Why do advocates of socialized medicine prefer pets over people? It’s hard not to conclude that’s the way they think. After all, in Canada you can get a CT scan or MRI sooner for your “companion animal” than for your child. And health insurance is a thriving business in Great Britain, which only recently decided to allow people to spend extra to get better drugs than those offered by the National Health System.
Reported Reuters earlier this year:
Forget worming pills and a flea collar — a trip to the vet in Britain these days could be about heart surgery, joint replacement, chemotherapy or a host of other cutting-edge procedures.
Britain is one of the few countries in Europe to offer many of these complex treatments: devoted British pet-owners have fuelled a fast-growing insurance market that helps fund care which would otherwise take a big bite out of a bank account.
Research firm Datamonitor has forecast the country’s pet insurance market will grow to almost 600 million pounds ($1.18 billion) in 2011 from nearly 380 million pounds in 2006.
“It wasn’t that big a market a few years ago but now it is growing,” said Kelly Ostler-Coyle, a spokeswoman for the Association of British Insurers. “It is a combination of how much people value their pets and (the fact) that there are more providers in the market.”
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So the solution is a free market in health care? Does not the recent financial crisis on wall street give you pause about what might happen when health insurance companies are left to their own devices with their greed?
I wonder if a POOR people, who normally couldn’t afford a CT scan or MRI for their kids at all, can get their pets scanned sooner than their kids? Nope. If it weren’t for socialized medicine, their kids wouldn’t be scanned ever.
So what is the point of this article? That we should deny poor people medical services entirely in order to keep rich people from purchasing medical services for their pets? Who is it that falls for this claptrap? What a confused piece of demagogy.
Scholar in Training,
If you think this financial crisis is due to allowing markets to be free, you are going to need a lot more training.
There are a couple of companies which offer pet insurance here in the states. While I love my dog and want her to have a healthy life, I do not think I would do a major surgery in order to keep her alive. At what point and time is she suffering? She cannot tell me this. Also in the US our health care is so messed up that many go without the care they need. We need to take care of these people before we worry about our four legged friends.