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. . . HEALTH CARE (CANADIAN) see "HEALTH" for related links Canada's 'Free' Health Care Has a High Price Tag By John H. Fund "The Wall Street Journal" August 12, 2005 For many Canadians their 37-year-old universal health-care system is the symbol of their national identity. Last November, Canadian Broadcasting held a contest to pick the greatest Canadian ever. The clear winner out of 1.1 million votes cast was Tommy Douglas, a politician known as the "father" of Canada's nationalized medicine. But last June, a majority of Canada's Supreme Court struck down a Quebec law that banned private health insurance and held that the public system inflicted cruel and unusual punishment on many of its patients. The Fraser Institute has found it takes an average of 17.9 weeks between the time a patient makes an appointment to see a general practitioner and when he can then see a specialist. He will then be treated by a system that ranks 13th out of 22 advanced countries in access to MRI technology; 17th out of 21 in access to CT scanners and seventh out of 22 in access to radiation machines. The safety valve in the system is that nearby U.S. hospitals can provide treatment for emergency cases and patients willing to pay. But Canada's public care doesn't save money. As the satirist P.J. O'Rourke once noted, "If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free." When adjusted for the age of its population, Canada vies with Iceland and Switzerland as the highest spender on health care among the 28 most developed nations with universal systems. Dr. David Gratzer, a Toronto physician affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, calculates that a Canadian earning $35,000 a year pays a stunning $7,350 in health-care taxes. Canada's Supreme Court was scathing in its indictment of the system. "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care," the court ruled. "Delays in the public health care system are widespread . . . in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists." The court struck down a Quebec law banning private medical insurance, which should lead to successful challenges to similar laws in other provinces. While last week the court stayed the impact of its ruling in Quebec for a year, a nationwide debate on why Canada is the only country other than Cuba and North Korea to ban private insurance and private care has finally broken out. The prohibition is viewed as bizarre in other nations with universal health care. Sweden has long allowed private insurance for elective services. In Australia, private hospitals provide a third of the nation's capacity. In Germany and the Netherlands, anyone above a certain income threshold is allowed to leave the public system. In Canada, the ban on private insurance results in truly loopy law. Dr. Sheldon Elman, the personal physician for Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, says the system is "disastrously terrible" in key areas. "You can buy an MRI for your dog and you cannot buy it for your daughter," he told the Montreal Gazette. [. . . ]  ;void(0)) HIROSHIMA . . see "WAR & PEACE" for related links Some argue that the U.S. could have demonstrated the bomb on an uninhabited island, or could have encouraged surrender by promising that Japan could keep its emperor. Yes, perhaps, and we should have tried. We could also have waited longer before dropping the second bomb, on Nagasaki. But, sadly, the record suggests that restraint would not have worked. The Japanese military ferociously resisted surrender even after two atomic bombings on major cities, even after Soviet entry into the war, even when it expected another atomic bomb - on Tokyo. [...] It feels unseemly to defend the vaporizing of two cities, events that are regarded in some quarters as among the most monstrous acts of the 20th century. But we owe it to history to appreciate that the greatest tragedy of Hiroshima was not that so many people were incinerated in an instant, but that in a complex and brutal world, the alternatives were worse. --Nicholas Kristof, "Blood On Our Hands?", http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/05/opinion/05KRIS.html - Truman’s supporters countered that, in fact, a blockade and negotiations had not forced the Japanese generals to surrender unconditionally. In their view, a million American casualties and countless Japanese dead were adverted by not storming the Japanese mainland over the next year in the planned two-pronged assault on the mainland, dubbed Operation Coronet and Olympic. For the immediate future there were only two bombs available. Planners thought that using one for demonstration purposes (assuming that it would have worked) might have left the Americans without enough of the new arsenal to shock and awe the Japanese government should it have ridden out the first attack and then become emboldened by a hiatus, and our inability to follow up the attacks. As it was, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, General Tojo’s followers capitulated only through the intervention of the emperor. And it was not altogether clear even then that Japanese fanatics would not attack the Americans as they steamed into Tokyo Bay for the surrender ceremonies. These are the debates that matured in the relative peace of the postwar era. But in August 1945 most Americans had a much different take on Hiroshima, a decision that cannot be fathomed without appreciation of the recently concluded Okinawa campaign (April 1- July 2) that had cost 50,000 American casualties and 200,000 Japanese and Okinawa dead. Okinawa saw the worst losses in the history of the U.S. Navy. Over 300 ships were damaged, more than 30 sunk, as about 5,000 sailors perished under a barrage of some 2,000 Kamikaze attacks. And it was believed at least 10,000 more