Laz this sounds like you :))
The impatient inpatient: This is where the arguments get anecdotal, and little ridiculous. I never understand, for instance, why American small business owners who have to buy insurance in the world's most dysfunctional market complain so much about the prospect of Canadian-style health care. In 1993 I talked to a Rotary Club where, before I even got my international comparisons slide out, the small business owners in the room came after me with the classic anti-Canadian argument that goes something like "When he needed care the Prime Minister of Alberta/Nova Scotia/Yukon Territory/Canada came down to the US". There has always been an extremely limited number of Canadians getting new high-tech care in the US that isn't available in Canada, almost always paid for by their province. However this has been transposed into the argument that thousands of Canadians are flooding across the border to get care that is unavailable at home. There is even the very occasional and underfilled patient bus trip coming down to get prescriptions and treatments unavailable in Canada, of course massively outnumbered by the buses taking Americans to buy cheaper drugs up north.
While the argument about Canadians flooding south to get medical care withheld from them up north is widely heard, it's bullshit. Yup, lots of Canadians get care in the US, but that's because, due to the better weather, the higher incomes, going to college or that NAFTA thing, they eitherlive here, or are on vacation in Florida to escape that terrible winter. Work done by a team led by Steve Katz at University of Michigan with the Evans/Barer/Cardiff team at UBC which looked into this in obsessive detail found essentially no evidence of Canadians crossing the border to get care. (Incidentally plenty of Americans are still going up there for non-covered surgery like laser corrective eye surgery, which is cheaper and just as good up north). In fact according to Canadian insurers there appears to be no interest amongst Canadian consumers in commercial insurance products to cover care abroad, other than standard holiday cover. Note that this is not the case in the UK, where private insurance allows about 10% of Brits to jump the queue to get surgery in a private hospital. So it looks like the Canadians accept the fact that they have to wait for surgery, and not surprisingly don't want to come down here to pay for it out of pocket. |
