Will Socialized Health Care in the US Kill Canadians?
Sorry about the wait for that angioplasty...
More than 400 Canadians in the full throes of a heart attack or other cardiac emergency have been sent to the United States because no hospital can provide the lifesaving care they require here.
Most of the heart patients who have been sent south since 2003 typically show up in Ontario hospitals, where they are given clot-busting drugs. If those drugs fail to open their clogged arteries, the scramble to locate angioplasty in the United States begins...
...While other provinces have sent patients out of country – British Columbia has sent 75 pregnant women or their babies to Washington State since February, 2007 – nowhere is the problem as acute as in Ontario.
At least 188 neurosurgery patients and 421 emergency cardiac patients have been sent to the United States from Ontario since the 2003-2004 fiscal year to Feb. 21 this year. Add to that 25 women with high-risk pregnancies sent south of the border in 2007.
Although Queen’s Park says it is ensuring patients receive emergency care when they need it, Progressive Conservative health critic Elizabeth Witmer says it reflects poor planning.
That is particularly the case with neurosurgery, she said, noting that four reports since 2003 have predicted a looming shortage.
“This province and the number of people going outside for care – it’s increasing in every area,” Ms. Witmer said.
“I definitely believe that it is very bad planning. ...We’re simply unable to meet the demand, but we don’t even know what the demand is.”
Read that last line again: "We’re simply unable to meet the demand, but we don’t even know what the demand is.”
Well, that’s a confidence builder.
The Canadian system is supposedly one of the main models upon which the coming American health care revolution will be based. And yet this wondrous Canadian system seems to be more and more incapable of providing relatively common medical procedures to Canadian citizens, even in Canada’s most populous province. Because the system is controlled by a bureaucracy, it doesn’t respond to market pressures (goodness knows that most of the time, bureaucracies barely respond to political pressure) and in fact can’t even figure out what the market is demanding. All of this results in the Canadian government relying on the supposedly inferior US system to provide lifesaving care in many instances. No wonder 3 out of 4 Canadians live within easy driving distance of the US border.
So what happens if we decide to go down the path toward single-payer health care in the US? You’d have to be a fool to think that we could try the same thing that the Europeans and Canadians have done and get different results. No, in the long run, we’ll experience the same sorts of inefficiencies, quality and supply problems that plague the government systems, and yes, more Canadians will die, because the safety net that currently exists for the Canadian system here in the United States will be gone.
More: Check out the video after the jump...
Comments
#1 2008-03-03 18:28 (Reply)
A few points:
1) So is this a good thing or a bad thing? I guess it all depends on how you feel about Canadians.
2) Canada couldn’t even get bacon right. Why on earth would we model our health care system after theirs?
#1.1 2008-03-03 19:02 (Reply)
Canada couldn’t even get bacon right.
Take that back. That’s just the sort of ill-considered statement that could get a commenter banned around here.
#2 2008-03-03 22:20 (Reply)
Sorry, eh?
What I meant to say is that the size of government grows exponentially. Government run health care will invariably create a need for more government regulations of said health care and more government run programs to plug the leaks.
That will cost more money causing taxes to increase.
Higher taxes will lead to fewer people being able to manage their own health needs, causing more people to depend on the government provided health care. So demand will go up.
But because health care is now being regulated by the government, supply will go down since fewer people will be attracted to the high stress jobs if they pay much less.
Fewer doctors leads to fewer life- and cost-saving innovations by the people who actually know the medicine.
This would result on out-sourcing patients to facilities that are better equipped to treat them.
Isn’t that basically what happened in Canada? Or do the democrats think that the problem wasn’t in the theory, but in the execution?
I guess it’s better to give everyone lower quality care than anybody high quality care.
It’s a lot like school cafeterias in that regard. Close the campus so everyone has to eat the same meals and no one can go to the place down the street for a Kahuna burger.
#3 2008-03-04 01:31 (Reply)
I live in a country (Australia) that by USA standards has a semi-socialised system of health/sickness care.
And from talking to some American friends, I know which country I would prefer to be in if I or any of my family and friends became seriously ill or had an unexpected catastrophic accident.
