How ObamaCare would have killed my son and me

It occurred to me tonight that if ObamaCare had become the law of the land 30 or 40 years ago, my son Josh and I would be dead.

ObamaCare was designed to destroy the private sector health insurance industry and force all Americans into a single-payer system run by the federal government.  Unless it is repealed or ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, that is precisely what will happen over the next few years.  If that happens, millions of people who otherwise could be saved from life-threatening illnesses and injuries will die.

We all know the arguments about how inefficient socialized medicine systems are, how people are forced to wait for months on end to get life-saving treatment, how people are left to die in hospital hallways, how death panels ration health care, how those with the means to do so come to the United States to get the treatment that they cannot get in their own countries.  We all know that if the Democrats succeed in forcing us into such a system, countless people will die from the system’s inherent inefficiencies.  This article is not going to rehash these obvious points.

What no one is talking about, though, is that millions of additional people will die from medical conditions that would have been cured if innovation had not been stifled by that system.  Simply put, countries that have the kind of socialized medicine systems that Obama and almost all of the Democrats in Congress are trying to force us into do not innovate because they have no incentive to do so.  When was the last time you heard of a major life-saving medical innovation coming out of England or Canada?

It is the United States that has produced almost all of the great medical innovations of the past several decades.  If America dismantles its best-in-the-world health care system in favor of the single-payer system sought by Obama and his Democrats, then there will be no country left on the planet to whom the world can look to develop the treatments and cures to humanities’ most dangerous and intractable medical conditions.

Which brings me back to my original statement:  If ObamaCare had become the law of the land 30 or 40 years ago, my son Josh and I would be dead:

In 1993, I was diagnosed with hypercholesterolemia – Irrespective of my diet and level of exercise, my body produces too much “bad” cholesterol.  Over the past two decades, I have been able to keep my cholesterol at healthy levels through the use of statin drugs like Lipitor, Zocor, and Crestor.  If leftists like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had succeeded in destroying the private sector pharmaceutical industry 30 or 40 years ago, then these drugs would never have been developed, and I almost certainly would have had a fatal heart attack within the past twenty years.

In 2007, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease.  I was told at the time that if I had to have cancer, this was the one to have because it is almost always curable.  And indeed, after three months of chemotherapy and a month of radiation therapy, a CT scan showed me to be clean of the offending lymph nodes.  But about 50 years earlier, my mother went to high school with a teenaged boy who contracted and died from Hodgkins Disease.  There was no cure at that time, but in the past 30 years, a cure was developed that is now effective about 99% of the time and that saved my life.  If leftists like Barack Obama and today’s Democrats had succeeded in socializing the medical system and stifling innovation 30 or 40 years ago, I would be dead from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma today.

My son Joshua and his twin brother Dylan were born in April of this year premature at 31 weeks.  Josh has Down Syndrome, and he was born with a related heart defect (as well as several other medical problems).  The doctors were able to diagnose Josh’s Down Syndrome and heart condition early in the pregnancy, and so we were able to have pediatric cardiologists following him even before he was born.  About two months after Josh was born, he needed and underwent a very delicate and complicated heart surgery performed by CHKD’s Dr. Mohammed Mumtaz, one of the finest surgeons and human beings on the face of the Earth.  Needless to say, the surgery was successful and saved Josh’s life.  If leftists like Barack Obama and today’s Democrats had succeeded in socializing the medical system and stifling innovation 30 or 40 years ago, the medical science and techniques that saved Josh’s life would not have been developed, and he would have died in infancy.  (And even if these techniques did exist, it is highly questionable that the government bureaucrats in charge of rationing health care would have approved the expenditure for this expensive and risky procedure for a baby with Down Syndrome.)

After Josh’s successful heart surgery, about a week into his recovery, Josh contracted sepsis, a very serious and often fatal blood infection.  The doctors treated the sepsis aggressively and, over the course of about two weeks, managed to defeat it.  One of those doctors later told us that Josh had contracted the worst case of sepsis that he had ever seen and that he was amazed that Josh survived.  If leftists like Barack Obama and today’s Democrats had succeeded in socializing the medical system and stifling innovation 30 or 40 years ago, the medical science, drugs, and techniques that saved Josh’s life would not have been developed, and again, he would have died in infancy.

The striking thing is that if Josh and/or I had died because no cures had been developed to address our respective medical conditions, no one would have known that such cures could have been developed if the market had been left to work, and so, no one would have held the socialized medical system accountable for these deaths.  Likewise, if ObamaCare is allowed to go into effect, we will never know how many people who die in the coming years and decades ahead would have been saved if the market had been left to work and to continue to develop cures to currently fatal medical conditions.  These millions of people will be the silent and unappreciated victims of ObamaCare unless ObamaCare is repealed.

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