Free Republic

Canada's single-payer healthcare system forced over 1 million patients to wait for necessary medical treatments last year. That's an all-time record. Those long wait times were more than just a nuisance; they cost patients $1.9 billion in lost wages, according to a new report by the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-based think-tank. Lengthy treatment delays are the norm in Canada and other single-payer nations, which ration care to keep costs down. Yet more and more Democratic leaders are pushing for a single-payer system -- and more and more voters are clamoring for one. Indeed, three in four Americans now support a...

A recent survey conducted by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 51 percent of U.S. adults support single-payer health care. This isn’t a poll of actual voters, of course, but it does suggest that the propaganda campaign conducted by the Democrats and the “news” media is having an effect. The system they most often hold up as a paragon of the single-payer approach to health care is, of course, Canada’s “Medicare” program. But, before deciding to emulate the Canucks, we should consider what they really pay for health care and what they get for their money....

Conservatives are rumbling around the talk show circuit bellowing about the socialist threat to the (literal) American body politic. And, as usual, Canada is once again getting dragged into the fracas, shoved around by both sides as either an exemplar or a warning — and, along the way, getting coated with the obfuscating dust of so many willful misconceptions that the actual facts about How Canada Does It are completely lost in the melee. I’m both a health-care-card-carrying Canadian resident and an uninsured American citizen who regularly sees doctors on both sides of the border. As such, I’m in a...

Measuring just 10 inches long, Carter Lake should never have made it past his first few desperate hours outside the womb. When his mother Jennifer’s water broke barely half-way through her pregnancy, doctors warned her they would let the baby die if he was delivered at less than 24 weeks. Resuscitation and life support at that point were futile, they insisted. But four days later, Lake spontaneously gave birth at home and the minuscule, 22-week infant was sped to hospital by ambulance, where staff took him without question to the intensive-care unit. In the ensuing days, though, doctors and nurses...

The FDA letter said that since 2011, the company has repeatedly discarded batches of vaccine because of bacterial counts that registered above specified limits. It noted that 21 per cent of the plant's production in 2014 could not be released to the market because of the problem. "We have 30 days to review and respond to the findings noted in their report and we are committed to doing so by August 4, 2014," said the email from Michelle Smolenaars Hunter, communications manager for GSK Canada. GSK expects to provide between 28 million and 33 million doses of flu vaccine to...

Every year thousands of Canadian have no choice but to seek medical care outside of the country’s single-payer health care system, according a report from a Canadian free-market think tank. In 2013, nearly 42,000 Canucks left their homeland to avoid long wait times and inferior care that plagues their centralized health system. The report from the free-market Fraser Institute found that 41,838 Canadians became “medical tourists” in 2013 and sought care outside of their hockey-loving country. While there were slightly fewer people fleeing the Canadian health system in 2013 than the previous year, the number leaving still amounts to nearly...

A Canadian study released Wednesday found that many provinces in our neighbor to the North have seen patients fleeing the country and opting for medical treatment in the United States. The nonpartisan Fraser Institute reported that 46,159 Canadians sought medical treatment outside of Canada in 2011, as wait times increased 104 percent — more than double — compared with statistics from 1993. Specialist physicians surveyed across 12 specialties and 10 provinces reported an average total wait time of 19 weeks between the time a general practitioner refers a patient and the time a specialist provides elective treatment — the longest...

Among the consequences of poor access to health care in Canada is the reality that some Canadians will ultimately receive the care they require outside of the country. Some of these patients will have been sent out of country by the public health care system due to a lack of available resources or the fact that some procedures or equipment are not provided in their home jurisdiction. Others will have chosen to leave Canada in response to concerns about quality (Walker et al., 2009); to avoid some of the adverse medical consequences of waiting for care such as worsening of...

An illegal immigrant has no right to free medical intervention or ongoing health care under the Charter of Rights, the Federal Court of Appeal has ruled in a precedent-setting decision.

Physicians at Montreal’s LaSalle Hospital grew weary of waiting for government funds to improve their hospital, so some of them took matters into their own hands. They posted videos of the emergency room on YouTube. Here’s one, and although it is in French, it’s pretty clear from the start what some of the problems are.

But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948. The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government’s goal to effect $30 billion in “efficiency savings” in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished. In a document, or white paper, outlining the plan, the government admitted...

Top state officials appeal for access to cheaper meds By Rachel Brand, Rocky Mountain News May 6, 2004 One million people already know what lawmakers are starting to figure out: Drugs are cheaper in Canada, and it's time the government finds a way to ensure their safety. State governors, attorneys general, the head of a national pharmacy chain and even the White House are calling for - or capitulating to the reality of - legal drug imports. On Wednesday, state governors told a federal advisory panel that the U.S. government should establish a way to give Americans safe access to...