Look Into The Crystal Ball That Is Canadian Health Care
Doug Giles, who has experienced both Canadian and American health care, writes at Clash Daily about what happens when you transition from a Free-Market to a Government-Administered system.
There is a loss of responsiveness and flexibility. If a private business owner is losing money on every transaction, he will adjust prices to cover costs -- or, introduce additional services with a better profit margin to offset losses. When losing market share to a competitor, he will innovate: improve his product, equipment, services or pricing, to better attract the customers. His drive to succeed will indirectly benefit the public. The best and most successful operations will expand, offering greater service to more people in more locations....The obvious objection (heard frequently here) is that profit-based systems are run by (gasp!) businessmen. And we've seen enough movies to know that businessmen are cold-hearted, steel-eyed, tight-fisted cutthroats who generally sell out their mothers for a nickel -- right?
...But the potential for damage in the private sector is limited by this: customers can go elsewhere, unresponsive operators will eventually close shop. But when public-sector agencies run out of money, they ask the government (read: taxpayer) for more money. Management errors are invariably perpetuated and magnified.
Still on the topic of money, if Obama achieves that one-payer model, remember this: If health care dollars are drawn from the same pool that every other government project fights over, you politicize health care. Period.
This is why, in Canada, abortions and gender reassignment are covered, but physiotherapy and routine eye exams are not. This is also why we lack hospital beds, especially long-term beds while we spend big on pet projects like wind farms. Cynics might call this a passive version of the much-discussed "death panels".
By shifting health care to a government service, hospitals and clinics are forced to fight for a piece of that same pie that infrastructure, law enforcement, education, environmental impact statements, welfare, and free needles for addicts (but not Diabetics) and all the rest battle over.
The whole "free" thing is a misnomer, too. (1) We're paying more and more each year for fewer and fewer available services, but we don't see that because it's buried among our other taxes. Health care and education costs are always the two largest expenses for a province. Forget things like PET scans, (where Ontario only funds 6 scans / 10,000 people / year.) Now we are gradually losing access to things like X-rays (2) and MRI, which can be arbitrarily deemed by a bureaucrat to be "medically unnecessary", and bouncing the bill back to the doctor. Will that affect care? Diagnosis? How could it not?
via @mpetrie98
I was just talking to a Canadian Saturday. She was was all for Obamacare. She was saying how great universal health care and how people in the U.S. were dying for lack of insurance. I didn't have the heart to tell her how many people are dying in Canada because they could not get an MRI for a year.
Jim P. at October 21, 2012 12:54 AM
I've worked in six different hospitals in the Pacific Northwest in the past 18 years. There were Canadian patients in all of them all the time. Some of those patients were there to receive life saving treatment that was not available to them in Canada. At least not available soon enough to save their lives.
With regard to healthcare, many people in the U.S. don't realize how good we have it here. And too many people in Canada no longer have any idea what good healthcare is.
Ken R at October 21, 2012 4:17 AM
Amy Alkon
https://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2012/10/look-into-the-c.html#comment-3398713">comment from Ken RHe makes that point at the link, Ken.
Amy Alkon
at October 21, 2012 8:14 AM
And so Canada illustrates my point: you will not be denied health care in the USA. It will simply not be available. "Insurance" - in quotes because it actually is NOT inurance in conventional terms - exists TO PAY DOCTORS.
There is no way increasing the number of non-medical personnel consuming your service dollar can increase your care.
You are sick? The clerk is not sick. Fill out this form, and wait. The clerk will call you when you may be seen.
Radwaste at October 21, 2012 9:57 AM
I work in admissions at an urgent care/fast track for a hospital right now. There are at least a dozen people a day walking in with no insurance and saying they have no money to pay for services (we charge $195 for uninsured patients, then bill for any charges above that for labs, xrays, etc). We get yelled at regularly by these people who expect to be treated for free because they say they are sick or hurt. It's a business, not a charity! We are usually then forced to listen to a litany of complaints about free health care in other countries, we suck, it's not fair, etc. Apparently everyone expects something for nothing these days. I'd rather have treatments available to me, whether I can afford them or not, than no real options at all.
BunnyGirl at October 21, 2012 1:36 PM
Comments I've heard in hospitals by patients from Canada and the UK:
"Everything is so clean here!"
"I'm only sharing the restroom with one other patient!"
"I'm getting so much attention here, I'm afraid I won't get any rest!" (She was very pleased with the attention).
Ken R at October 21, 2012 4:30 PM
"I work in admissions at an urgent care/fast track for a hospital right now..."
You'll appreciate this. A few months ago we had to take my wife's son (my stepson) to the ER to be treated for a head injury. (He had been in a car accident and refused treatment at the scene, but a few hours later he was behaving irrationally and losing his memory.) While he was being treated, I was walking around the waiting room stretching my legs, and I saw a 400-lb. man in a wheelchair roll himself up to the desk. When the attendent addressed him, the first words out of his mouth were "I'm having back spasms. I need a muscle relaxer." Yeah, I'll bet you do, pal.
Big props to the triage in this ER, by the way: They took in several clearly ill patients and left Mr. Muscle Relaxer waiting. He was still waiting when we left, several hours later.
Cousin Dave at October 22, 2012 8:36 AM
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