AMERICAN ISSUES PROJECT

Democrats stepped up efforts this past week to introduce their disastrous socialized health care plan. President Obama already called on his Democratic colleagues to enact this legislation by August. To persuade Americans that this plan is needed Obama has often repeated, “The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds." This, of course, is simply unsupportable. If you add up all bankruptcies in a year you barely get one every thirty seconds and not every bankruptcy is due to the cost of health care. Team Obama certainly understands this. You would hope so anyway.

Obama and democrats insist their program will benefit the 46 million Americans who they say are uninsured. This, of course, is not accurate either. According to The American Spectator, 9.7 million of this 46 million are not citizens of the United States. Another 14 million of the uninsured are eligible for Medicaid and SCHIP but have never signed up for the programs. They could be signed up for government insurance if they ever made a visit to the emergency room. Another 17.6 million of the uninsured had annual incomes of more than $50,000. This leaves you with around 5 million Americans without insurance which is a far cry from 46 million. But, why let facts get in the way? Barack Obama and Democrats have a plan to push on America. They want their socialized health care.

Like everything Obama does, this plan will have an enormous cost. That's why Obama has already announced that he will get the rich to pay for it. And on the flip side, Democrats also plan to penalize those with adequate financial resources who don’t elect to get insurance. This mandate on adults who do not purchase insurance is something Obama said he would not do during the election.

But, not much is being said on how this plan will affect Americans and women in particular. Looking at the nationalized health care systems in Europe Obamacare will likely be a big step backwards for women's health here in the United States.

Currently the United States leads the world in treating breast cancer. Women with breast cancer have a 14 percent higher survival rate in the United States than in Europe. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Breast cancer mortality is also 9 percent higher in Canada than in the US. Less than 25 percent of U.S. women die from breast cancer. In Britain, it's 46 percent; France, 35 percent; Germany, 31 percent; Canada, 28 percent; Australia, 28 percent, and New Zealand, 46 percent. The European Network of Cancer Registries reported:

Breast cancer is also the most common cancer in females in Europe. It is estimated that in the year 2000 there were 350,000 new breast cancer cases in Europe, while the number of deaths from breast cancer was estimated at 130,000. Breast cancer is responsible for 26.5 percent of all new cancer cases among women in Europe, and 17.5 percent of cancer deaths.

In Britain, where they enjoy socialized medicine, breast cancer rates have soared by more than 80 percent in the past 30 years under their system. A big reason for this is early diagnosis. Nine of 10 middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to less than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent). Women who develop breast cancer in Europe are four times more likely to be diagnosed when the tumor has spread and survival is less likely than are women in the US.

The BBC reported that US women were more likely to survive breast cancer than their European counterparts because they are diagnosed earlier, research finds. The five year survival rate in the US was 89 percent compared to 79 percent in Europe. One reason was that 41 percent of the US cases were diagnosed at an early stage, compared to just 29 percent in Europe and this greatly improved the survival rate.

The failures of nationalized health care have been widely reported. The failures of nationalized health care in treating breast cancer have also been widely reported. Thousands of women will be affected. In fact, it's hard to imagine anything worse for cancer patients than government-run health care. Nationalized health care and breast cancer are a deadly mix.

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