Diana Hsieh LTE on Single Payer Systems

The July 17, 2007 Rocky Mountain News published the following LTE by Diana Hsieh:

Free-market medicine is the answer

At a weekend rally in Denver, filmmaker Michael Moore advocated the total government takeover of medicine with heartbreaking tales of peoples' medical disasters ("Filmmaker Moore presides at Colorado health care rally," June 25). He neglected to mention that "single-payer" socialized medicine makes medical disasters routine because of inevitable rationing of care.

In Canada, patients are forced to wait weeks and months for diagnostic tests, appointments with specialists, and treatment as their deadly cancer cells multiply.

In Britain, most National Health Service kidney patients over the age of 55 are allowed to die rather than offered dialysis. As usual, the working poor suffer the most: They are unable to afford treatment outside the government system they’ve already bought with taxes.

The only reliable protection against medical disasters is a genuinely free market in medicine. Only when medicine is freed of burdensome government regulations, mandates and entitlements will patients be able to pay for their own routine health care and purchase affordable catastrophic insurance. That's the reform Colorado needs.

Diana Hsieh, Sedalia