Michael Tanner a Cato health care expert, writes: “Because cancer is a slow-moving and expensive disease to treat, it is not cost-effective under socialized medicine to treat the disease too aggressively.”
Moral: If you are unfortunate enough to contract cancer, don’t go abroad looking for inexpensive treatment in a country with socialized medicine. Costly as U.S. medical care may be, it could still be a bargain; your chances of recovery will be much better. In the United States, with its complicated but still more or less private system, about 800/0 of men diagnosed with prostate cancer survive. But in England and France, both of which have “benefited” from almost all-inclusive socialized medicine for decades, only 43% of men survive prostate cancer. Many U.S. lawmakers look to the Canadian system of government medicine as a model – but two-thirds of Canada’s provinces ship their colon cancer patients across the border for treatment. And in England a majority of cancer patients (60% are not even) allowed to see an oncologist. Under socialized medicine, the treatment of expensive diseases is often either avoided or denied.
