Apparently Bernie Sanders, socialist Senator and POTUS wannabe, had a heart attack on the campaign trail but survived after some pretty nifty (and quick) medical care — after which the Commie asshole had the nerve to bellow: “Medicare For All!” (his campaign slogan).
As Dan Greenfield has pointed out:
While Bernie’s timetable of getting an angioplasty within a day might not sound that impressive to Americans, in the British NHS system, the median time from assessment to treatment is 55.3 days. Mean times for treatment have been cited as being 80 days. The maximum NHS waiting time is supposed to be 18 weeks and almost 16% of patients in the UK have to wait more than 3 months for an angioplasty.
Canada’s socialist system has angioplasty waiting times of around 11 weeks. And that’s after you get an appointment to see a specialist.
…
Bernie waited a day in Vegas to get his angioplasty. In Norway, he would have waited 39 days.
In Finland, which Bernie has also cited as an inspiration for his socialist program, he would have waited 22 days. In Sweden, another favorite of American socialists, Bernie would have waited 42 days.
Greenfield also points out (and I paraphrase) that as President Sanders, the man who would have implemented socialized medical care, Our Bernie wouldn’t ever be subject to the same kinds of waiting periods imposed on others: oh no. He’d have been whipped into Bethesda Naval Hospital within the hour, and had an angioplasty a couple hours later.
Which is always the way with Communists: the ordinary people suffer while the nomenklatura get only the best. And under socialism, ordinary individuals’ lives are irrelevant as long as the principle is upheld.
Well, I wish the evil old bastard had croaked, just on principle.
Sorry Kim, but you’re mistaken on this one. You’re letting the perfect get in the way of the good enough. Under universal healthcare systems like the NHS time until treatment is determined by need. The key point is that patients are triaged: someone who can wait will be treated after someone who cannot wait. I’m speaking from experience here, both personal and professional. And those who have to wait are given palliative care in the interim. Yes it can suck, but there are only so many doctors and so many nurses and so many operating theatres. The UK could spend its entire GDP on the NHS and yet more could be done. It’s far from perfect, but it’s more than good enough. The UK gets better results than the US for a little over half the expenditure. I suggest you speak to Mr Free Market and The Englishman. At the age of 52, I pay approx £1500 a year in taxes for the NHS.
Oh, and in the UK you can have private health insurance as well.
Quentin, do you have your kitchen knives all boxed up for turn-in yet?
Which rather begs the question: why have private health insurance at all, if the NHS works so well?
I can’t get this to post correctly. I’ll try again with a real PC instead of this tablet.
How come the Marxist cockbreath didn’t fly to Cuba where, he and his fellow travelers say, the hospitals and health system are marvelous?
Just because he’s a Socialist doesn’t mean he’s stupid, that’s why.
being a socialist at his age means he’s stupid and/or evil.
I’m afraid I don’t buy that. Here in the US, ANYONE who has a heart attack gets treatment immediately. I personally know multiple people who had stents put in before the sun went down on the day of their very first heart attack. There’s no triage, no palliative care, no waiting because you CAN for life-saving care.
I find the use of the term triage interesting, because it’s a concept used when the need for medical care far surpasses the resources available, such as in a mass casualty event like an earthquake. Some people you can’t save so you don’t waste resources on them, some can wait a while, and some we CAN save but only if we get started ASAP. There’s no excuse for a modern nation with modern medicine to be triaging patients on a regular basis. Triage should be the exception, not the rule, otherwise the backlog just grows or the people waiting for treatment die.
My comment should have been under Quentin’s comment above.
> I’m afraid I don’t buy that. Here in the US, ANYONE who has a heart attack gets treatment immediately.
Yes, but the triage process confirms that it is indeed a heart attack – which requires immediate attention – and not a bad case of indigestion which does not.
> Triage should be the exception, not the rule,
If you have infinite resources, go ahead.
