs. This has resulted in a boom for countries like India and Costo Rica.

    As I have previously written:

    For anyone unfamiliar with the term, medical tourism is when someone chooses to travel outside their country of origin, usually to less-developed countries, in search of affordable, quality medical care. And it also happens to be one of the fastest growing global industries. In 2016, this burgeoning sector was valued at $100 billion and is expected to experience 25 percent year-by-year growth by the year 2025. And in an era of soaring medical costs, it is saving health care consumers thousands of dollars and providing them with the care they so desperately need.

    The thought of traveling abroad for health care might scare a fair number of Americans. After all, we tend to think our own medical system as more advanced than others. But the truth is that excessive government regulation has actually stifled medical innovation and caused the cost of treatment to skyrocket. And while American politicians argue about how to best fix this problem, other countries have been innovating and relaxing regulations in order to offer competitive care to medical tourists.

    In India, for example:

    [T]he critically acclaimed Narayana Hrudayalaya heart hospital offers cardiac surgeries from $5,000- $7,000. The same surgery in the US would cost a patient upwards of $50,000. And as far as other medical procedures are concerned, in Costa Rica, a knee replacement surgery can cost a patient around $23,000. However, the same surgery, obtained in the US can cost anywhere from $35,000-$60,000.

    The dramatically lower costs have encouraged some US employers to encourage their employees to seek treatment outside the country rather than use their insurance policies to see an American doctor. For employees who need knee replacement surgery, Hickory Springs Manufacturing began offering a choice: pay $3,000 dollars out of pocket and have the procedure performed in the United States, or opt to take an all-expenses-paid vacation to Costa Rica for the surgery instead. And on top of the free trip, you will also receive a $2,500 bonus check. Since switching to this model, the company has saved more than $10 million on health care costs.

    The free market is not constrained to the political borders of one’s own country. And in order to have a robust health care market full of choice, consumers need to be able to go wherever the best care is available. Senator Rand Paul’s decision to go to Canada for surgery should not be condemned; rather, it should inspire the rest of the country to take a look at all the medical options available to us.

    Source: Media Fail Marvelously in Mocking Rand Paul for Surgery in Canada, “Land Of Universal Health Care” – Foundation for Economic Education




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  • Socialized Medicine Is “Free” But Leads To Really, Really Long Wait Times

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Last November, CTV News in Canada ran this incredible story about growing wait times for medical care in Canada due to its socialized medical system: “‘It’s insane’: Ont. patient told she’d have to wait 4.5 years to see a neurologist.” Here’s a slice:

    An Ontario doctor says health-care wait times have reached “insane” lengths in the province, as one of her patients faces a 4.5-year wait to see a neurologist. When Dr. Joy Hataley, a family practice anesthetist in Kingston, Ontario, recently tried to send a patient to a neurologist at the Kingston General Hospital, she received a letter from the specialist’s office telling her that the current wait time for new patient referrals is 4.5 years. The letter said that, if the delay is “unacceptable” to Dr. Hataley, she should instead refer the patient to a neurologist in Ottawa or Toronto.

    Dr. Joy Hataley said she was shocked when she received this letter from a neurologist’s office. Dr. Hataley, who has been outspoken about wait times and other issues plaguing Ontario’s health care system, said the wait time “shocked” her. She wanted to shock others as well, so she tweeted a photo of the letter above and tagged Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins and Kingston-area MPP Sophie Kiwala. Dr. Hataley said she’s used to hearing back from specialists who are unable to see her patients for months, and even up to 2.5 years.  But a 4.5-year wait is “insane,” she told CTVNews.ca in a telephone interview. “This is an alarm bell,” she said. “What it is to me is a red flag to the system.”

    “When Dr. Hataley first pulled up the response from the referral, both of us were just seeing the wait time first hand, I was just in disbelief and shocked,” Wooldridge, a 40-year-old developmental service worker, told CTVNews.ca in an email. “The more I thought about it after leaving her office I was just annoyed and felt that this is ridiculous and not in any way okay.” Wooldridge said she will continue to live with chronic pain and be cared for by Dr. Hataley until she can see a neurologist. She said she shouldn’t have to travel outside of Kingston to see a specialist.

    “I don’t honestly feel that I should have to go to another city when we have a neurologist 4.5 minutes up the road and I’m a resident of the city in which my taxes help go towards,” she wrote. “I don’t think it’s right or fair to drive to another city…it’s financially not easy for me to just pick up and go, as much as I would like to.”

    (h/t Peter Krieger)

    Related: This is from the executive summary of Canada’s Fraser Institute’s most recent annual report “Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2017 Report” (emphasis added):

    Waiting for treatment has become a defining characteristic of Canadian health care. In order to document the lengthy queues for visits to specialists and for diagnostic and surgical procedures in the country, the Fraser Institute has—for over two decades—surveyed specialist physicians across 12 specialties and 10 provinces. This edition of Waiting Your Turn indicates that, overall, waiting times for medically necessary treatment have increased since last year. Specialist physicians surveyed report a median waiting time of 21.2 weeks between referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment—longer than the wait of 20.0 weeks reported in 2016. This year’s wait time—the longest ever recorded in this survey’s history—is 128% longer than in 1993, when it was just 9.3 weeks (see graphic above).

    In the video below, Ronald Reagan tells the joke about waiting ten years to get a new car in the Soviet Union. Here’s my variation of that joke for the Canadian medical system.

    A patient in Canada is told by a hospital administrator that there will be a five-year wait for an appointment with a neurologist. The patient asks, “Will that be in the morning or the afternoon.” The hospital administrator asks, “What difference does that make, it’s not until five years from today.” The patient says, “Well, I have my next dental appointment on that day in the morning.”

    Reprinted from the American Enterprise Institute.


