American health care system is the safety valve for the Canadian system. If you don't want to die while waiting for care, pay up and come south to America. If not, die waiting.

Of course, the national health care system cannot stand competition. So they're doing their best to eliminate it.

I've posted on his before, but I thought I should do it again - the military has centralised heath care

I had a growth in my lung, I was told given my family history and age and the fact that just 6 months eariler there had been nothing on my chest x-ray that the likley canidate was testicular cancer.

I was told we had three options, 1.Remove it immedatly, 2.needle biopsy, 3.take another x ray in SIX MONTHS to see if it had grown. The GP said given the likely canidate he was recommeding removal.

A month later I show up at the hopsital for what I thought would be surgery, but some overseer denied the recomendation for removal and instead opted to sign me up to have my testicles scanned with an ultasound. It showed nothing, the doctor who preformed it said that wasnt unsusal becuase in guys my age most testicular cancer is not a mass in or on the testicles but a mutation of the cells in the lining of the sack around the testicles.

He recomeded surgery to remove the mass in my lung. Two weeks later I show up again only to find no surgery, instead I had been 'approved' for an iodine contrast CAT scan guided needle biopsy. On the way into my lung the guy scraped the needle against my rib. They were unable to penetrate the mass in my lung and decided to try and biopsy the few cells that might have gotten stuck to the tip of the needle.

Two weeks later I was told the results were inconclusive

Two weeks later I wsa at another appointment with a different GP who suggested that we wait six moths to try for another biopsy. I told him to go fuck himself and that I would be getting new crews and my senators involved. Given the expression on his face I'm guessing that was te first time a private had ever spoken that way to him, he was a Lt Colenel

A few days later I was schedualed for the surgery to remove the mass in my lung - turned out to be fungus, which if it had managed to escape my lung into my blood stream whould have set up new growth everywhere in my body killing me

That is what government controlled heathcare gets you.

Recomedations to wait until your acctually dying, peicemeal soulutions, others making decisions on your behalf without your input, and only the threat of greater powers being brought to bear being truly effective.

And what sort of power will you have if everyone else is in the same position?

Most Americans are bombarded with propaganda. You don’t know how many think tanks are paid by certain industries — insurance, drug, organized medicine — to feed out negative stories about the Canadian health system. I live in Canada and was born here. My Canadian born sister works as a nurse in Florida and has been married to an infectious disease specialist for almost 20 years. My other sister has been a nurse here in Canada for close to 30 years. I previously worked in the Canadian life and disability health insurance industry for a top tier firm for close to ten years in the 1990s.

Of course we have mishaps here in Canada and our system has its share of inefficiencies, but no more or less than in the US, all factors considered. In the US, there is a whole industry collecting news of how awful and terrible and inefficient everything is here and of how *gasp* socialized our health care is. This misinformation is then being beamed out for wide-reaching US consumer consumption, instilling needless fear into your population. Do you not have firemen, police and ambulance services in the US? THAT is government funded. Is that socialism too? Quite frankly the irrational fears perpetuated upon your public by your government and their mouthpiece shill “think-tanks” are ridiculous and completely without merit. The US system is irreparably broken and well on its way to collapsing under its own immense bureaucracy.

Your inability to look at the issues rationally and objectively and work toward solutions that benefit ALL your citizenry is a world-wide laughing stock. Any nit with half a brain knows your system is collapsing and is going to bankrupt itself because it is based in profit for corporations and not on what is best for your fellow human beings. Access to affordable, safe health care should be a basic human right, for everyone. To most people in the world, this is a no-brainer.

The statistics in the piece are laughable and exaggerated. One thing you need to understand is that the “Fraser Institute” is a well-known conservative Canadian Harper government (think GOP) think-tank mouthpiece. They receive almost of their funding from conservative foundations and organizations, including many of a fundamental evangelical nature. They are most well known for receiving large chunks of funding from the oil and gas industry here in Canada and for their “policy position papers” on climate change denial. Exxon Mobil is one their biggest contributors. Stephen Harper, our Prime Minister is from the west coast of Canada where the world’s largest environmental nightmare is currently located, the Alberta Oil Sands. His politics are based in two very right-wing western Canadian political parties, the Canadian Alliance and the Reform Party. And it is no secret to most informed Canadians that he is well-greased by the oil and gas lobbyists here. The Fraser Institute is a joke. There is nothing objective about anything that emanates from it. Ever.

