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A 2004 column that remains as relevant today (especially today) as six years ago:
If you’re not thrilled about watching the Democratic National Convention tonight, I have a video recommendation: The Barbarian Invasions. Set in Canada with French dialogue and English subtitles, it won last year’s Academy Award for best foreign film, and — wait, where are you going?
Americans should give this film a try if only to see how much worse being sick would be if government controlled our health care. The Barbarian Invasions documents the mediocrity, rationing, mindless bureaucracy, corruption, and elitism that inevitably would follow. A few years ago, audiences cheered when Helen Hunt tore into HMOs in the movie As Good As It Gets. What As Good As It Gets was to managed care, The Barbarian Invasions is to socialized medicine.
When the millionaire son of a dying Canadian professor returns home from England, he finds his father in a hospital ward where patients on gurneys pack the hallway. Ironically, a completely vacant ward lies one floor below. The professor faces a six- to 12-month wait for PET scan, and doctors routinely call him by the wrong name.
This is not the stuff of fantasy. Health care in Canada is distributed by government and the result is chronic shortages (e.g. hospital staff, PET scanners). Vancouver’s Fraser Institute issues an annual report detailing just how long government-created shortages force Canadians to wait for medical care.
Full article is here.
P.S. “The Barbarian Invasions” is one of those accidental conservative films, which always happens when a filmmaker chooses truth over propaganda. The film is also, politics aside, a stand-alone masterpiece. Well worth a Netflix. Be sure to make it a double feature with its prequel “The Decline of the American Empire.”