Maybe The Canadian Health Care System Isn't Nirvana

The [Wall Street] Journal story also notes the outcry that arose when a heart patient died in 1989 after having surgery canceled 11 times....

Tragedies like that one led to a scoring system being put in place in one Ontario medical network to standardize waiting times for heart patients. Patients are assigned a score - a ``2'' should wait only 48 hours for surgery for example, a score between ``5'' and ``7'' can wait 120 days.

OK. So the Canadians have cheaper prescription drugs (and a veritable army of spammers trying to sell them here), but is their health care system really the best model for us to aspire to?

I don't really like the idea of nationalized health care. The last thing I want in my life is an bunch of uncaring, faceless bureaucrats looking at me as a number and then running a strict cost/benefit analysis to determine if I should live or not. My life is worth a whole hell of lot more to me than it is to them where I would be just another piece of paper to push from the In basket to the Out.

Putting a bureaucrat's life-altering (or life-saving) decision before mine or my family's is just wrong. Decisions of life and death are best decided by those involved.

There are very few things in this world that belong to you and you alone. Your health is one of them. We should not voluntarily give up our control over our health. To do so is to expand the powers of our government into the realm of the wannabe-God dictators.

No bureaucrat in America should have the power of life or death over any citizen.