Health plan won’t pencil out

In her inaugural address, the new Canadian Medical Association president stated Canada’s single-payer system was “imploding”; too expensive with inadequate service. In a recent TV interview, the former president, a British Columbia surgeon, agreed, saying that nearly 50 percent of the province’s expenditures were for health care and would reach 80 percent in three to four years. Every study confirms Western Europe’s single-payer systems are in identical financial crisis.

Government-controlled health care in Tennessee, Massachusetts and Maine, which promised great savings, coverage and improved services, are introducing draconian rationing because of huge budget over-runs.

In 2002, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair began his flagship project of computerizing Britain’s medical system, as a “model for the rest of the world,” to cost the equivalent of $10 billion U.S. and take four years. Despite the best international IT firms doing the work, current estimates are completion in 2015 at a cost of $80 billion. President Barack Obama claims his similar project will cost only $50 billion and take five years. Our population is six times more than Britain’s and we have 10 times more physicians. Obama’s claims are not credible.

We can’t afford “Obamacare.”

Bob Foster, Ph.D., economics

Spokane