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Biotech / Medical : HRC HEALTHSOUTH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tunica Albuginea who wrote (53)	11/30/1999 5:25:00 PM
From: Tunica Albuginea	Respond to of 181

Heresy in Canada Editorial by TA: Premier Klein should invite HRC CEO R.Scrushy to help design a more efficient system for Canada. Also, franchise HRC in Canada, :-) TA ----------------------------------- interactive.wsj.com November 29, 1999 Wall Street Journal, Review & Outlook Heresy in Canada Alberta Premier Ralph Klein just announced that the Canadian province would begin using private medical facilities to provide for some surgical services that require overnight stays under the country's health care system. Calling it "nonsense" to suggest that it is bad to use a private provider to deliver a public health service, Mr. Klein said his goals are to reduce waiting times for surgery and costs, and to invite innovation. Ottawa bureaucrats, such as the federal Health Minister Alan Rock, provincial doctors and health care unions reacted hysterically. Mr. Rock promised to "oppose at every turn any effort to create a parallel private health system in Canada." The leader of the New Democratic Party, Alexa McDonough, said, "If Ralph Klein gets away with what he's now launched, we can kiss off Medicare." Gets away with what? According to a study by Vancouver's Fraser Institute, in 1998 the "median actual wait" in Canada extended well beyond the "median clinically reasonable wait" for any number of treatments, including radiation oncology, urgent cardiovascular surgery, and neurosurgery. And the problem is getting worse. To deal with shortages in the area of chemotherapy, some provinces now ship patients over the U.S. border for timely treatment that Canada can't deliver. Efforts by Mr. Klein to treat illness close to home and to expedite patient access to that treatment would seem to make him a genuine public servant. But to the die-hard government health bureaucracy, he's a traitor to the nation. But Mr. Klein is hardly proposing a free market in health care. The policy statement released by the premier's office emphasizes that the single payer Canadian system will be safe under Mr. Klein. "There will be no two-tier medicine" and providers will be "prohibited from charging any fee . . . to insured persons for an insured surgical service beyond those set out in the Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan." "There will be no private hospitals. . . ." So what is Mr. Klein trying to "get away with"? As far as we can tell he's plotting to help residents get the operations they need, when they need them. Specifically, a "Regional Health Authority may . . . contract with a private provider (either for profit or not-for-profit) for the provision of surgical services." The irony here is that there already are surgical services--not requiring overnight stays--that are delivered by the private sector, among them, notably, abortions. There is something not very life affirming about a health care system that provides, on demand, services that end life, while it rations against the advice of physicians' treatments for sustaining life. Canada's big-government egalitarians insist that shortages could be taken care of without the private sector if only the provinces would spend more money on the problem. But Fraser Institute's Director of Health Policy Research, Martin Zelder, reports, "More money doesn't reduce waiting because, under the current system, it is largely diverted to fattening the paychecks of hospital employees." That practice may also explain why the medical technology in Canadian hospitals is becoming increasingly obsolete. With most of the pie going toward the payroll, there isn't enough left over to stay modern. In a study on medical technology, Fraser reports that "although Canada is the fifth highest among OECD countries in terms of total spending on health (as a percentage of GDP), it is generally among the bottom third of OECD countries in availability of technology." Private providers might well deliver health care more efficiently, namely through the use of better technology. The status quo mind-set seems to be that merely tinkering with the Canadian health care system is an attack on the nation itself, regardless of the potential gains for humankind. Mr. Klein's sin in the eyes of Ottawa is to officially recognize the inadequacies of that system. He should be congratulated for his courage.