#3.1 2008-03-04 15:54 (Reply)
I’ve had close family members who have been diagnosed with serious, and in some cases hard to treat illnesses, all of whom received excellent care in the States (and weren’t bankrupted by it, either).
For example: Back in October of 1997 (or thereabouts - sorry I can’t remember the exact date), my father noticed that he had passed a blood clot in his urine. He walked out of the bathroom, called his doctor, and was in the office that afternoon. The next day, we knew that he had kidney cancer. One week later, he was recovering from a radical nephrectomy. That quick response probably added years to his life.
After the surgery, Dad went in for scans every few months for a year or two to check for new occurrences of the cancer. We never had a problem scheduling those office visits, and always received the results promptly. And when the cancer did eventually return, Dad was able to undergo the only FDA approved course of treatment for kidney cancer at the U of Michigan hospital in Ann Arbor. Mom and I moved out there for a few weeks to stay with Dad while he underwent treatment, and his insurance plan gave us no problems whatsoever. When there were instances where the insurance company balked at paying for particular drugs or treatments, the problem was resolved after a consultation with Dad’s doctor.
Kidney cancer is a tricky beast, and unfortunately the treatments were not able to stop the disease. But even at that point Dad had the opportunity to participate in a clinical trial at the National Institutes of Health, which afforded him another opportunity to beat the disease, which eventually did take his life.
If we lived a couple hundred miles to the east in Ontario, I highly doubt that our experience would have been anything like the prompt, caring, and highly professional treatment that Dad received in the US.
I want to make clear that I am not arguing that the American system is perfect. It’s not. There are problems that need to be solved, and there are people who need coverage who don’t have it. And while there are solutions to those problems, they most definitely don’t lie in having the government take over the whole system. The vast majority of US citizens are happy with their health care. It’d be a shame if we threw out the baby with the bathwater.
#3.1.1 2008-03-04 16:27 (Reply)
Coincidentally, Marc, in researching the principle of subsidiarity this afternoon on the Acton site, I printed out the article, “Subsidiarity and Health Care Reform” by Robert J. Mylod. It contains some excellent ideas: http://www.acton.org/publications/randl/rl_article_259.php
#4 2008-03-04 14:23 (Reply)
Take is from this Canadian - you don’t want socialized healthcare. My husband and I spent 3 hours with our daughter lying on a gurney in the hallway of our hospital’s emergency dept. waiting for the surgeon because they didn’t even have a cubicle to spare. All the personnel were top-notch, but that can’t make up for both a lack of personnel and inadequate facilities. Thousands of families don’t even have access to a family doctor in our small province of PEI, while even those of us ‘lucky’ enough to have one have often end up going to walk-in clinics and waiting hours there since it might take up to a week to get in to see one’s doctor. Waiting your turn in line for health care is deemed by the elites (who nonetheless often manage to queue-jump) and their gullible followers as some sort of Canadian virtue. Sad.
#5 2008-04-07 00:13 (Reply)
As a Canadian who has lived all over the world, I can assure you that you don’t want your current system either. You need something in between.
It would take a few laws:
(1). No insurance firm is permitted to turn anyone away or terminate coverage regardless of medical hx.
(2). No insurance firm is permitted to charge any client more then another.
(3). No insurance firm may refuse medically approved treatment.
(4). All employers must provide x amount of coverage per hr worked by employee.
(5). All states must provide coverage or balance of coverage to those who can not afford it themselves due to unemployment.
Keep your free market system -- just regulate it.
Cal
#5.1 2008-04-08 11:13 (Reply)
I am a former Canadian (naturalized American citizen) who has lived in the USA for 16 years. I’ll take the USA system over the CDN system anytime, thanks.
I have an uncle in the hospital right now waiting for bypass surgery up in good old Canada... waiting, waiting, waiting. Maybe they are hoping for him to kick-off so they don’t have to do the surgery.
Cal and your provisos are a free market system, how?
#5.1.1 2008-04-08 15:36 (Reply)
It’s not fully free market system. It’s also not full socialized medicine. It allows the market to still determine cost of services and to allocate funding -- it just prevents the market from shirking responsibility of care for the very people which make it function and attempts to stop a corporation from becoming an executioner.
