Universal health care sounds very appealing, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it’s been tested in this country already, resulting in a system of failure.

This system is Medicare, which was designed to provide federal single-payer health services to millions of seniors.

Consider them the guinea pigs of universal health care. The system is one of the largest in the world to this date.

When founded in 1965, it was projected to cost the federal government $9 billion for its hospital program alone.

In the end, it cost more than $66 billion, according to the Cato Institute.

In the end, the Medicare program fails by acting as a monopoly power in the senior health care market.

The feds do not negotiate for lower prices on the limited services (covered services are dictated in more than 100,000 pages of Medicare regulations) that are covered, but rather dictates below-market reimbursements for medical services, reducing the quality and accessibility of medical services.

Additionally, the program has failed to maintain confidential doctor-patient relationships. Under the program, groups of seniors are required to divulge medical, sexual and emotional information before receiving coverage.

Further, nonprofessional program employees are directed to keep tabs on those under coverage, recording information on psychological moods and profanity use.

If the seniors do not wish to share private information, these employees are required to speak for them and reach unnecessary conclusions about seniors’ private lives.

Many seniors purchase private health care services simply to avoid this intrusion into their lives.

Medicare is a domestic experiment in universal health care that has failed to produce positive results. Its dictate and lengthy policies have increased the cost of care for seniors while reducing access to services and producing violations of doctor-patient confidentiality.

How can we expect an expansion of this concept into a national system such as Canada’s to be any more effective?

Canada has faced its own onslaught of problems since enacting universal health care. Waiting times for services have doubled in the past decade. To receive treatment, one must literally wait on a list.

The low end of waits are in Ontario with an average wait of 14.3 weeks for operations. The worst waits are in Saskatchewan with an average wait of 29.9 weeks.

The problem can be exemplified in knee and hip replacements. In British Columbia, 9,000 are waiting for surgery, and the list is increasing at a 10 percent annual rate. However, there is only funding for 6,000, leading to a 18-month wait.

Yet, Canada continues to prohibit individuals from spending their own money on services covered by the government. Even if some have the funds to pay for their own hip replacement, they are not allowed to. At least not in Canada.

Many seniors are now flying overseas to places like Belgium for surgical treatments and avoiding long waits for the treatment they need.

The basic problem that emerges is that the system is not really free. A two-child family of Canadians pays $5,000 per year in public health insurance.

That’s far beyond the cost of the most comprehensive private coverage. Bureaucratic uniformity and a lack of entrepreneurship add to the cost of administering such a system.

When a system develops where the payment for services has already been made through taxes, and upfront costs are null, an economic shortage develops.

The government could not continue to increase already high taxes to fund the program, so Canada’s government was forced to hold down costs, which led to a reduction in the quality of services and availability.

Just as with Medicare, patients wait for the care they desperately need.

It is argued that universal health care will result in a more just system for the American people, with no patient left behind.

One must only look at the failures of Medicare and the Canadian health care system to realize that in these systems, patients aren’t left behind, they’re left standing in line for needed medical care at increasingly inefficient public cost.

Jonathan Greenlee

Junior

Civil Engineering