OT "The country's publicly financed health insurance system ... — is gradually breaking down."
"Canada's Slow-Motion Public Health System Falters, Private Medical Care Is Surging "
"Supreme Court ruling last June — it found that a Quebec provincial ban on private health insurance was unconstitutional when patients were suffering and even dying on waiting lists"
nytimes.com
RE: "In that respect we don't get that much different care than our neighbors to the north."
There's actually a substantially worse wait in Canada. My brother is a Cardiologist in the USA and he is constantly getting a ton of people from Canada who are willing to pay for heart care at his clinic, rather than die waiting 12 to 24 months for care. (When a wait time is 24 months in Canada for a particular tool, this is the systems way of saying they really don't want to treat you.) The seriousness of the cases that sit with no care for a year shocked my brother - because he said in the USA we would not put them on a year-long queue.
I can remember a friend of mine whose Dad had a heart attack in Canada and they basically didn't do anything. In the USA, they would have had him in IC and gotten what needed to be removed out of his clogged arteries without delay, then the risk would have been cut approximately in half for each 24 hours thereafter over a period of a few days. But in Canada, her Dad was just sitting in the hospital forever on a waiting list for surgery. Unreal. Talk about a high-risk situation - he could have died any minute. It is also less efficient to keep people waiting in a long line at a hospital queue.
We definitely don't want to go to a public health care. While public health care does have better preventive care (because they look at the total life cost of patient care rather than annual care), we are substantially better when it comes to handling the critical things that need more immediate attention than a year to two year wait would permit.
But hospitals should be sensitive to treating everyone equally, even when there is the pressure of high publicity. When my brother had a govt official as a patient (a governor), he was treated no differently than anyone else, except for the matter of dealing with their public relations person. It's possible Clinton had more clogged arteries. The ordering of treatment is dependent upon the outcome of the tests. I believe it's against the law (or at least, against the medical ethics) to treat people preferentially - in fact, a doctor could lose their liability insurance if they treated one person before another person without any valid medical reason to do so.
It's the poor that suffer in a public health care plan - because the rich simply come to the USA for better care.
Regards,
Amy J |