“Yes, but the triage process confirms that it is indeed a heart attack – which requires immediate attention – and not a bad case of indigestion which does not.”
But we’re not discussing indigestion here, we’re discussing people who’ve had a heart attack, require angioplasty (which they don’t do for indigestion), and have to wait months on average for that procedure because they’re not likely to croak immediately (and how many people DO die while waiting for such procedures?). Diagnosis to prognosis to procedure happens in hours, not months.
“If you have infinite resources, go ahead.”
It doesn’t require infinite resources, merely adequate resources. Note I did say we do triage for exceptional instances like earthquakes, where you have large numbers of injuries beyond what could otherwise be expected, so the poor schmuck with the broken arm may have to wait a couple days and take pain killers to get it set while we deal with fractured skulls. That’s an earthquake, not a Friday.
re:
very-serious portrait of Bern
At the range, a big poster warns against using photographs of famous people as targets. As an example of prohibited targets, they use the magazine cover of very-serious David Hogg and the other very-serious school-kids spokes-models for firearms confiscation.
Yes, it seems wrong.
[ attempts to stop grinning, utterly fails ]
“ but there are only so many doctors and so many nurses and so many operating theatres. ”
Might that be because the health system is managed by a centralized bureaucracy operating under a highly politicized budget process?
Around here the two competing health care systems seem to be opening a new facility (hospital, specialty clinic, stand alone ER) every week to meet demand. With local TV commercials letting me know that if I have a heart attack/stroke/cancer I’m minutes away from at least two highly rated facilities, one for each system.
The “health care crisis” in the US has zip/zilch/nada to do with quantity or quality of care. It has to do with financing the system, and the fact some statist busy body Europhiles in DC can’t stand the fact that they don’t control it.
> Might that be because the health system is managed by a centralized bureaucracy operating under a highly politicized budget process?
No. It’s the same the world over. There are only so many doctors etc in the US. We in the UK have private healthcare on top of the NHS. There are private hospitals in the UK with private doctors and private nurses and private so on. There’s one a few hundred yards away from me right now. But there are not an unlimited number of doctors and other medical staff.
How much do you pay for your healthcare?
Sanders home in Burlington Vermont is 95 miles from a Montreal, a large, Canadian, French speaking, socialist city. It’s a 2 hour drive.
Has Sanders ever gone there for health care? No.
Would he ever consider doing so? No.
Is it not true that the commie Frogs from Montreal routinely head to Burlington for treatment? Yes.
Canada was a beautiful, wealthy first world country but is now rapidly becoming a socialist shithole. Wish you were here, Bernie, wish you were here.
2016: “Feel the Bern!”
2020: “Fill the Urn!”
Damn! Beat me to it.
For me, if no one else, the key issue is, Does the federal government have a responsibility to provide medical care to the population at large? The current response (again, for me) is No. Lacking some sort of reasoned chain of responsibilities, it stays No.
Give me my money back.
For a different anecdote concerning wait times, I needed an MRI of my knee a few years back. I had an appointment at a local lab (between Austin and San Antonio, TX) in about three days. Just out of curiosity, I checked to see how long I’d have to wait for a similar MRI if I lived in the Toronto, Ontario area. IIRC, the average wait was about six weeks. While searching for that information, I saw a claim that all of Canada has about as many MRI machines as Cleveland, OH.
Not bad, considering that Cleveland’s population is about 10% of Canuckistan’s… AND concentrated into a much smaller area.
[eyecross]
There some faint rays of hope up here. https://canadadiagnostics.ca/services/mri/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwivbsBRDsARIsADyISJ8sDRPNx4Py_P5RxzPAYhRMVZWqnde-ihsrmOx0zY9kZwX4b16teooaAoR7EALw_wcB
We now have lots and lots of private MRIs.
Of course that means we pay extortionate taxes and then pay again for the private service.
If it was up to me Bernie would be in the ER but not for a heart attack.