The Top Ten Myths of American Medical Care

Thomas Sowell urges everyone to read this book (The Top Ten Myths of American Medical Care) immediately.

His review of the book and the state of American healthcare is something I whole heartedly agree with.

Fortunately, Sally C. Pipes is one of the few who has explored the reality of government-controlled medical treatment in Canada and other countries. Among the things she discovered is that new life-saving medications that go immediately into the market in the United States take a much longer time to become available to Canadian patients — if they ever get approved by the bureaucrats.

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As with so many government programs, “the poor” are used as a political justification for imposing government-controlled medical care on everyone. But The Top Ten Myths of American Medical Care shows what a fraud that is. First of all, the average uninsured American has above-average income — and people living in poverty are already eligible for Medicaid.

There are of course some serious problems with Medicaid, as there is with government medical treatment at Veterans Administration hospitals and with Medicare. But such things only highlight the dangers of having the government take over the rest of the medical sector, given its dangerous failures where it is already involved in medical matters.

The lure of something for nothing may be seductive when you are in good health. But it can become a bitter irony when you are waiting for months for surgery to relieve your pain or when your life hangs in the balance while some bureaucrat decides whether you can get the best medication or something older and cheaper.


The Top Ten Myths About American Medical Care can literally be a life-saver. What it reveals is unlikely to be told by the mainstream media or by other enthusiasts for the magic phrase “universal health care.”