HEALTH: Look in the mirror, America
As a young man I lived and worked in Norway and found their health-care system very intriguing. The primary factor that made their system work is that Norwegians consume very little alcohol, almost no one smokes, hamburger is so lean that it sticks to the frying pan tasting very much like leather, and exercise is almost a religion.
Because of their culture, they live long, healthy lives using very little health care, so their government-run health-care system works pretty well. But such a system here would cost a fortune because we eat like pigs, drink like fish, smoke like chimneys and exercise like a potato chip. Changing our cultural habits, physical activity to food consumption, would go a long way to making any health-care system better, our current one included.
When Norway switched to socialized medicine after World War II it did not have enough doctors, nurses and medical facilities to meet the needs of their citizenry, so they ended up with long waiting lists during the 15 years that it took to staff their health-care system. During this period the chronically ill and elderly suffered terribly, often dying before medical care was available. Because it was just after the war Norwegians simply endured it. Today it is doubtful that they would be any more tolerant of such a situation than we would be.
As well as their system now functions, it would immediately collapse if they tried to provide medical care to a similar percentage of foreigners as we have in our country. This is why Norway carefully monitors who can come into their country. No nation on the planet can offer such expensive social services to anyone and everyone who just happens to cross their borders uninvited.
In the final analysis, in addition to the huge increase in costs and long waiting lists, there is one irreconcilable problem with government-run health care: The idea of a political crony deciding whether or not someone is worthy of receiving scarce medical resources. Somehow I feel that those being disqualified will always be a member of a demographic, representative of the opposing political persuasion from those in power; Obama did sign legislation to take over a half trillion dollars out of Medicare for seniors, not Medicaid for the poor. Rather than physicians and patients deciding, do we really want such decisions to be made for entire groups along political lines?
STEVE NOVAK
Coeur d’Alene