Socialized Medicine, North Of The Border, An Update

From: BroJack (PrinceOfUsenet_at_home.net)
Date: 07/22/04 

Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2004 15:36:48 GMT

>From Canuckistan where 1/2 of the peeps support the other half; the
sexual age of consent is 14; prisoners are entitled to PCs in their
cells; the military couldn't defeat a US Boy Scout troop; and
discrimination against white males is blatant, we give you Hillary's
medical Utopia.

Bro
____________________

Free Health Care in Canada
by Walter Williams (July 22, 2004)

Let's start out by not quibbling with America's socialists' false
claim that health-care service is a human right that people should
have regardless of whether they can pay for it or not and that it
should be free. Before we buy into this socialist agenda, we might
check out just what happens when health-care services are "free."
Let's look at our neighbor to the north -- Canada.

The Fraser Institute, a Vancouver, B.C.-based think tank, has done
yeoman's work keeping track of Canada's socialized health-care system.
It has just come out with its 13th annual waiting-list survey. It
shows that the average time a patient waited between referral from a
general practitioner to treatment rose from 16.5 weeks in 2001-02 to
17.7 weeks in 2003. Saskatchewan had the longest average waiting time
of nearly 30 weeks, while Ontario had the shortest, 14 weeks.

Waiting lists also exist for diagnostic procedures such as computer
tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound.
Depending on what province and the particular diagnostic procedure,
the waiting times can range from two to 24 weeks.

As reported in a December 2003 story by Kerri Houston for the
Frontiers of Freedom Institute titled "Access Denied: Canada's
Healthcare System Turns Patients Into Victims"
(http://ff.org/centers/ccfsp/pdf/CCSFP-1203-PP.pdf), in some
instances, patients die on the waiting list because they become too
sick to tolerate a procedure. Houston says that hip-replacement
patients often end up non-ambulatory while waiting an average of 20
weeks for the procedure, and that's after having waited 13 weeks just
to see the specialist. The wait to get diagnostic scans followed by
the wait for the radiologist to read them just might explain why
Cleveland, Ohio, has become Canada's hip-replacement center.

Adding to Canada's medical problems is the exodus of doctors.
According to a March 2003 story in Canada News (www.canoe.ca), about
10,000 doctors left Canada during the 1990s. Compounding the exodus of
doctors is the drop in medical school graduates. According to Houston,
Ontario has chosen to turn to nurses to replace its bolting doctors.
It's "creating" 369 new positions for nurse practitioners to take up
the slack for the doctor shortage.

Some patients avoided long waits for medical services by paying for
private treatment. In 2003, the government of British Columbia enacted
Bill 82, an "Amendment to Strengthen Legislation and Protect
Patients." On its face, Bill 82 is to "protect patients from
inadvertent billing errors." That's on its face. But according to a
January 2004 article written by Nadeem Esmail for the Fraser
Institute's Forum and titled "Oh to Be a Prisoner," Bill 82 would
disallow anyone from paying the clinical fees for private surgery,
where previously only the patients themselves were forbidden from
doing so. The bill also gives the government the power to levy fines
of up to $20,000 on physicians who accept these fees or allow such a
practice to occur. That means it is now against Canadian law to opt
out of the Canadian health-care system and pay for your own surgery.

Health care can have a zero price to the user, but that doesn't mean
it's free or has a zero cost. The problem with a good or service
having a zero price is that demand is going to exceed supply. When
price isn't allowed to make demand equal supply, other measures must
be taken. One way to distribute the demand over a given supply is
through queuing -- making people wait. Another way is to have a
medical czar who decides who is eligible, under what conditions, for a
particular procedure -- for example, no hip replacement or renal
dialysis for people over 70 or no heart transplants for smokers.

I'm wondering just how many Americans would like Canada's long waiting
lists, medical czars deciding what treatments we get and an exodus of
doctors.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3809

Relevant Pages

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