Eye surgeon and senatorial candidate Rand Paul warns that under ObamaCare, Americans could be forced to wait a year and a half merely to see a doctor due to Canadian-style rationing of health care being imposed.
As an eye surgeon with his own private practice, Paul warned that senior citizens could be forced to endure debilitating conditions as a result of health care rationing under the system being readied for passage, and be forced to wait as long as 18 months just to see a doctor as happens in Canada and Britain.
"There are 1 million people waiting for any kind of elective surgery in Canada at any one time," he told Newsmax.TV's Ashley Martella.
"Canada's so bad that they have a lottery, there are some little towns that have one family doctor, they do a lottery and you can sometimes wait a year and a half to see the doctor," said Paul. "I have friends who are eye surgeons in Canada, they've finished their surgery by September, they're allotment, they're given a number of surgeries they can do, when they're finished in September some of them come to the U.S. and do elective cosmetic eye surgery in the U.S. because they're not allowed to operate any more in Canada."
In his article, There's No Such Thing as Free Health Care, Journalist John Stossel highlights how even people with life-threatening conditions are told to wait. A woman with a blocked artery that prevented her from digesting food was told by doctors in British Columbia that she had only weeks to live, but that the surgery was still "elective."
"The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live," said the woman, who traveled to the United States to receive treatment.
It's true that America's partly profit-driven, partly bureaucratic system is expensive, and sometimes wasteful, but the pursuit of profit reduces waste and costs and gives the world the improvements in medicine that ease pain and save lives.
"[America] is the country of medical innovation. This is where people come when they need treatment," Dr. Gratzer says.
"Literally we're surrounded by medical miracles. Death by cardiovascular disease has dropped by two-thirds in the last 50 years. You've got to pay a price for that type of advancement."
Canada and England don't pay the price because they freeload off American innovation. If America adopted their systems, we could worry less about paying for health care, but we'd get 2009-level care--forever. Government monopolies don't innovate. Profit seekers do.
On this note, Paul stressed that problems in health care were created by too much government interference, and that the only way to fix the system was to increase competition, not restrict it.
The Republican candidate for Senate highlighted FEMA's botched efforts to distribute water bottles at the superdome after Hurricane Katrina as an example of the failings of government-run health care.
"They can't even distribute water, there's no way they can distribute health care," said Paul.
The Senatorial candidate also said that with 46 million new people on government assistance, the new system could bankrupt medicare and lead to rationing for everyone. Doctors who have already tolerated shrinking wages for the last fifteen years would also leave the U.S. warned Paul, creating a vacuum.
"It's intellectually dishonest for Democrats to say it's going to cost $874 billion, but it's really not going to add anything to the deficit. I don't think the American public believes that," added Paul.
Paul pointed out that the longer the debate raged about health care, the more people opposed the government's proposals, emphasizing why the Obama administration is hell-bent on ramming through the legislation later this week on Christmas Eve.
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