suicide planes were waiting on Kyushu and Honshu. Those who were asked to continue such fighting on the Japanese mainland - as we learn from the memoirs of Paul Fussell, William Manchester, and E. B. Sledge - were relieved at the idea of encountering a shell-shocked defeated enemy rather than a defiant Japanese nation in arms. [...] Hiroshima, then, was not the worst single-day loss of life in military history. The Tokyo fire raid on the night of March 9/10, five months earlier, was far worse, incinerating somewhere around 150,000 civilians, and burning out over 15 acres of the downtown. Indeed, “Little Boy,” the initial nuclear device that was dropped 60 years ago, was understood as the continuance of that policy of unrestricted bombing - its morality already decided by the ongoing attacks on the German and Japanese cities begun at least three years earlier. Americans of the time hardly thought the Japanese populace to be entirely innocent. The Imperial Japanese army routinely butchered civilians abroad - some 10-15 million Chinese were eventually to perish - throughout the Pacific from the Philippines to Korea and Manchuria. Even by August 1945, the Japanese army was killing thousands of Asians each month. When earlier high-level bombing attacks with traditional explosives failed to cut off the fuel for this murderous military - industries were increasingly dispersed in smaller shops throughout civilian centers - Curtis LeMay unleashed napalm on the Japanese cities and eventually may have incinerated 500,000. In some sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only helped to cut short the week-long Soviet invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria (80,000 Japanese soldiers killed, over 8,000 Russian dead), but an even more ambitious incendiary campaign planned by Gen. Curtis LeMay. With the far shorter missions possible from planned new bases in Okinawa and his fleet vastly augmented by more B-29s and the transference from Europe of thousands of idle B-17s and B-24, the ‘mad bomber’ LeMay envisioned burning down the entire urban and industrial landscape of Japan. His opposition to Hiroshima was more likely on grounds that his own fleet of bombers could have achieved the same result in a few more weeks anyway. --Victor Davis Hanson, military historian, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, "60 Years Later" http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200508050714.asp - There's no doubt the atomic bomb wound up saving lives - American, Japanese, and maybe millions in the lands the latter occupied. The more interesting question is to what degree it enabled the Japan we know today. They were a fearsome enemy, and had no time for decadent concepts such as magnanimity in victory. If you want the big picture, the Japanese occupation of China left 15 million Chinese dead. If you want the small picture, consider Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. It fell to the Japanese shortly after Pearl Harbor, when the 22 British watchkeepers surrendered to vastly superior forces. The following year, the Japanese took their British prisoners, tied them to trees, decapitated them, and burned their bodies in a pit. You won't find that in the Geneva Conventions. The Japs fought a filthy war, but a mere six decades later and America, Britain and Japan sit side by side at G7 meetings, the US and Canada apologize unceasingly for the wartime internment of Japanese civilians, and an historically authentic vernacular expression such as "the Japs fought a filthy war" is now so distasteful that use of it inevitably attracts noisy complaints about offensively racist characterizations. The old militarist culture - of kamikaze fanatics and occupation regimes that routinely tortured and beheaded and even ate their prisoners - is dead as dead can be. Would that have happened without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the earlier non-nuclear raids? --Mark Steyn, "The etiquette of modern warfare", _The Jerusalem Post_, [3 August 2005] http://tinyurl.com/cqvdw - Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima. . . . The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East. --Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) American Democratic statesman, President of the U.S. [1945-1953], first announcement of the atomic bomb [6 August 1945] - "Hiroshima" Editorial in "The Wall Street Journal" August 5, 2005 Today -- or August 6 in Japan -- is the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which killed outright an estimated 80,000 Japanese and hastened World War II to its conclusion on August 15. Those of us who belong to the postwar generations tend to regard the occasion as a somber, even shameful, one. But that's not how the generation of Americans who actually fought the war saw it. And if we're going to reflect seriously about the bomb, we ought first to think about it as they did. In 1945, Paul Fussell was a 21-year-old second lieutenant who'd spent much of the previous year fighting his way through Europe. At the time of Hiroshima, he was scheduled to participate in the invasion of the Japanese mainland, for which the Truman Administration anticipated casualties of between 200,000 and one million Allied soldiers. No surprise, then, that when news of the bomb reached Lt. Fussell and his men, they had no misgivings about its use: "We learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, and for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live." Mr. Fussell was writing about American lives. What about Japanese lives? The Japanese army was expected to fight to the last man, as it had during the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Since the ratio of Japanese to American combat fatalities ran about four to one, a mainland invasion could have resulted in millions