How To Make Single-Payer Healthcare Work
By Mitch Berg
Key lesson: Make sure there’s a free healthcare market next door for when your own system can’t handle things:
A critically-ill premature-born baby from Hamilton is all alone in a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital after she was turned away for treatment at local facility and transferred across the border without her parents, who don’t have passports.Ava Stinson was born Thursday at St. Joseph’s Hospital, 14 weeks premature.
A provincewide search for an open neonatal intensive care unit bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two pound, four ounce baby to Buffalo.
For good, grim entertainment, ask the Norwegians – who still have some private healthcare – about the Swedes (who have none) who come across the border to actually get healthcare they can’t find in their own single-payer system.
(Via Ed)
June 29th, 2009 at 7:31 am
Check out my post about some details I’ll bet John Q. Public doesn’t know about Medicare, CanadaCare & single-payer health care.
Here’s a teaser: Did you know that CanadaCare doesn’t pay for prescription drugs?
June 29th, 2009 at 7:49 am
There will be private health care available. Can’t crush the entrepreneurial spirit — I can already see it: maquiladora hospitals.
June 29th, 2009 at 10:31 am
this whole thing scares me to death. I work in the healthcare field, in the billing office (insurance), so I worry about this Obamacare taking my job away. The managers had “how we’re doing” meetings when the economy started to get so volatile, and really reassured us that we’re doing ok. In fact we’re hiring two new doctors in August.
Along came this healthcare bill and away went my reassurance. I was listening to Bill Bennet a week or so ago, and this lady called from Montreal. She said there’s 2 (TWO) MRI machines in the whole city of Montreal. There’s more that two machines in most hospitals in this country. Also, she said no one can get a prim dr, there’s 48 hour waits in ER’s and people die in ambulances because they’re carting them around from hospital to hospital to find one that can take them.
This whole thing is seriously giving me a tummy ache :-/
June 29th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
I’ve told the story before about the stellar young surgeon who was made head of his department in Montreal. The government asked him to find out why so many doctors were leaving Canada. He investigated for almost a year, spent 6 months writing the report, turned it in and moved to Austin, TX. As he told me, what he wrote didn’t really matter as much as what he did when he found out how the other system worked. He found he could actually get his patients treated without spending all his time fighting committees and red tape and liked the thought of that.
June 30th, 2009 at 6:45 am
“For good, grim entertainment, ask the Norwegians – who still have some private healthcare – about the Swedes (who have none) who come across the border to actually get healthcare they can’t find in their own single-payer system.”
Worst. Garrison Keillor. Joke. Ever.