Archive for May 29th, 2009
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05.29.09
Health Care in Canada
Right now, our president, Barack H. Obama, has been proposing health care for ALL Americans. Which by the way, I am all for this! And a lot of people, of all stripes and of all political parties, are filling up the airwaves, the print media and the internet with a lot of misinformation, lies, graphs, and more. All to let everyone know that such a plan is too costly for the government, would not give all of us health care that we are used to paying for, and that ultimately it would be some faceless, nameless government bureaucrat who would decided if a person gets treatment or not. And of course, I have seen as you have a comparison with Canada, our neighbor to the north. Telling us all kinds of scare stories and more about our friends to the north when it comes to health treatment, etc.
So here is an article from an ezine I subscribe to. It is put out by Bob Osgoody and you can subscribe here: http://adv-marketing.com/business/subscribe2.htm
A Message from Bob
Friday Rant
As always, if anyone has a dissenting opinion, and it is presented fairly and in good taste, I will share it with you. Today, I will share one from G. Hamilton, who lives in Canada. I do reserve the right to comment on any opinion offered, which I will do at the end of the article.
As a Canadian, I can’t resist a comment on your rant about health care reform. Americans seem to believe socialized medicine means a five year wait for substandard care. This is utterly false and part, I suspect, of misinformation pumped out to scare Americans away from such schemes.
When someone I know was found to have a brain tumor, she had major surgery within two weeks. Others diagnosed with cancer start treatment right away. When I dragged myself to the emergency room, feeling bad, I was admitted to the hospital within an hour with pneumonia. I spent nine days receiving the best of care.
All of this didn’t cost a personal penny. Nor do Canadians have to scrape up money for health premiums or stay at outworn jobs because of the insurance plan. Business and industry aren’t burdened with coverage for employees. No one, no matter what their income, need fear they will be without health care. No asset is seized to pay a medical bill. No one can be ruined by medical debt. Our children inherit our hard-earned wealth, not some medical corporation. Our system gives each of us indescribable peace of mind.
We gladly pay through our taxes. As a US justice famously stated, taxes are the price of civilization. If we get good schools, universal health care and a strong social safety net to prevent the worst ills of poverty and ignorance, it’s worth every dollar. . Goodness knows, our system is far from perfect. There are cost pressures, service gaps, inter-governmental wrangling, inevitable blunders and a gigantic country to cover. Wait times can sometimes be long when everyone is in line, not just those who can pay, though a concerted effort is doing much to resolve this issue. For instance, you now get cataract surgery within 3 weeks and a joint replacement within 11 weeks. Anyone needing immediate help, gets it immediately.
Whenever “for-profit medicine” tries to establish itself, alarm races through the land. We are warned about doctors growing obscenely rich off the sickness of others. We are given the specter of lying deathly ill in a hospital eyeing us as a source of profit and bent on earning as much from our misery as possible while our insurance company plots equally hard to provide as little coverage as they can; neither much concerned about what is best for the patient. We would emerge either denied treatment or thousands of dollars in debt, headed straight into bankruptcy. We are grimly told half of all personal bankruptcies in the US involve medical debt.
This scare picture probably isn’t true any more than our “five year” wait times. Our system is private, by the way, but it has a single payer – the government. A Canadian doctor spends about an hour a week on billing as opposed to the 20 hours a US doctor needs.
Without insurance companies in the middle, money goes directly to medical support. Our system was begun half a century ago by Tommy Douglas, premier of Saskatchewan. Tommy, appalled by the dreadful suffering he had seen during the Depression in families unable to afford doctors, fought the “for-profit medical” establishment to a standstill, including their American reinforcements determined to stamp out the idea lest it spread south. And guess what! In a 2006 national poll to decide who is the greatest Canadian, this scrawny, long-dead politician won, hands-down, beating out founders, explorers, inventors, war heroes, sports giants and rock stars. I love him too.
Yes, a modern health care system is expensive to run, but how much better to bear the cost together, as a compassionate community, rather than abandoning individuals to pay with everything they have for life-saving treatment. Canada manages to provide good universal care at significantly less cost per capita than is spent in the US, yet we have a lower infant mortality rate and a life expectancy higher by two years.
I hear so many absurd statements from the US about “socialism” and “communism” that I feel compelled to speak up. If you want another opinion, please pick anyone from the Canadian phone book and give them a call.
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Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us on this most important matter. Yes, it is true, currently the US does spend about 50% more per capita, than you do in Canada. But this still leaves about 40 million people without coverage. My response to this unfortunately is rather long as well, and I will share it next week.