No, I don't have inside information. But it should be obvious.
"The more time I spent in the Canadian system, the more I came across people waiting for radiation therapy, waiting for the knee replacement so they could finally walk up to the second floor of their house." "You want to see your neurologist because of your stress headache? No problem! Just wait six months. You want an MRI? No problem! Free as the air! Just wait six months."
[...]
We saw this in Canada, where we did find one area of medicine that offers easy access to cutting-edge technology -- CT scan, endoscopy, thoracoscopy, laparoscopy, etc. It was open 24/7. Patients didn't have to wait.
But you have to bark or meow to get that kind of treatment. Animal care is the one area of medicine that hasn't been taken over by the government. Dogs can get a CT scan in one day. For people, the waiting list is a month.
Mr. Stossel's absence from the program is the biggest sign that the Obama White House and not ABC was calling the shots. And despite that Mr. Obama tanked on a number of the questions, including this one:
DR. ORRIN DEVINSKY, EPILEPSY SPECIALIST: Yes, in the past, politicians who have sought to reform health care have tried to limit costs by reducing tests, access to specialists, but they've not been good at taking their own medicine. When they or their family members get sick, they often get extremely expensive evaluations and expert care.
If a national health plan was approved and your family participated, and, President Obama, if your wife or your doctor became seriously ill, and things were not going well, and the plan physicians told you they were doing everything that reasonably could be done, and you sought out opinions from some medical leaders and major centers, and they said there's another option that you should -- should pursue, but it was not covered in the plan, would you potentially sacrifice the health of your family for the greater good of insuring millions? Or would you do everything you possibly could as a father and husband to get the best health care and outcome for your family?
OBAMA: Well, first of all, Doctor, I think it's a terrific question, and it's something that touches us all personally, especially when you start talking about end-of-life care. As some of you know, my grandmother recently passed away, which was a very painful thing for me. She's somebody who helped raise me.
But she's somebody who contracted what was diagnosed as terminal cancer. There was unanimity about that. They expected that she'd have six to nine months to live. She fell and broke her hip. And then the question was, does she get hip replacement surgery, even though she was fragile enough that they weren't sure how long she would last, whether she could get through the surgery. I think families all across America are going through decisions like that all the time. And you're absolutely right that, if it's my family member, it's my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.
But here's the problem that we have in our current health care system, is that there is a whole bunch of care that's being provided that every study, every bit of evidence that we have indicates may not be making us healthier.
Note that Mr. Obama transformed a straightforward question about whether he and his family should be subjected to the same restrictions as the ones he would impose on America into a question of complex medical decision making. The question wasn't whether surgery was the correct care for his grandmother. The question was, what would he want if it was the right thing to do but disallowed by the government.
The folks at the libertarian Cato Institute have some responses for Mr. Obama.
As Aretha sang, you better think.
7/2/09 0900: Speaking of infomercials ... (more details here)
