79-01-A7

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Patent Medicine II

Transcript On the last broadcast I told of the Senate subcommittee that is roadshowing the country under the pretense of holding hearings when in truth it is campaigning to socialize medicine; and the taxpayers are footing the bill for this sales trip. Part of the sales pitch is based on how much medical costs are increasing and how much they'll be in a few years if we don't adopt a program of compulsory government medical care. Nothing is said, however, about the cost now and in the future if we do adopt such a scheme. Health care now costs us about $150 billion a year. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare -- even though it wants government medicine -- has estimated that the Kennedy proposal would add $80 billion to that the first year. Supporting this is the evidence in all -- and let me emphasize all -- the nations in the world which already have nationalized (that is socialized) health care. This includes among others Canada, Britain, Sweden. In these latter two, some kinds of care are being denied to people because of cost. This denial takes the form of setting an age limit above which things such as transplants won't be given. Patients are denied care if a disease is too far advanced, reducing the odds of saving the patient. Several thousand kidney patients in one of those countries die each year because the cost of keeping them alive is too great. In other words, the medical bureaucrats play God. But we have evidence close at hand of the role government intervention in health care can play in raising the cost of such care. The Hospital Association of New York State reveals that 24 percent of the costs of hospital care in that state result from government regulations aimed at cost and quality control. This report was based on a study of 148 hospitals. It was found that administrative personnel spend from 50 to 70% of their time complying with regulation. Even nurses spend more than one-quarter of their time on such matters instead of in the care of patients. In that one state alone, New York, the number of employees engaged full time in paper work, year-round, is equivalent to what it would take to fully staff 75 hospitals with 250 beds each. Or put it another way, they could provide full hospital services to 600,000 people. Possibly New York is above the average in this regulatory extravagance, but it indicates a problem that must be serious in all of the country. In New York, regulatory costs add almost $40 a day to each patient's bill. Can any of us believe that total takeover by government would not vastly increase the paper work, the regulations and the cost of health care? We have provisions now for the elderly and the destitute and more than 130 million Americans have some kind of health insurance. If the government really wants to help, let it give citizens income tax reductions or credits for health insurance premiums. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.		Details Batch Number 79-01-A7 Production Date 01/??/1979 Book/Page RPtV-406 Audio Youtube? No
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