I posted too soon

Yesterday's entry re: Deroy Murdock's article on healthcare reform, was from the middle of July. Yesterday's article from Murdock contains more information than could be hoped for insofar as a comparative study of the healthcare system in the US as opposed to socialized medicine. First, in the UK....

1. Breast cancer kills 25 percent of its American victims. In Great Britain, the Vatican of single-payer medicine, breast cancer extinguishes 46 percent of its targets.
2. Prostate cancer is fatal to 19 percent of its American patients. The National Center for Policy Analysis reports that it kills 57 percent of Britons it strikes.
3. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show that the UK’s 2005 heart-attack fatality rate was 19.5 percent higher than America’s. This may correspond to angioplasties, which were only 21.3 percent as common there as here.

The article goes on to make some comparisons to Canada where we find....

1. Canada has one third fewer doctors than the OECD average. “The doctor shortage is a direct result of government rationing, since provinces intervened to restrict class sizes in major Canadian medical schools in the 1990s,” Dr. David Gratzer, a Canadian physician and Manhattan Institute scholar, told the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee on June 24. Some towns address the doctor dearth with lotteries in which citizens compete for rare medical appointments.
2. In 2008, the average Canadian waited 17.3 weeks from the time his general practitioner referred him to a specialist until he actually received treatment,” Pacific Research Institute president Sally Pipes, a Canadian native, wrote in the July 2 Investor’s Business Daily. “That’s 86 percent longer than the wait in 1993, when the (Fraser) Institute first started quantifying the problem.”
3. Such sloth includes a median 9.7-week wait for an MRI exam, 31.7 weeks to see a neurosurgeon, and 36.7 weeks to visit an orthopedic surgeon.

And there are other statistics cited in the article as well. All of this points to a more rational decision to help the small percentage of uninsured in this (US) country. What seems to be alarming people and prompting them to atend town hall meetings for the first time is the breakneck speed in which volumous amounts of legislation is being fast-tracked to socialize medicine and nobody ever informed these voters of the potential downside of passing this turkey until now.