So, how about some facts, facts are good, right?

No one waits “an average of 19 weeks from a general practitioner's referral to delivery of elective treatment by a specialist.” That is ridiculous. If someone needs emergency medical treatment here, they get it. No one dies “waiting” for treatment and no one goes bankrupt or loses their home because they can’t pay a hospital bill. The reason for this are because a long time ago we made it a political moral priority to not do that to our citizens.

People, by nature, are always more comfortable culturally with whatever they have than with some other system. People imagine having the worst illness, and if you are really very sick in the U.S., you can generally get excellent care in your country, particularly if you are well insured. But if you live the average life of an American, like we very much do here in Canada, under the Canadian system, we have better primary care, and easier access to it

Canadians spend half as much per capita on health care as you do in the U.S., and yet if you come here, you may have to wait here and there for some services like an MRI image if it’s not a life and death situation, but overall the system produces very good health outcomes and anyone in need of emergency care or immediate treatment of a life and death nature gets it. Each case is assessed on its individual merits. And there is no giant bill that will bankrupt you if you don’t have insurance. People are more satisfied there with their care here than Americans are with theirs. If you diagnosed it like a physician working from within it, you’d give our system an A and you’d have a hard time giving more than a B to the US system. And by physician, I mean a physician who actually functions under the belief that the Hippocratic Oath actually means something and that he or she has a duty to practice medicine ethically. Not Dr. Feelgood Beverly Hills boob-job surgeon who needs to buy another yacht and new set of lips for his 20-year-old wife.

Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein of Harvard did a study comparing Canada and the U.S. looking at what it costs employers, providers, doctors and hospitals and the insurance mechanism and compared Canada and the US, and they found that it’s somewhere between 25 and 30 percent that goes to administration. Anyone who has had anyone really sick in their family in the US knows how much time you spend haggling over the bills and we have none of that in our system. US insurance companies have a nomenclature that when the hospital issues a bill, the insurance company can’t understand it. So there are entities, enterprises that translate that from the insurance companies’ nomenclature into the hospitals’ nomenclature and vice versa.

For example, imagine a hospital sees a horse and it says I code that as H-O-R-S-E, and the insurance company uses French for that, C-H-E-V-A-L, and now the computers, they can’t mesh this unless there is a translator in between who says “Oh, horse for that insurance company means cheval.” This goes on every day. They don’t understand the way that they “code” things. So I hope Obama will come and say, “You guys had 30 years to figure it out and obviously you couldn’t. I’ll figure it out for you. Here’s a nomenclature. You must use it, and if you don’t, you don’t get paid, period.”

If you ask an American health insurance executive “What do you pay in New Jersey for a colonoscopy?” He will just laugh and say, “What a silly question. There is no price for a colonoscopy. We have a different price for every hospital. And for the same hospital, we might have six prices depending on the insurance product, is it an HMO, etc.”

There could be 30, 40 for one company, but then with Aetna for example, they could have another 30, and everyone has a different contract, so a hospital might receive 60, 80,100 different prices for a colonoscopy, depending on which insurance company and what contract it is. So when you say ‘What are the private market prices?’ There is no price. When you have a consumer-directed health care system, where people are supposed to shop around, what are they going to tell them? They can’t tell them anything because they can’t shop around. It’s a false marketplace for the consumer.

There is no real price because every price has to be negotiated and haggled over. So imagine what it costs compared to a system where a government negotiates with a physician association. Here’s the fee schedule, and that’s it, and everyone uses the same fee schedule. You can put that into a computer. You have a little card like an American Express card. The price list is already there. You swipe it through, the doctor keys what he or she did and here’s your bill. In the US, you have to look at what contract was it, where it originated, what the specifics are, and if the coding turns out to be wrong, and the bill isn’t clean, it’s an administrative nightmare.

