We kept hearing that Obamacare would be the answer to all of our prayers. It will lower our rates, we can keep our insurance and our doctor. Now we have Bernie Sanders and others say that maybe Obamacare isn’t the answer and that we need a single payer plan. Canada has a single payer system and it sucks. In fact, their single payer system could be the death of you. Literally. Just ask Laura Hillier, or rather ask her next of kin. Laura was first diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia at age 13.
She needed a bone marrow transplant and they found several acceptable donors, but what they couldn’t find is a bed. Seriously. For the want of one bed Laura Hillier died. There are all kinds of shortages under a single payer system, because in order to keep costs down, you ration how much life saving equipment you have. Do you believe that before Obamacare anyone would die due to the lack of a bed and would any hospital system be limited to five leukemia patients at a time? And even if one hospital is short, there is always another one that can take you.
It’s not even a temporary shortage. They had found multiple donors for Hillier in the first half of 2015 and she died on January 20th of this year. She just missed graduating high school by a couple of months. Her classmates felt for being so brave and so sick that she deserved to know some of the joys of graduation. They came upon the idea od using her casket to write what they normally would have written in her yearbook.
It is so tragic because she didn’t have to die. Death by single payer.