A Canadian educated in England warns us about adopting socialized medicine

Mark Steyn points out that the only way for the Messiah to achieve his stated goal of reducing health care costs by installing the beginnings of his dream single-payer (i.e. government monopolized) system is to ration the only cost in the entire scheme that isn't fixed - the health care itself:

"When President Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor, and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of “controlling costs” is to restrict the patient’s access to treatment. In the Province of Quebec, patients with severe incontinence — i.e., they’re in the bathroom twelve times a night — wait three years for a simple 30-minute procedure. True, Quebeckers have a year or two on Americans in the life-expectancy hit parade, but, if you’re making twelve trips a night to the john 365 times a year for three years, in terms of life-spent-outside-the-bathroom expectancy, an uninsured Vermonter may actually come out ahead."

Are you ready for a system in which concepts such as "best practices guidelines" and "cost efficiencies" are the paramount factors, and which will always matter more than the decisions of both the physician and the patient, only to ultimately fail to prevent the whole shebang from becoming as big a failure as England's NHS?

"The British National Health Service is the biggest employer not just in the United Kingdom, but in the whole of Europe."

Yep, they've got themselves a real shining success over there worth emulating, eh?