{"id":1535472,"date":"2022-07-01T14:04:50","date_gmt":"2022-07-01T18:04:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1535472"},"modified":"2022-07-01T14:04:52","modified_gmt":"2022-07-01T18:04:52","slug":"sally-c-pipes-health-care-is-not-a-right-no-matter-what-the-left-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/sally-c-pipes-health-care-is-not-a-right-no-matter-what-the-left-says\/","title":{"rendered":"Sally C. Pipes: Health Care Is Not a Right, No Matter What the Left Says"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">30<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fsally-c-pipes-health-care-is-not-a-right-no-matter-what-the-left-says%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1535472&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div id=\"article-header\">\n<div class=\"row\">\n<div class=\"col-xs-12\">\n<div class=\"contributor-img pull-left\">\n<a href=\"https:\/\/townhall.com\/columnists\/sallycpipes\/\"><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Sally C. Pipes\" class=\"img-thumbnail\" src=\"https:\/\/media.townhall.com\/townhall\/reu\/contributor-sm\/authorimages\/sallycpipes.gif\" \/><br \/>\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n<p>|<\/p>\n<p>Posted: Jun 30, 2022 12:01 AM<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"row\">\n<p><em>The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"article-body\">\n<aside id=\"aside1\" class=\"left aside-wrapper aside-wrapper-950\">\n<\/aside>\n<p>At the recent unveiling of his latest plan for Medicare for All, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., evoked a familiar theme. &#8220;Health care,&#8221; he said, &#8220;is a human right that all Americans, regardless of income, are entitled to.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But health care is neither a right nor a privilege. It&#8217;s an aggregate of goods and services. The task of health policy is to ensure timely, affordable access to these goods and services for all who need them &#8212; and to do so without sacrificing the quality of care.<\/p>\n<p>Medicare for All would outlaw private health insurance and grant everyone a right to public coverage. All Americans would have an insurance card with their name on it. But as real-world evidence from Medicare for All-like systems abroad makes clear, access to coverage is not the same as access to care.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s because there&#8217;s a limited supply of health care, just like any other good or service. Unlimited demand &#8212; fueled by Medicare for All&#8217;s promise that care will be free at the point of delivery &#8212; paired with limited supply is a recipe for shortages, long waits, and suffering far worse than anything Americans see under our current system.<\/p>\n<p>Great Britain&#8217;s National Health Service, the single-payer system established in 1948, has subjected patients to life-threatening treatment delays and subpar care for generations. And that crisis has only grown more acute in recent years.<\/p>\n<p>According to a report released last month, a record-high 6.4 million patients in England were waiting for care. A separate study released May 31 by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine found that a lack of capacity in NHS emergency rooms was causing &#8220;real patient harm&#8221; and was a &#8220;serious patient safety crisis.<\/p>\n<p>In Canada, the situation is much the same. The typical wait time for Canadian patients to receive specialist care following referral by a general practitioner is over 25 weeks, according to the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-based research organization. Median wait times in some provinces now exceed a year.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s no surprise, then, that more than 200,000 Canadians leave the country to seek care, according to a 2017 analysis from SecondStreet.org, a Canadian think tank.<\/p>\n<p>Single-payer absolutists in the United States almost never acknowledge the bleak conditions in these and other government-run health systems. On the contrary, these are the very healthcare schemes Sanders lauds when he laments that America is &#8220;the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care to all of its citizens.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But in what sense does the United Kingdom or Canada &#8220;guarantee health care to all its citizens?&#8221; Months- or years-long waits for needed care mock such guarantees. As former Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court Beverley McLachlin wrote in a 2005 decision challenging the Canadian system&#8217;s ban on private insurance coverage, &#8220;Access to a waiting list is not access to health care.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And when the government is in charge of a person&#8217;s care, it can decide the terms on which that care is delivered. In 2017, some local NHS affiliates began restricting elective surgery for people who smoked or were obese.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s more, the &#8220;free&#8221; health care Sanders claims to offer is anything but. The Vermont senator himself has suggested that his proposal will cost taxpayers between $30 trillion and $40 trillion over the next decade &#8212; money that would have to be raised in large part through some combination of massive tax increases and enormous inflation-spurring deficits.<\/p>\n<p>Single-payer health care is not free elsewhere. In Canada, the average family of four pays more than $15,000 a year in taxes just to support the country&#8217;s public health insurance system.<\/p>\n<p>Senator Sanders wants to force all American patients into a single, enormously expensive government-run healthcare program &#8212; the kind of program which has choked off access to timely, high-quality medical care every place it&#8217;s been tried and led to needless pain and death.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s some view of what constitutes a &#8220;human right.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>| Posted: Jun 30, 2022 12:01 AM  The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1535472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1535472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535472\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1535472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1535472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1535472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}