There’s a company, I think it’s a subsidiary of United, that writes software to help hospitals in the US bill better and get every dime they can from insurance companies and then they also sell other software to help insurance companies defend themselves against the doctors’ billing. It’s laughable. It’s almost hard to explain it without laughing. Americans are SO uniformed at how their health care system does not function to serve their best interests.

You already have a Canadian-style health plan in America. It’s called Medicare. It works. Don’t tell me Medicare doesn’t work. Tell that to the elderly. One way to test that it is to take it away. Then see what happens. Bedlam. Especially now with your massive unemployment and aging baby-boomers. Crumbling republic is what it is.

You need to ask how Canada does it. How does Germany do it? How does Taiwan do it? How do other nations do it? The US is spending twice as much as the people who are culturally similar to the US. You really have to ask yourself, how do they do it? Look at what the Bush administration did with drugs, turning the Medicare Part D to private industry, and what did they do? They persuaded millions of the elderly to switch out of brand name drugs into generics, totally devastating the drug industry. This wasn’t done by the government. It was done by private enterprise, by private, competitive enterprise. That is because your system and all of its offshoot industries and its sub-businesses function for profit and not for real live HEALTH of human beings. People are commodities in the US health care system. There is no moral responsibility. Profit is king.

When someone has a major illness in the US, they should able to get access to care and not have to worry about whether they can pay the bill. There are certain things you formulate in the framework for a health care system to achieve. You could say, “We’re not going to copy Germany, we’re not going to copy Canada, but we want to end at the same point,” and that is that. People can go to bed and not worry about losing their health insurance when they lose their job as so many have. And those things are achievable, and the Obama plan, if you look at it, has all that in it. And just to be clear, Obama’s plan is not national health care, a nationalized health care, government funded, government run, the taxpayers pay. No. It’s not that. It says you keep whatever you have as long as they’ll give it to you, but if they don’t give it to you anymore, here, we have this.

And the same thing will eventually happen to your banking system, you’d be surprised what that will look like in another 10 years. It will be highly regulated, like a utility. It’ll be small. It’ll do what it was supposed to do rather than being a gambling casino, which is what it became, almost causing a world economic collapse. The bankers, in 2008, they behaved like drunken sailors. It’s time for the US to grow up and stop acting like a self-centered teenager and start putting the needs of the people who DEMOCRATICALLY elected them to function for the people and not for corporations. All this media hyperbole that Canada has “socialized medicine” is a giant steaming cup of GOP mind-game manipulation. Most people are too stupid to do the reading to learn the facts. No. Instead they will blog and post and re-circulate conservative-based “think-tank” research as fact.

How about a balanced perspective based on reality for a change?

Ah, I see one of Occupy Wall Street's paid shills has shown up. And as usual, your entirely-too-long argument consists entirely of ad hominem attacks against anyone and anything that disagreed with your opinions. I notice you don't actually have a counter-argument to the 19-week statistic; you just try to impugn the source, and then you just state that they are wrong and you are right, with no supporting evidence. And then you wander off into a whole bunch of off-topic, fact-free standard lefty rambling. As is usual with you leftists, it's ultimately about your desire to get something for free, even if the people providing that something have to be enslaved to provide it to you. So immature. So leftist.

.... My Canadian born sister works as a nurse in Florida and has been married to an infectious disease specialist for almost 20 years. My other sister has been a nurse here in Canada for close to 30 years. I previously worked in the Canadian life and disability health insurance industry for a top tier firm for close to ten years in the 1990s.

And what does this have to do with the rest of your post?

You already have a Canadian-style health plan in America. It’s called Medicare.

And I want you to find where in the The United States Constitution that Medicare is mentioned. And if you say the Article 1 Section 8 you are a sheeple.

Nope, not a paid shill. Just a Canadian who has experience and knowledge of BOTH systems and who knows fear and bullshit masquerading as facts when I see it.

