The Vancouver Sun has learned that Canada’s vaunted single-payer, socialist health care bureaucracy is planning on cancelling more than 6,000 medically necessary surgeries, including neurosergery, treatment for vascular diseases, and other life-saving procedures, all supposedly to cut costs and save money.
One doctor is quoted as calling the decision a “nightmare” and wondering why on earth medically-necessary surgeries are the first thing to be cut.
Well, Doc, I’ll explain it to you. In the U.S. it’s called the “Washington Monument Syndrome.” Every time one of our socialist bureaucracies at the local level of government fears that its budget won’t be increased by as much as it wishes, the first thing to be cut is police, ambulence services, garbage collection, and other things that impose the maximum inconvenience and danger on the public. It’s a kind of extortion scheme whereby the bureaucrats, who enjoy a monopoly in the provision of their “services,” withdraw them until the public pressures politicians to come up with the bucks for the bureaucracy in question.
This scheme was named after the director of the National Park Service in the 1960s, who would shut down the Washington Monument — the most popular tourist attraction in D.C. — whenever Congress balked at giving him his budgetary wish list. Vacationers from every state would angrily call their congressional representatives to complain that on their vacation to the nation’s capitol their top tourist spot was closed. Congress would quickly acquiesce, and other bureaucrats at all levels of government learned of yet another means of extorting even more $$$ from the taxpayers.
This will be coming soon to a hospital near you, American citizens, if Obamacare is adopted.
