Re: Nothing to do with marxism or anti-capitalism or anti-US bias
From: tcomeau (tunderbar_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 08/21/04
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Date: 20 Aug 2004 19:46:32 -0700
I appreciate the fact that you are finally basing your arguments on
the topic and that you are actually presenting useful observations
that actually make a point or several points in a rational way and on
topic.
TC
"Robert" <RobertJ@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<10icngmca112v71@corp.supernews.com>...
> "tcomeau" <tunderbar@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:b550f406.0408200942.4a0bb0db@posting.google.com...
> > This horrendous story is not unique:
> >
> > http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/03/02_403.html
> >
> > Universal health care is about compassion for ones fellow man/woman.
> > The US may want to consider it, and turn the corner, so to speak.
> >
> > TC
>
> I find it puzzling how you take a federal program of medicare in the US and
> then find big flaws in the system. It is similar to the medicare canadian
> health system. I don't like it, thank you, so nobody wants to make it
> universal for everyone. Let me help you out by telling you to find a bad
> private insurance and find a good government program and compare the two
> then people will want the good government program.
>
> I think it's great that Canada is making money on selling drugs to
> Americans. It helps the Americans and helps the Canadians with their health
> care system get some badly needed money.
> Drug companies are multinational so it will be interesting how they will
> respond to canada getting their cut of the money.
>
>
> http://www.heritage.org/Research/HealthCare/HL702.cfm
>
> There isn't a single politician who advocates user fees. There isn't a
> single politician who will publicly state that they are in favor of private
> insurance. And yet, just before the end of last year, a major poll
> commissioned by Macleans magazine showed that a clear majority of Canadians
> now support user fees. On private insurance, we're divided.
>
> I've just randomly chosen a few stories that have come to light recently.
>
> The head of trauma care at Vancouver's largest hospital announces that they
> turn away more cases than any other center in North America. He's quoted as
> saying this would be unheard of in the United States.
>
>
> In Manitoba, which is my former home province, the premier--the political
> equivalent of a governor--concedes that his pledge to end hallway medicine
> has fallen short. Hallway medicine is the phenomenon where the emergency
> rooms are so filled with patients that people are forced to lie on
> stretchers in hallways, often for days. Overcrowding is a periodic problem.
> In fact, the overcrowding is worse than last year. The community is rocked
> by the death of a 74-year old man who had waited in the emergency room for
> three hours and had not been seen.
>
>
> New Brunswick announces that they will send cancer patients south to the
> United States for radiation therapy. New Brunswick, a small maritime
> province, is the seventh to publicly announce its plans to send patients
> south. In the best health care system in the world, the vast majority of
> provinces now rely on American health care to provide radiation therapy.
> Provinces do this because the clinically recommended waiting time for
> treatment is often badly exceeded. Ordinarily, oncologists suggest that
> there should be a two-week gap between the initial consult by the family
> doctor and the referral to the oncologist, and then two weeks more from the
> oncologist to the commencement of radiation therapy. In most Canadian
> provinces, we exceed that by one to two months, sometimes three.
>
>
> In Alberta earlier this year, a young man dies because of the profound
> emergency room overcrowding. He is 23. On a winter's night, he develops pain
> in his flank and goes to the local emergency room. It is so crowded that he
> grows impatient and goes to another. There, he waits six hours. No one sees
> him. Exhausted and frustrated, he goes home. The pain continues, so he
> finally decides to go to the local community hospital. It's too late: His
> appendix ruptured. He dies from the complications hours later.
> Those are some of the examples of the cruelty of what goes on in Canada. But
> they don't give you the flavor of the insanity--and I'll use that term in a
> nonprofessional sense--of the Canadian system.
>
> MRI scanners are very difficult to get in Canada. There are long wait times.
> In my book, I talk about a political struggle on Vancouver Island where the
> wait time for a non-urgent MRI scan was over a year--"non-urgent" being
> defined by government officials, not by physicians. In the province I now
> live in, Ontario, there are long wait times for MRIs.
>
> Part of the problem is that we have so few of these scanners. Canada per
> capita has as many MRI scanners as Colombia and Mexico. It wouldn't be fair
> to try and compare us to the United States or Western Europe. And the few
> MRIs that we have tend to run on bankers' hours. MRI scanners are expensive
> to operate. So if an MRI scanner stops dealing with humans at 5 p.m., there
> are still hours you could run the scanner.
>
> What many MRI clinics now do to make a little bit of money is rent out their
> facilities to veterinarians. There was a story, which caused quite a
> scandal, that a London man was expected to wait seven months for an MRI but
> his dog could get one in just a couple of weeks. They, of course, addressed
> this discrepancy in a very Canadian way: by preventing veterinarians from
> booking the off hours.
>
> The National Post, one of Canada's national dailies, went to a number of
> prominent politicians and asked if they queue jump. They had done a little
> bit of work and knew of a clinic where VIPs received faster care. A reporter
> asked Senator Sharon Carstairs, government leader of the Senate, if it was
> true that her husband queue jumped. She said that that story was absolutely
> untrue and unfounded. Actually, she observed that the sort of surgery he
> needed wasn't available in Canada, so they went to the United States and
> paid $15,000--an unspeakable act by Canadian standards.
>
>
> .................
> So they did something very sneaky. They actually got a government
> biostatistician to provide the incidence. They could thus answer a simple
> question: If you're diagnosed with cancer in Canada, how do you compare in
> terms of your life expectancy to somebody who's diagnosed in the United
> States? Canadian provinces ranked close to or at the bottom in every single
> category.
>
> The Canadian system is ailing. Why? I believe that Canadian medicare suffers
> from a basic economic problem. We have a free-for-all system, and, as health
> economists have well shown, costs are driven up. Patients tend to
> overconsume health services while providers tend to oversupply health
> services. The only way we can deal with this is to ration through waiting.
>
> It's like the old Soviet system: Everything is free, but nothing is readily
> available. It's very amusing when you're talking about toilet paper in
> Moscow in 1975; it's far less amusing when you're talking about cancer
> treatment in Toronto in the year 2001.
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