Posted on 06/22/2005 8:00:40 AM PDT by Constitution Day
Talk About “Sicko” By Mark Steyn The trouble with most of the Big Ideas is that at heart they’re small, mean ideas applied on a huge scale. Two of them took a colossal knock in recent days, and we should all rejoice. First came the French and Dutch voters’ demolition job on the European Union’s ersatz constitution designed to enshrine permanent rule by a technocratic elite convinced it knows better than the citizenry what’s good for them. Two weeks later, Canada’s Supreme Court struck down the government health-care monopoly, at least as far as the Province of Quebec is concerned. This has vast implications for the Oscar-winning crockumentary maker Michael Moore, whose forthcoming film Sicko is a savage indictment of U.S. health care leavened with a Bowling for Columbine–type suck-up about how we Canadians do these things so much better. That section may have to be re-edited. I confess to being something of an agnostic on health care. I’m no fan of “insurance” that bears no relationship to the cost of treatment or your likelihood of getting any particular ailment, or of the defensiveness of a medical system that has to keep one eye on John Edwards prowling the wards for clients. On the other hand, to spot the drawbacks in your medical treatment, you first have to be getting some. And that’s the design flaw in the Canadian system. As the chief justice, Beverley McLachlin, put it, “Access to a waiting list is not access to health care” — and in Canada you wait for everything. North of the 49th parallel, we accept that if you get something mildly semi-serious it drags on while you wait to be seen, wait to be diagnosed, wait to be treated. Meanwhile, you’re working under par, and I doubt any economic impact accrued thereby is factored into those global health-care-as-a-proportion-of-GDP tables. The default mode of any government system is to “control health-care costs” by providing less health care. Once it becomes natural to wait six months for an MRI, it’s not difficult to persuade you that it’s natural to wait ten months, or fifteen. Acceptance of the initial concept of “waiting” is what matters. True, they’ve not yet reached the stage of a ten-month waiting list for the maternity ward, but consider the experience of Debrah Cornthwaite, who last year gave birth to twin boys at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton. That’s in Alberta. Mrs. Cornthwaite had begun the big day by going to her local maternity ward at Langley Memorial Hospital. That’s in British Columbia. They told her, yes, your contractions are coming every four minutes, but sorry, we don’t have any beds. And, after they’d checked with the bed-availability helpline “BC Bedline,” they brought her the further good news that there was not a hospital anywhere in the province in which she could deliver her babies. There followed seven hours of red tape and paperwork. Then, late in the evening, she was driven to the airport and put on a chartered twin-prop to Edmonton. In the course of the flight, the contractions increased to every two-and-a-half minutes — and most Lamaze classes don’t teach timing your breathing to the turbulence over the Rockies. Would you want to do that on your delivery day? You pack your bag and head to your local hospital in Oakland, and they say not to worry, we’ve got a bed for you in Denver. But forget the medical arguments and consider the purely political ones. The justification for “universal access” to health care is that a “decent society” does not let its sick suffer because they can’t afford an operation. But even as universal access decayed into universal lack of access, the utopian Left defended it all the more vigorously: The fact that we all received the same non-treatment testified to our virtue, though even this perverse defense was utterly phony: One of the most unattractive features of our ersatz egalitarianism was that it led to the creation of a humbug nomenklatura who (like Canada’s prime minister) use private clinics for their own health even as they continue to proclaim that decrepit incompetent monopoly public health is an eternal “Canadian value” that can never be changed. The Canadian columnist Lorne Gunter quoted one of those old jokes intended to reveal national character. This was the one about the American, the Canadian, and the Soviet granted a wish apiece. The American asks to be transported to Montana and given the chance to build a huge cattle herd. The Canadian asks that his rich neighbor with the big herd be taxed more so that Ottawa can give him a grant to buy land and cattle just like the rich neighbor. The genie then asks the Soviet, “Do you want me to give you land and cattle like your neighbor’s, too?” “No,” says the Soviet. “Just kill my neighbor’s herd.” As Gunter put it, “Canadian health care advocates seem to have the same attitude as the Soviet.” The much vaunted progressiveness and compassion of our defining Big Idea has dwindled down into a kinky pleasure in universal mediocrity. Of course, despite the government monopoly, Canadian health care does have a private sector. It’s called America. In Montreal, we drive an hour south to Plattsburgh or Burlington. If the Democrats have their way and America moves (as it’s doing incrementally) to government health care, the entire system will fall apart and we Montrealers will have to drive a week south to Costa Rica.
To spot drawbacks in your health care, you first have to be getting some.
May I rephrase?
It sounded to me like Canadians who get sick near the end of the year are in deep trouble.
Well, what you wrote doesn't surprise me. I know when I had recurrent sinus infections last November, I was referred to an ENT for a "fast track" appointment ... six weeks later, LOL!
It's sad, really, because people have just grown to accept it.
The talk show host up here has pointed out that the only other country in the world besides Canada that doesn't allow some sort of private system along with its public system is Cuba.
Something's gotta give, and soon.
Quebec does do a few things right--outlawing Sharia law, and now this Supreme Court decision.
The trouble is, the politicians have been trying to convince people that any form of private health care is anti-Canadian. The public system is part of the national identity.
But when I first met my husband, sixteen years ago, he had eye surgery at the time and there weren't anywhere near the waiting lines like there are today.
I think it's kind of like the frog in the pot of hot water. People are finally realizing the water is beginning to boil.
Add North Korea. We're in great company.
That sort of confirms what the cruise ship doctor told me, doesn't it?
I gathered that the habit of taking off a month or two at the end of the year is a common practice that isn't made clear to Canadian citizens. It might make them unhappy.
Very perceptive of you. One of our local congress creatures is a huge lefty who has actively taken people to Canada to buy prescription drugs. I had a hard time explaining to my Democrat father that it was a complete scam. They pay heavily in other ways.
In so many ways the news that is NOT reported is the most important information that Americans should be hearing and seeing.
LOL!
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