Universal Health Care! Are Canadians Stupid?

geocities.com ^ | 2000 | Jack Stewart

[SAJ]

Old Hoosier erred: he meant to say this decade

OK, you Canuckistanian clown, what's the waiting period for the elective (but enormously life-enhancing) eye surgery known as intraocular phacoemulsification. In the UK, under their vaunted National Plan, it's 2.5 to 3 years. In the US, in my case at least, it was 11 days.

How long would I have had to stay well worse than legally blind in the Socialist White North?

[joseph_hardesty]

You "accidentally forgot" to mention the introductory paragraph to the news story you cited. I will be glad to reproduce it here:

"Normally when you hear about bus trips between Maine and Canada related to health care, it's Mainers going north to buy prescription drugs."

You are welcome!

[mitchbert]

The central problem with our (Canadian) system is the lack of a private alternative for those who wish to avail themselves of it. This requires folks who don't want to wait for service to go to the States and pay for it if they can. Wait times are caused by several issues but two of them are the backlog created by folks with no opportunity to opt out of the public system, thereby opening up space for others, and the shortage of beds due to limited government resources to build new facilities. That being said, long waits are not universal. Personally, I had a situation this year where I needed to see my doctor for an unpleasant but certainly non-life threatening condition. I saw him the same day I called him. I saw a specialist two hours later, and was in outpatient surgery the following day. And I'm no one of importance; the trick is I have a long term family physician and don't rely on walk in clinincs or emergency rooms for my medical care (far too many do). Cancer patients are another matter in many cases, though, as limited facilities do create unacceptable waits. Still, my family has had some experience with cancer in the past while, and treatment was timely and appropriate. This is harder for people in small towns and remote areas, though to be sure.

Discostu, I would argue that the reason SARS didn't spread widely outside Toronto was specifically because it was first detected in Toronto. We have some excellent research and teaching hospitals up here and once the initial spread happened (a situation that was caused by sloppy procedure and unfamiliarity with the disease, not specific to a socialized system) there was a full court press effort to stop the spread, and in fact it didn't move out of the group affected by the original spread. Had this disease surfaced in a small town with limited facilities and few specialists in infectious diseases it could have got out of hand really quickly. What do you think would have happened if the first breakout of the virus had been in the barrios of LA? Illegals get sick, won't go the hospital out of fear or ignorance, can you say rapidly spreading pandemic? North America is very lucky it happened here first. YOu want to blame somebody? Blame the vile communist Chinese for sitting on this problem for months out of their stupid oriental misplaced "pride and fear of loss of face." And before anyone thinks I'm simply blindly defending our system here, I'm not. There are serious issues with it, but I one of my closest friends is a Doctor of Immunology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences (where you want to be if you're REALLY sick or injured in Toronto) and she was on the inside of the SARS crisis (also working currently on West Nile).

Our system is far from perfect, and I have have many family members who are American physicians (surgeons, actually); in many ways the U.S. system is vastly superior to the Canadian system, the health of research and discoveries being only one proof of that. The one big advantage the Canuck system has is that a major illness won't cost you everything you have, and the medical community can bring the full weight of available treatment technology to bear on anyone who needs it. Still, never forget what P.J. O'Roarke says about government run medical care: "If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it's 'free'."

[mitchbert]

In Canada,do they have the same thing we have in Australia re private health care?ie,if you do get private health care insurance,you are exempt from paying medicare fees at tax time?

No, everyone gets dinged on their tax bill. As well, many folks, myself included, carry supplamental coverage (though an employer/employee copayment arrangement) that insures me for things the gov't system doesn't, like dental, drugs, long term disability pay assistance, etc. Our system is far from universal in fact.

[BookmanTheJanitor]

WTF? I just posted the article (including the part you said I forgot) & source. If you got a problem with the article or with reading comprehension, that's too bad.

[smpc]

So there are no private hospitals there?

[jla]

So are you an American or Canadian?
And what's your point in posting this?

