Health Care Example

More of Jim Thompson's propaganda against health-care reform.

The anti-health care reform lobby like to paint this sort of counselling as a money-saving device, but - given the US tendency to over-treatment - it is basically a patient-saving device.

A close friend of mine died of leukemia a few years ago. It wasn't the leukemia that killed him, of course, but aggressive chemotherapy, which provoked a stomach ulcer that hit a blood vessel,so that he bled out before his doctors could cauterise the bleed.

It was well known that the chemotherapy had essentially no chance of stopping his leukemia, and was very likely to kill him before the leukemia would have. His initial decision had been to give it a miss, but his family and friends saw this as defeatist, and managed to persuade him to give it it's - negligible - chance. The Australian health care system was happy to pay the cost of the treatment - it was set up with the consent of the doctors who get paid by it - but I can't see that it did anybody any good except the medical staff who got paid to administer the - pointless - chemotherapy.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Yep, I can find the electronics subject in that... Ooops, I forgot that this is an american politics forum, my bad..