Failure Is An Orphan

And it doesn’t get any orphannier than when your father abandons you.

We’ll get back to that.  Let’s talk history:

As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates’ comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in Detroit, the overworked doctor in Orlando, to name a few.

But no one will mention Claude Castonguay — perhaps not surprising because this statesman isn’t an American and hasn’t held office in over three decades.

But if you’re a Canadian who’s died waiting for a kidney transpant, or because they couldn’t get a specialist appointment to check out that mysterious growth, you might heard of the name.  He’s Castonguay was the father of Canada’s single-payer healthcare system.

And while American critics of single-payer who pay attention to the horror stories of Canadian healthcare get met with blizzard of non-sequitur stats from the usual US suspects, Castonguay has – well, a different perspective:

Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.

In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It’s as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced.

What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.

Years ago, Canadians touted their health care system as the best in the world; today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.

Read the whole thing.

2 thoughts on “Failure Is An Orphan

  1. “…today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.”

    Only if you need it. Surely it’s a coincidence that the PM and MPs with serious conditions just happen to fly to LA and Rochester when they need treatment quickly.

    Down in Florida the Canuks who were always bragging about their health system were in their 50s and early 60s. By their later years they were spending more and more time down south since they could actually get care there. So much so that the Canuks started putting referal requirements on their snowbirds and rationing just how much “emergency care” was allowed. It seems that for years lots of “emergency” hip replacements were done down there rather than put up with the 18-36 month wait in Canada.

  2. cue RickDFL with “But, But, Statistics show…” non-sequitur in three, two, one…

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