Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Canada has national health care, guaranteed free to all citizens. Free that is, if you can get any.
Canada has so few MRI machines that patients go on a waiting list. 90% of patients get their scans within 9 months, the rest take longer. If you only had six months to live, you wouldn’t find out in time to worry about it – you’d die waiting for a diagnosis.
But if you could get treatment, it would be free. So that’s way better than our system in the US, right? We should change to their system at once, right?
Joe Doakes
I’ve noticed – and I’ll put this in the form of a progressive blog comments – that “proponents of single payer healthcare conveniently omit the terrible outcomes that people get in the UK and Canada”.
If people who wanted free health care actually had to live it, they’d find ways to exempt themselves. I know several health care workers who immigrated to here from Canada. There are less services, thus less health care jobs. (One of the big reasons they are here, not there.) But, less services means things like either longer hospital stays or home with family care if one isn’t quite ready to go home alone after surgery, stroke or heart attack. (Here, we have options of transitional care units for those cases.) Not that getting your family to help is always a bad thing. But some families and friends aren’t prepared for that. And in a country where we are used to having services available to help, suddenly having to be the service would be a bit of a shock. I mean, look at how many kids are in daycare.
The Canadians also tell me there is no such thing as a private hospital room. People here have become accustomed to privacy, especially while receiving personal care. And it isn’t just about privacy. Infection control seems to be a pretty good reason to have private rooms.
While health Care is expensive, we do receive more services and quality is higher than almost anywhere. We get what we pay for, I guess. Yes, there are some unnecessary tests that are most likely the culprits of high costs. But, “free” health care isn’t going to reduce costs here and will likely create an even wider divide between the wealthy and the poor. But maybe that’s the goal.
It is as if the socialist left has the idea that they’ll somehow escape the need for significant medical care. The most spectacular example of this that I can think of is former President Obama, who seemed oblivious to the fact that with his three decades or so of smoking (legal things and otherwise), he’s got a great chance to get lung cancer and need some significant care.
I know of a Ontario family who’s patriarch had a treatable form of cancer, he was put on a list for treatments, sadly he died waiting his turn for those treatments. His opportunity for life extension was lost to “free medical care”.