Notes on Obamacare, One Year Later

Republican senator Ron Johnson, from Wisconsin, has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, marking the first anniversary of the passing of Obamacare. Johnson writes that under a more bureaucratic system, the sort of medical innovations that 27 years ago saved his newborn daughter's life would be fewer and more expensive:

Carey's story sounds like a miracle, but America has always been a place where medical miracles happen. Since 1970, American doctors have won more Nobel Prizes for Medicine than all other countries combined. According to McKinsey and Co., thousands of foreigners come to the United States every year for medical care they cannot get at home—due to rationing or because it is simply not provided. And cutting-edge drugs to treat serious illnesses are more widely available in the U.S. than abroad.

Take cancer as one example. Compared to the U.S., breast cancer mortality is 9% higher in Canada (according to the government statistics of each country), 52% higher in Germany and 88% higher in the United Kingdom (according to studies published in Lancet Oncology). Prostate cancer mortality is 604% higher in Britain.

Those in need of timely care from specialists are better off in the U.S. Drawing on several peer-reviewed studies, Dr. Scott Atlas of the Stanford University Medical Center notes that patients who need knee and hip replacement, cataract surgery, and radiation treatment wait months longer in the United Kingdom and Canada than in the United States.

The plain truth is that the American system is better at rewarding innovation and responding to consumer needs. But the history of government-led care is there for all to see. Are we doomed to repeat it?

Read the whole thing here.

At the Corner, Mitt Romney avoids discussing his own health care law from when he was governor of Massachusetts and says that he'd grant Obamacare waivers to all fifty states if he were president.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is still trying to sell Obamacare to college students, this time courtesy of Labor secretary Hilda Solis. Solis has a form "letter to the editor" that's running in several college newspapers, according to the Student Free Press Association.