[hobbes1]

I won't say you're an idiot but.....


Here's something that is far too obvious for the author to have omitted from consideration.


Immigration. We have a far greater number of people streaming cross our borders that Canada does not have, and that skews all of the Health numbers.


Go back to DU.

[Scenic Sounds]

Increasingly, the traditional connection between employment and health insurance in this country is being severed. Private employers seem to want out of the health insurance business. Should this trend continue, I think that it is more or less inevitable that some sort of national health care system will emerge here. If people can't continue to get health insurance at work, I'm afraid that they will get it at the ballot box. ;-)

[weegee]

Just another smarmy lib.

Please don't feed the trolls.

[smpc]

Ok,sounds similar to what we had up to the 80's here.I guess Australia is half way between the US and Canadian systems.

[discostu]

It wasn't first detected in Toronto, they had received warning on SARS a few days before. On top of that there were multiple waves of infections at the Toronto hospital with at least two being well after everybody knew it was in that hospital.

I'm not blaming anybody I'm just pointing out the simple fact. In head-to-head comparisons of how the two medical systems delt with the same problem the Canadian healthcare system (like all the other socialized healthcare systems that ran into SARS) failed miserably. That's a simple fact, privatized healthcare handled SARS socialized healthcare allowed it to run rampant. There are differences at the most basic level with how the two systems approach health problems and the socialized system sucks, socialized anything sucks, that's why socialized countries are not leaders of the world.

[The Westerner]

Surely 40 million Canadians can't be wrong? Their opinion of themselves does not constitute a logical argument. However, if you are enamored of their system, feel free to go there and see for yourself. Personally, I have family who fled the Canadian health care system when their medical practice was expropriated by the government...And I have heard the same horror stories as Pete above just posted.

[spunkets]

" As the above article points out, in a 1992 Gallup poll, the Canadians, who live right next to us, and speak the same language, and have lots of knowledge of our system, preferred their system to our system by 96% to 2%."

They're as cluless as y'all are. The only thing those dims know is that it's "free". Well it's not free, there are waiting lines and the services are rationed.

[joseph_hardesty]

where is DU????

[muawiyah]

A simpler explanation for the Canadian preference for their own system is that it is the ONLY available system in Canada.

Secondly, not all Canadians have used the American health care system so they just don't know. The fact that some are able to state they prefer the American to the Canadian system is a demonstration that some Canadians have, in fact, used our system. Those folks found the Canadian system lacking.

My sister in law's sister was invited by the Canadian Defense Force to provide a demonstration of a new type of ski fitting. Next thing you know she had appendicitis while in Canada. The CDF was unable to "schedule" her for a medical appointment of any kind. In the end they used a Canadian government helicopter to fly her to Seattle where she could be seen immediately.

That's not necessarily "anecdotal" ~ it reflects the systemic bias against foreigners built into the Canadian health care system. The place is functionally not a safe place for Americans to travel because they will not tend to you, and you cannot otherwise "purchase" medical care up there. As far as Canada is concerned a foreigner can just die in the street when it comes to even emergency care.

[weegee]

Newbie Troll posted a 3 year old article with a misleading headline.

Check the PDF for yourself, actual title is:

Universal Health Care! Are Canadians Stupid?

This is your "first" day and all but please don't change titles

[weegee]

Like the trolls haven't asked that before and then bragged about their activity back at DirtyUnderwear.com.

[mywholebodyisaweapon]

If you are making the point that the U.S. health care system has problems, then the point is well-taken. Our system has so little of the free market left in it that inefficiencies are inevitable.

But to say that a socialist system is superior is to dodge the issue, isn't it? We haven't had a free market system for so long that a second-best type comparison misses the mark. It is not the socialist aspects of the U.S. system that keep it going, but rather the few, remaining market-based mechanisms. Please don't try to use Canada as a excuse to take away what has kept our system, however flawed, afloat.

[paul51]

LOL. That's a great shot.