Health care rant: Why some people are more equal than others in countries with universal health care

Norwegians have been shooked to their core as the queen of the Labor movement and former Norwegian prime minister has been caught receiving free health care services from Norway, while she has officially emigrated and ceased paying taxes to Norway. Reactions oscillate between relief that someone is exposing that some people are more equal than others in the egalitarian social democratic lighthouse of Europe and anger that someone can expose the saint of Norwegian social democracy as a human being with self interest.

The point was that she is not eligible to receive those services since she emigrated and ceased paying taxes, just as I did. I got the letter from the Norwegian government when I emigrated, and so did she.

The difference is that she makes close to $90,000.00 for an hour’s worth of work, while I make less than half of that a year. If I receive health care services in Norway, an insurance claim will be sent to my U.S. insurance company. When I did not have health insurance a few months back, the Norwegian government would have sent the claim to collection, trust me on this. But I am not the former prime minister, so doctors wont’ sign off on an illegal charge.

The reason I am writing about this, is a couple of videos I found from the Free Market Cure project. There is much to change about American health care, but the system is better than any other I have lived with ever, and I grew up in one of the most expensive public health care systems in Europe, paid for with socialized oil money and mandatory salary taxation. It does not work, and these videos shows why:

Who are the uninsured? People choose not to get insurance, because in the U.S. they have a legal right to health care. This right does not exist in most countries, including Norway.

With a universal budget, you got to chose among scarce resources. The government has to chose between operations that strictly are not life-threatening (although desirable for some), from sex-change operations to simple operations that prevent more life-threatening diseases. In our system, both would have received what they needed, maybe with a little help from friends if they could not do it themselves.

Does your state have Lemon laws? What if the only option you had in health care was the ultimate health care lemon? This story about health care rationing is not a Canadian scare story. My mom did not make it to my commencement because she finally got into a specialist with her inch-sized thyroid tumor after nine months of waiting in Norway. By the time she got in, another 1/5 inch sized tumor had appeared. And I have previously written about the scandal in Sweden when the former prime minister Göran Persson had to cancel meetings abroad because he was waiting for months for a simple operation, it finally became a political embarrassment and he got ahead of the line.

How compassionate is it to wait in line for life threatening medical services? This is NOT A UNIQUE story!

In an effort to help the minority of people that cannot afford insurance in the U.S., some people want to force all of us into this “one-size-fits-no-one-system.” It will not solve the problem, but it will sure create all sorts of new problems for the rest of us.