Medical Services OTOH, are not manufactured goods to be exported. They Are SERVICES provided on a local (relatively) basis.
Can you see the Apples in the Basket of Oranges now?
She lives in Florida and for three months a year she goes to different hospitals around the U.S. verifying claims by Canadian citizens who come here on "vacation", are then stricken with some affliction and use our system for treatment. A claim is them filed with the Canadian flubberment and they reimburse the health care facility here.
She told my s-i-l that people up there use someone else's name to go to a doctor and get diagnosed. Since the wait is so long for non-emergent procedures they take this info with them on vacation. When they get here they get taken care of.
Want to here the best part. The ex-Canadian nurse still gets her full salary from before the down sizing.
Great system, eh?
I can offer you anecdotal proff since I am Canadian and lived in the Windsor area. People were dying on waiting lists for heart surgery (waiting times being 18 to 24 months) back in the early '90's. So people that needed surgery went to Detroit and had it paid for by the provincial health care system. Since so many people were electing this option, the provincial government, under Bob Rae and the NDP (extreme socialist party, far left of the Liberals) changed the system so that coverage would be for the max allowed under OHIP. THat maxiumum was about 25-30% of what the cost was outside Canada. So now only people with money could go to the U.S. and the average Canadian got stuck in the long waiting lists. There is a two-tier system in Canada: the government run system and the U.S. system for the wealthy.
This isn't a valid comparison, so you can't include the people from the U.S. who buy prescriptions in Canada. These people are going to Canada to buy something that is identical to what they would buy in the U.S., but at a price that has been artificially reduced in Canada through government regulation.
When it comes to things that are truly different in health care, Canada doesn't come close to the U.S. If you go through any medical specialty that you can thing of (neurology, cardiology, orthopedics, etc.) and rank all of the hospitals in the world for each of them, I'll bet 95 of the top 100 hospitals for these specialties are in the U.S.
Not prõf, but an indicatio, nevertheless. My town has historically bên a beach resort with a tremendous summer tourist season and economic depression for the rest of the year. When Canada cut off the last of private health care we suðenly got a winter season consisting mostly of Canadians coming to the coast. The ones I talked to and that my friends dealt with came here to get their major health needs taken care of along with a nice warm weather vacation. These visitors were notable for aðing nothing to the local economy outside of rõm and fõd and the local hospital entered a period of prosperity it had not before known. After a few years Canada disallowed insurance payments to foreign entities and the Canadian tourists declined radically in number but did not stop.
The visitation has been increasing steadily since and at least one couple says their visit is because they simply could not get things taken care of in Canada without waits that would preclude successful treatment of the problem. Getting that bypass now costs more than ever because they have to paythe government "insurance" and still have to travel and pay the uninsured rates for the treatment. Some have purchased American insurance using their winter aðresses and are paying two large insurance rates.
Canadian doctors can only earn a certain prescribed sum each year. When they reach that total, they move to their U.S. practice -- which they share with another Canadian doctor who mans it the rest of the year.
As a consequence, Montana has a relatively high population of doctors.