“Yea, I was on Obama’s website yesterday, checking out his policies, and under healthcare, it says “ The plan will cover all essential medical services”. The word ‘essential’ jumped out at me. Who decides?”
Doesn’t really matter. Socialized medicine works this way. First, you develop a budget for healthcare. This budget includes all the essential services. The budget allocates funds for each essential service. The budget is not a projection of how many services of that type is required, it is based upon what the government can afford to pay. When you need a service, it will be provided if funds are available. If no funds, then no service and you have to wait on new funds.
Insurance works this way. You have a contract with the carrier to provide a service. The availability of funds doesn’t matter, the carrier must provide the service if the service is determined to be necessary by your physician.
Too many people think that universal health care will be like insurance only paid by the government and forget that the government will only pay for the services in it’s health care budget.
Another example of how socialized medicine works is the way Princess Diana received treatment after her crash. French paramedics were on the scene fairly quickly but, because of socialized medicine, they had to decide which hospital to take her to for care. Under the French system, different hospitals are mandated to specialize in certain areas so the paramedics couldn’t just take her to the nearest hospital. They had to take her to “the right one.” So, while bureaucrats dithered, Diana lay at the scene of the crash, bleeding to death.
It is well known in the medical community that a trauma patient should be gotten to a care facility as fast as possible, preferably in the first 20-30 minutes after the victim’s wounds were received. It took French paramedics more than 90 minutes to get her the care she needed. Who knows if they could have saved her at all, but the fact remains, her chances for survival would have been significantly greater had the French been able to just take her to the nearest hospital and get her into surgery within the first 30 minutes like paramedics here in the US can and do.
Socialized medicine kills. That’s all there is to it.