U.S. Republican Congressman Mark Green of Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District explained during a hearing on Obamacare this week how his experiences in an emergency room turned him against socialized medicine.
Green made his remarks during a House Oversight Committee hearing.
“My first patient was a gang member. He’d been shot in the lower abdomen. The guy was punching at the staff and yelling at us all. Meanwhile, we’re trying to save his life,” Green said.
“After giving this guy world-class care I walked out thinking at least with government payer I’d get paid for the risks taking care of this patient.”
Near the end of his shift, however, Green said he had another patient, a 35-year-old woman on chemo with a lowered immunity system. The woman’s infections had threatened her life.
“With her were two children and a worried husband. The woman was only 35 years old. She didn’t have insurance. As we stabilized her, I realized that early detection saved this young woman’s life. In Europe, socialized medicine has delayed early detection as care is rationed, and that is why mortality rates for specific illnesses are far better in the United States than they are in Europe and Canada,” Green said.
“That woman would not have received timely detection there, and her chances of survival would have been significantly less than a socialized system.”
Green spoke of another patient, the CEO of a major corporation in Canada, who had a laceration and flew to Nashville for better medical care versus what he would have gotten with his country’s government-run health care.
“In Canada, you can get an MRI for your dog that day because there is a free market in veterinarian care, but you can’t get one for grandma’s knee. You’re going to wait six months,” Green said.
“Socialized medicine does not work. It does not provide better care. Study after study has shown Medicaid patients have equal outcomes to patients without insurance at all. Those are the real numbers. The ACA is not socialized medicine. What it does is it takes money from taxpayers at increased rates for small businesses.”
Green went on to say Obamacare has raised rates.
“You see, either by intention or accident, the ACA creates pressures on the health care system that are crashing the very system that the witnesses today were praising,” Green said.
“The ACA is driving the cost shifting to a point that small businesses can’t afford it and more people are shifted to government systems as this dynamic pushes people onto the government care, Medicare, Medicaid, all of that. We move to more and more socialized medicine. At some point, the shifts cause the system to crash.”
At Obamacare hearing, former Army and ER doc @RepMarkGreen shares the personal, real-world emergency room experiences that turned him against socialist health care.
🎥: @GOPoversight pic.twitter.com/3blPBmhuAO
— Nate Madden (@NateOnTheHill) July 10, 2019
According to Conservative Review, Green did his residency in emergency medicine at the U.S. Army Aviation Center. Green also served as a special operations flight surgeon and founded an emergency room management company.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Mark Green” by Mark Green. Background Photo “Mark Green” by Mark Green.
