To the editor:
After I attended the recent League of Women Voters town hall meeting in Coupeville on government-run healthcare, I came away disappointed in the League of Women Voters for declaring themselves “nonpartisan” when they clearly are not; this was evident when they introduced their panel of eight (seven pro and one against).
I was totally frustrated with U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen after he claimed to have read the bill, when it was obviously he hadn’t or he would have answered the questions presented to him rather than try to avoid them, or answer them incorrectly.
I sat there in disbelief at the untruths told to the audience by some of the panelists themselves; such as Dolly Lister’s claim that the Canadian healthcare system is successful when, in fact, the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association (Dr. Anne Doig) said in a recent interview with the Canadian press that the country’s healthcare system is sick and that the current system – if it keeps on going without change – is not sustainable.
Even Dr. Robert Ouellet, the current president of the CMA, recently stated there’s a critical need to make Canada’s healthcare system patient-centered and “that competition should be welcomed, not feared.”
Panelist Marshall Goldberg, an activist for single payer, sited Europe’s healthcare system and even claimed the healthcare system in Venezuela was a model for healthcare in the U.S. – Wikipedia doesn’t even list Venezuela as a country having a viable health care system!
If you look at healthcare in the United Kingdom, which is often praised for spending as little as half as much per capita on healthcare as the U.S., credit for this cost containment goes in large part to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, or NICE.
The British officials who established NICE in the late 1990s pitched it as a body that would ensure that the government-run National Health System used “best practices” in medicine. As the Guardian reported in 1998: “Health ministers are setting up [NICE], designed to ensure that every treatment, operation, or medicine used is the proven best. It will root out under-performing doctors and useless treatments, spreading best practices everywhere.” Sound familiar?
What NICE has become in practice is a rationing board. For example: In March, NICE ruled against the use of Lapatinib and Sutent, two drugs that prolong the life of those with certain forms of breast and stomach cancer. This followed a 2008 ruling against a variety of drugs – including Sutent, that would help terminally ill kidney-cancer patients. In 2007, the board restricted access to two drugs for macular degeneration, a cause of blindness. The drug Macugen was blocked outright; the other, Lucentis, was limited to a particular category of individuals with the disease, restricting it to about one in five sufferers.
Private U.S. insurers often cover all, or at least portions, of the cost of many of these NICE-denied drugs.
NICE has also produced guidance that restrains certain surgical operations and treatments. NICE has restrictions on fertility treatments, as well as on procedures for back pain, including surgeries and steroid injections. The U.K. has recently been absorbed by the cases of several young women who developed cervical cancer after being denied pap smears in order to reduce government health-care spending, refusing screens to women under the age of 25. The NICE board even has a mathematical formula for doing so, based on a “quality adjusted life year.”
While the guidelines are complex, NICE currently holds that, except in unusual cases, Britain cannot afford to spend more than about $22,000 to extend a life by six months.
So, if you don’t want this type of government-run healthcare for America, read the bills, educate yourself and contact your representatives.
Charlona Sawyer
Greenbank