    Mark J. Perry

    Mark J. Perry is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.




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  • Canada’s Prime Minister Only Pretends to Support Free Trade

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

     

    The lack of free trade hurts poor people the most. Therefore, we should welcome Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s comments in support of free trade, right? Well, not so fast.

    During Trudeau’s visit to China in December, the Canadian Press published an article titled, “World at ‘pivot point,’ needs to embrace free trade: Trudeau”:

    The world is at a “pivot point” and will fail unless countries embrace free trade and elevate their citizens who have been left behind by globalization, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Wednesday.

    …Trudeau came to the Fortune Global Forum, a Davos-style gathering of the world’s business elite, to sell Canada as a good place for foreign investment, but he went off script and delivered a stern warning about the dangers of allowing protectionism and inequality to flourish.

    “We are at a pivot point in the world right now, where we decide whether we work together in an open and confident way and succeed or whether we all falter separately and isolated,” he said.

    “As that anxiety spreads, people start to turn inwards. They start to close off. They start to get fearful,” he added. “If that continues to happen, make no mistake about it, we will all lose.”

    Trudeau didn’t mention the Donald Trump administration in Washington, but he’s already spoken out in China on the need to save the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] from demise…

    Trudeau expressed concern about people starting “to turn inwards” and “close off” because “we will all lose.” He is referring to protectionism, and I suspect his comments are largely directed toward the United States. Much has been written about the NAFTA negotiations and Donald Trump’s desire for more protectionist tariffs.

    Trudeau’s position seems to be that free trade is economically beneficial and protectionism is economically harmful. I agree, but if we pay close attention, we see that the Prime Minister is merely paying lip service to free trade.

    Defining Free Trade

    Free trade is a simple concept which exploits the division of labor to the fullest possible extent. Two parties want to trade with each other. They want to exchange goods for goods, or goods for money, or labor for money. If no one interferes with this voluntary exchange between the two parties, then free trade exists. If a third party — the government — intervenes and uses force to prohibit the exchange or to impose conditions on the exchange, then free trade does not exist. In today’s world, free trade does not exist.

    Many countries negotiate “free trade agreements,” but this is a misnomer. The essence of these “agreements” is to serve corporate interests through the establishment of rules that reduce competition. These are lengthy, complex documents that contemplate “managed trade,” not “free trade.” The largest beneficiaries are multinational corporations, and the biggest losers are consumers who pay higher prices. The division of labor is suppressed, and political power becomes more centralized.

    Bill Curry, writing for the Globe and Mail before the US dropped out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), referred to the TPP as an agreement which “would create a free-trade zone among 12 nations around the Pacific, making it the world’s largest.” However, further along in the article, we read this: “TPP countries get duty-free access to 3.25 percent of Canada’s dairy market and 2.1 percent of its poultry market.”

    So, more than 95 percent of Canada’s dairy and poultry markets remain unfree. I am not sure why Curry defines this as free trade, but that is how the TPP is commonly described.

    Similarly, Canada’s dairy and poultry markets are highly protected under NAFTA, which Trudeau wants to “save from demise.” The Prime Minister has a strange conception of free trade.

    Protectionism

    If a firm is unable to sell its products at a price that consumers are willing to pay, and which allows the firm to be profitable, then the firm is wasting resources — human labor and raw materials. I have written about this here. In the realm of free trade, lower-priced imports send a market signal to inefficient domestic producers. The signal says, “You must improve efficiency, lower your costs etc., or you will go out of business,” thereby conserving resources for someone else who can utilize them more efficiently.

    However, producers hate these market signals, and they lobby the government for tariff protection. This penalizes consumers whose choices are limited to buying the expensive domestic product, or the formerly cheap import which is now expensive because of the tariff.

    The government claims it must approve tariff requests from these inefficient producers in order to “save” domestic jobs while simultaneously avoiding discussion about the economic cost of this policy. Studies often reveal this cost to be exorbitant when the “additional markup” all consumers are forced to pay in a particular year is divided by the total number of workers whose jobs have been saved. The cost per job saved is often considerably higher than the worker’s annual salary.

    For example, according to calculations by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the total cost to American consumers from higher prices resulting from safeguard tariffs on Chinese tires in 2011 was at least $900,000 for each job “saved,” where the annual average salary for a tire builder was $40,070. Studies in other industries have also revealed an exorbitant cost for each job saved.  

    Furthermore, as the Peterson Institute tells us, tariffs have a ripple effect elsewhere in the economy:

    The additional money that US consumers spent on tires reduced their spending on other retail goods, indirectly lowering employment in the retail industry. On balance, it seems likely that tire protectionism cost the US economy around 2,531 jobs, when losses in the retail sector are offset against gains in tire manufacturing. Adding further to the loss column, China retaliated by imposing antidumping duties on US exports of chicken parts, costing that industry around $1 billion in sales.

    NAFTA contains numerous protectionist measures favoring special interest groups at the expense of the general public. Prime Minister Trudeau knows this, and he wants to “save NAFTA from demise.” All his talk about the evils of protectionism is nothing more than political rhetoric.

    Get Government Out of the Way

    Governments do not trade with each other — individuals do. If a government really wants to facilitate free trade, a legal document that runs hundreds, or even thousands of pages, is unnecessary. A one-page document with two sentences would suffice: “People are allowed to trade freely. The government’s role will be limited to enforcing the terms of the contract which the private parties themselves have voluntarily negotiated.”

    I have seen no evidence that Prime Minister Trudeau is sincere about “embracing free trade.” He appears to be a typical politician, subservient to special interest groups while attempting to bamboozle the public with an illusion of free trade.


    Lee Friday

    Following a 23-year career in the Canadian financial industry, Lee Friday has spent many years studying economics, politics, and social issues. He operates a news site at www.LondonNews1.com

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.




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