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Show lleslth gofg eosto loraer than phiEiftGr, 7 blesg jQa&iis est growth was in the lineup of patients waiting to be admitted ad-mitted to the hospitals. The Input of resources went up and the output of services went down. The Secretary should find a better model - perhaps the system we already have. (Reprinted from a speech by Ronald Reagan) By saying it over and over again, proponents of government govern-ment medicine have tried to make us believe that health care costs are spiraling out of sight. And, I'm afraid they have been fairly successful. suc-cessful. If a pollster asked DON'T FEED THE ANIMALS: Division of Wildlife Resources personnel are reminding Utahns not to feed deer that migrate into urban areas looking for food. Deer are browsers, and a diet of hay without their normal woody diet, will cause them to starve to death with a full belly. Peep snows covering normal winter feeding grounds have forced deer into urban areas where they feed on shrubs and orchards. Persons wishing to help the deer, will let them alone to feed. Damage to shrubs and orchards will mostly be recovered with new spring growth. However, the deer will be better off if you run them off than by substituting a bale of hay for the shrubs. The situation Is much more . severe In northern Utah than locally, and recent warm temperatures should allow the deer to move higher out of urban areas soon. about medical costs the average citizen would probably prob-ably respond that "yes, they were rising faster than prices of other commodities." com-modities." But the average citizen would be wrong because be-cause like all the rest of us he's been subjected to a snow job put together by the busy planners in the Department of H.E.W. It is true that a dollar's worth of medical care ten years ago costs $1.85 today, but a dollar's worth of plumbing repairs ten years ago costs $2.10 today. I'm not picking on plumbers; for auto repairs, it's $1.90 and the same figure for blue jeans. A dollar's worth of postage stamps ten years ago costs $2.22 today, shingling your roof $2.33 and, to top it off, social security costs have gone up twice as much as the increase in health care costs. Now, how does H.E.W. justify its contrary opinion about medical care? Well, it does It by proving that "these are lies, blankety-blank blankety-blank lies and statistics." H.E.W. doesn't take ten-year ten-year figures. H.E.W. just tells us how much medical costs jumped in 1975 and '76 - and forgets to tell us that the recession inspired price controls weren't lifted on medicine until 1975 - a year after they were lifted on everything else. When price controls are removed there is a -thing called a "bulge". The consumer con-sumer price index jumped as much for other commodities commodi-ties in 1974 as it did for medical care a year later. It continued to rise for two more years and in the third year leveled off. The bulge in the consumer price index for health care leveled off in the second year. If we wanted to play H.E.W. 's game, we could take just the period between 1965 and 1973 and find that, yes, medicine costs rose faster than other prices - and government was to blame. That was the period when government went into medicine medi-cine by way of Medicaid and added tremendously to the total expenditures for health care. Secretary of H.E.W. Cali-fano Cali-fano has said Britain's national health care program should be our model. He should take another look. Over an eight year period hospital staffs in Britain increased in-creased by 28 percent while the number of hospital beds occupied dropped by 11 percent. per-cent. Typical of any government govern-ment program is this next figure - the number of administrative ad-ministrative and clinical staff jumped 51 percent. There was talk of a shortage of nurses but the ratio of beds per nurse fell from two to one -and -a -half. Amazingly in view of all this the great- |