The ideal would be a fully free market system based on ethics and all the rest that this blog is about but, the system has been allowed to slide so far in the direction of corporate power that there are really only three options.
(1). People dying from exclusivity and greed.
(2). People dying from socialism.
(3). Some means of interim control -- at least until some form of counter pressure (Patient union???) to the insurance firm’s power can be created.
Politically I am a libertarian. I’m also pragmatic enough to recognize that a political philosophy is a long way from a political reality and, once power has accumulated in the hands of a few, it takes time to take it back.
People dying for the immediate purity of a political philosophy is not a justified means to an end.
#5.1.1.1 2008-04-08 16:06 (Reply)
Hummm...
vouchers come to mind...
Oh no! We couldn’t possibly use those. After all, some vested interests would be very unhappy with a “visible” free market price for their goods and services. They might actually have to compete on price to get those vouchers.
That’s the same issue with socialized education which we have had for years -- even here in the good old US of A. Another issue... but don’t get me started ;-)
#6 2008-04-16 13:37 (Reply)
I am a summer resident of Ontario and live in Wisconsin.
My friend and guide, Jack, is 73 and resides in Sioux Narrows. It took him years to have surgery on his knees. That was 10 years ago. He needs more work on his knees and they are putting him off because he is (too) old. Jack also has a brain aneurysm, and they are treating it with ‘diet’ and it took him 2 months for the ‘scan.’
His daughter is 49, and needs surgery on her knees. They are putting her off because she is too YOUNG, and they felt that she too would need the surgery repeated 10-20 years from now.
#7 2008-04-16 15:34 (Reply)
I am a summer resident of Ontario and live in Wisconsin.
My friend and guide, Jack, is 73 and resides in Sioux Narrows. It took him years to have surgery on his knees. That was 10 years ago. He needs needs more work on his knees and are putting him off because he is (too) old. Jack also has a brain aneurysm, and they are treating it with ‘diet’ and it took him 2 months for the ‘scan.’
His daughter is 49, and needs surgery on her knees. They are putting her off because she is too YOUNG, and they felt that she too would need the surgery repeated 10-20 years from now.
#8 2008-04-16 22:12 (Reply)
Every American should have the opportunity to read this article about the pitfalls and dangers of socialized medicine (single-payer health care)! Canada and Europe are PROOF it doesn’t work!! The U. S. mainstream media and the liberal politicians are LYING BIG TIME about the “benefits” of such a plan. Many people actually BELIEVE it’s “free”, that it’s “better”, etc. In other words, too many Americans are falling for the lies of those who want to FORCE such a plan upon us! They’re also LYING when they say so many thousand (or million) Americans cannot get health care in the U. S. now. Just go into a hospital emergency room in the U. S., and READ THE SIGNS ON THE WALLS. You’ll SEE that no one can be turned away, BY LAW! WHO, in his/her right mind, would actually believe the lies current Presidential Candidates and most liberal politicians in the U. S. are telling re: this VITAL SUBJECT! The same people who would believe “the sky is falling” is my guess! And the U.S. Government could actually RUN such a socialized healthcare plan!? ABSOLUTELY NOT...just look what a mess they’ve made of our country!
#9 2008-04-17 11:00 (Reply)
I spent 7 years living in England and can tell you that if you are an older person in need of medical care, you might as well just die! They are filthy and neglected in the hospitals. It is horrible. People have to wait for a long time to get even routine operations.
We had a scare with my 5 year old. He was getting bruises all over his body, I told my husband that if it was serious, we would be on the next plane out of there!! Luckily it wasn’t life threatening.
U.S. health care isn’t perfect but we do not want socialized care, been there, didn’t like it.
#10 2008-04-22 12:04 (Reply)
I live in the United States. Two years ago in October I had severe abd. pain and went to the ED. After they ran some test and determined that it was probably nothing, they sent me home. My bill came up to be in the $4,000’s, not including the individual doctors’ bills. Being that I was still a student, I was not able to pay for the fees, however, after some inquiry into the hospital system, I was told that I can apply for a “charity” program so the hospital can forgive my ED stay. I still have to pay the doctors’ bills but I didn’t have to pay the 4 grand. I guess what I’m saying is that in the US, if you look, you’ll find a way to pay off that medical expense.