WELCOME TO OBAMACARE.  START COUGHING – AT 10:22 A.M. ET:  The first programs under ObamaCare are starting to be formed, and we still don't know what our new, socialized health-care system will look like.  But the great Thomas Sowell doesn't like what he sees, and makes the threat clear:

The most basic fact is that it is cheaper to remain sick than to get medical treatment. What is cheapest of all is to die instead of getting life-saving medications and treatment, which can be very expensive.

Despite these facts, most of us tend to take a somewhat more parochial view of the situation when it is we ourselves who are sick or who face a potentially fatal illness. But what if that decision is taken out of your hands under Obamacare and is made for you by a bureaucrat in Washington?

I think we'd like to know the answer.

A new book, The Truth About Obamacare, by Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute, lays out the facts in the plainest English.

While she can’t tell you the future, she can tell you enough about government-run medical systems in other countries that it will not take a rocket scientist to figure out what is in store for us if Obamacare doesn’t get repealed before it takes full effect in 2014. It is not a pretty picture.

We hear a lot about how wonderful it is that the Canadians or the British or the Swedes get free medical treatment because the government runs the system. But we don’t hear much about the quality of that medical care.

Having just gone through some medical stuff, the thing I valued much was the fact that I had choices, and, equally important, that the physician had choices.  I fear that this will evaporate.

We don’t hear about more than 4,000 expectant mothers who gave birth inside a hospital, but not in the maternity ward, in Britain in just one year. They had their babies in hallways, bathrooms, and even elevators...

...the media spin is that various countries with government-run medical systems have life expectancies that are as long as ours, or longer. That is very clever as media spin, if you don’t bother to stop and think about it.

Sally Pipes did bother to stop and think about it in The Truth About Obamacare. She points out that medical care is just one of the factors in life expectancy.

She cites a study by Profs. Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider at the University of Iowa, which shows that, if you leave out people who are victims of homicide or who die in automobile accidents, Americans live longer than people in any other Western country.

And, to be perfectly blunt, they seem to accomplish and create more...those dumb, bigoted, Islamophobic Yanks.

In the things that doctors can affect, such as the survival rates of cancer patients, the United States leads the world.

Americans get the latest pharmaceutical drugs, sometimes years before those drugs are available to people in Britain or in other countries where the government runs the medical system. Why? Because the latest drugs cost more and it is cheaper to let people die.

COMMENT:  The Obamans have tried to institute changes that are permanent, hoping that when people start receiving "benefits" they'll demand that those benefits continue.  I have to have more faith in the American people.  When they see their choices disappear, they will know what to do.

I hope.

August 24, 2010