My counter argument to the 19 week statistic is that I have lived here for well over 4 decades and it's just not true. It doesn't happen. Come and visit and see for yourself.

And thanks for the compliment re OWS and Anon.
Flattered.

Immature? Oh. You mean like name calling?

I'll let you people get back to your Ayn Rand seance now.

Rosemary, just a heads up but keep an eye on your real estate market up there... pop goes the bubble.

Also what works for a country like Canada with its population size just might not work with the US.

Nope, not a paid shill. Just a Canadian who has experience and knowledge of BOTH systems and who knows fear and bullshit masquerading as facts when I see it. -- Rosemary Rich at February 27, 2012 8:23 PM

How have you had experience with both systems?

Can I go somewhere in Canada and get an MRI or CAT scan on demand? What if I wanted an MRI and asked my doctor for a referral: Could I do this?

Or would I have to wait for an MRI slot to open?

"Can I go somewhere in Canada and get an MRI or CAT scan on demand?"

Yeah actually, you can. Since 1993. If you have the cash.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1485489/pdf/cmaj00276-0105.pdf

"Can I go somewhere in Canada and get an MRI or CAT scan on demand?"

Yes, private clinics offering these have been sprouting up like mushrooms since that first one opened in '93:

http://www.findprivateclinics.ca/MRI_Scan/82-0.html

In theory, these heretics aren't supposed to be practicing private medicine up here. In practice, they're taking some strain off an overburdened public system.

"The entrepreneurial, independent American spirit tends to demand the best medicine has to offer..."

OK, but nowhere in her piece does Pipes give a figure for the very big (and growing) share of American healthcare spending that comes from taxpayers - Medicare, Medicaid,Veterans Health Administration, etc.

Canadian here.

Not going to wade into the debate too much here but just want to say that as a Canadian lawyer and one who is licensed to practice in the state of New York, I have seen my share of medical American malpractice litigation resulting from health care disputes. The system has some very intrinsic problems many of which which could prevent such costly antics if it were to be redesigned to function more efficiently.

I am also a consumer of the Canadian "socialist" health care system and the the points Rosemary makes in her, yes, way too long post, are all valid and accurate.

There are some very serious economic concerns with the US system as is and it really cannot continue unabated. It simply won't be able to sustain itself.

Also, effectively (or even ineffectively for that matter) criticizing a right-wing point of view does not automatically render someone a Communist lefty from "Anonymous" or a "paid shill from Occupy Wall Street." What a low-brow assessment. Perhaps now is a good time to be reminded of Hanlon's Razor: Never ascribe to malice that which can more easily be explained by stupidity.

So, how about some facts, facts are good, right?

OK, fact is Canada and ALL of Europe rely on the US to fund NATO and the UN at levels far outstripping there own, not to mention the amount of money we pay such governemnt directly in order to fund bases which kept Russia at bay for 30+yrs and looks like will be keeping them at bay sometime in the near future.

Imagine how well your socialised medice would run if you didnt have the spare funds affored to you by the american tax payer via sholdering your NATO and UN burden

I'm sorry I missed this.

"It says you keep whatever you have as long as they’ll give it to you, but if they don’t give it to you anymore, here, we have this."

Rosemary (and James): That's false. And I have the letter from our company's contracted health-care provider, which they were required to provide by law, to prove it.

Federal laws change what private health-care providers may offer you.

You need to quit relying on anecdotes and press releases and start reading legal requirements.

Until you do, you just don't know what you're talking about. I suspect it's not occurred to you, either, that you used the term "give to you". That's totally wrong, too, because I pay for it. It's not a gift.

Here's a summary of what Rosemary and James do not know.

It's an editorial, so be sure to look this up in the bill itself -- but this is clearly not what Rosemary and James represent.

Rosemary, long but mostly right on, although Obamacare has critics from both the left and right. It's a boon to the insurance industry.

Lujlp, the U.S. doesn't have to commit its military to Europe's defense now that the Cold War has been over for over 20 years. It could pull back and take care of its own people first. But then, that would anger the Military-Industrial complex at home, wouldn't it?