of Japanese deaths -- and that's not counting civilians. The March 1945 Tokyo fire raid killed about 100,000; such raids would have intensified had the war dragged on. The collective toll from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings is estimated at between 110,000 and 200,000. * * * Nuclear weapons are often said to pose a unique threat to humanity, and in the wrong hands they do. But when President Truman gave the go-ahead to deploy Fat Man and Little Boy, what those big bombs chiefly represented was salvation: salvation for young Lt. Fussell and all the GIs; salvation for the tens of thousands of Allied POWs the Japanese intended to execute in the event of an invasion; salvation for the grotesquely used Korean "comfort women"; salvation for millions of Asians enslaved by the Japanese. Not least, and despite the terrible irony, the bombings were salvation for Japan, since they prompted Emperor Hirohito to intervene with his bitterly divided government to end the war, thus laying the groundwork for America's beneficent occupation and the country's subsequent prosperity. [ . . . ] Looking back after 60 years, who cannot be grateful that it was Truman who had the bomb, and not Hitler or Tojo or Stalin? And looking forward, who can seriously doubt the need for might always to remain in the hands of right? That is the enduring lesson of Hiroshima, and it is one we ignore at our peril. . . If homosexuality were the normal way, God would have made Adam and Bruce. --Anita Bryant (1940- ) American singer, in "New York Times" [5 June 1977] I don't care what people do, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses! --Mrs. Patrick Campbell (1865-1940) English actress. When told of a homosexual affair between two actors. - I came back last night having spent Saturday and yesterday on Fire Island. I don't think I shall ever go again. It is lovely from the point of view of beach and sun and wearing no clothes, but the atmosphere is sick-sick-sick. Never in my life have I seen such concentrated abandoned homosexuality. It is fantastic and difficult to believe. I wished really that I hadn't gone. Thousands of queer men of all shapes and sizes camping about blatantly and carrying on, in my opinion, appallingly. Then there were all the lesbians glowering at each other. Among this welter of brazen perversion wander a few "straights," with children and dogs. I have always been of the opinion that a large group of queer men was unattractive. On Fire Island it is more than unattractive, it's macabre, sinister, irritating, and somehow tragic. --Noël Coward (1899-1973) English playwright, actor, and composer, diary and see: When Noel Coward wanted to leave a party unfashionably early, he told his hostess, Tallelulah Bankhead: "I must think of my youth." She replied: "Well, next time, bring him along!" --Bette Davis (Ruth Elizabeth Davis) (1908-1989) American actress - The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen. --Quentin Crisp [Denis Pratt] (1908-1999) English writer, _Manners From Heaven_ [1984] The love that dare not speak its name has become the love that won't shut up. --Robertson Davies (1913-1995) Canadian author and playwright We must exterminate these people root and branch. Just think how many people will never be born because of this, and how a people can be broken in nerve and spirit when such a plague gets hold of it. When someone in the Security Services, in the SS, or in the government has homosexual tendencies, he abandons the normal order of things for the perverted world of the homosexual. We can't permit such danger to the country; the homosexual must be entirely eliminated. --Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) German Nazi politician, police administrator, and military commander, to his doctor Felix Kersten; in _The Kersten Memoirs_ [1957] p.57. When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one. --Leonard Matlovich (?-1988) American Air Force sergeant, attributed - The horrors unfolding in the Catholic church bring to mind a heated debate that recently got similar mention in the press. Because of a firm stance on an issue related to what the Catholic church faces today, one organization saw its funding disappear, its meeting places taken away, and its young members booed during a presentation of the American flag at the 2000 Democratic national convention. The organization, of course, is the Boy Scouts of America. I wonder who now disputes the wisdom of their decision to exclude gay Scout leaders, and I praise the leaders of the Scouts for considering first and foremost the welfare of the boys in their charge. --Warren Saunders Jr., letter to _The Weekly Standard_, July 22, 2002 - Yesterday [June, 2003] on CBC radio the Toronto morning show host was interviewing one of the men who was involved in the court case leading to the legalization of same-sex marriages in Ontario. At the end of the interview, after the interviewee announced his intention to get married that afternoon, the host finished up by saying "well congratulations, it's a fairy tale come true." Much apologizing ensued. --anon. end page | ABORTION - ARABS | ANTI-AMERICANISM | ANTI-SEMITISM | BALI - BUSH | CAPITAL PUNISHMENT - CLINTON (HILLARY) | ELECTION [AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL - 2004] & FOX NEWS | GLOBAL WARMING & GUANTANAMO | GUN CONTROL & GUNS | HEALTH CARE (CANADIAN) - HOMOSEXUALS | HURRICANE KATRINA | IRAN | IRAQ 1 | IRAQ 2 | ISLAM - ISRAEL v. PALESTINE | LEFTISTS | MEDIA (THE) & MEDIA BIAS | MOORE (MICHAEL) & NEW YORK TIMES | NORTH KOREA - PATRIOT ACT | RADICAL THOUGHT | RAP MUSIC | STEM CELL RESEARCH | TERRORISM 1 | TERRORISM 2 | TERRORISM 3 | TERRORISM 4 | TERRORISM (PREVENTING) | UNITED NATIONS | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
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