Canadians Face Long Waits for Health Care
People wonder why I’m against nationalized health care. Exhibit A: Canada:
TORONTO - A letter from the Moncton Hospital to a New Brunswick heart patient in need of an electrocardiogram said the appointment would be in three months. It added: “If the person named on this computer-generated letter is deceased, please accept our sincere apologies.”
The patient wasn’t dead, according to the doctor who showed the letter to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. But there are many Canadians who claim the long wait for the test and the frigid formality of the letter are indicative of a health system badly in need of emergency care.
Americans who flock to Canada for cheap flu shots often come away impressed at the free and first-class medical care available to Canadians, rich or poor. But tell that to hospital administrators constantly having to cut staff for lack of funds, or to the mother whose teenager was advised she would have to wait up to three years for surgery to repair a torn knee ligament.
“It’s like somebody’s telling you that you can buy this car, and you’ve paid for the car, but you can’t have it right now,” said Jane Pelton. Rather than leave daughter Emily in pain and a knee brace, the Ottawa family opted to pay $3,300 for arthroscopic surgery at a private clinic in Vancouver, with no help from the government.
“Every day we’re paying for health care, yet when we go to access it, it’s just not there,” said Pelton.
Health care is a limited resource, like any other limited resource. To become a doctor takes years of training, from the prime years of one’s life. The prices we pay doctors to see us for our ailments merely reflects the higher personal costs doctors have incurred in gaining the medical knowledge necessary to treat us.
The fact is, rationing of medical care is going to take place in every country, in every type of economy and under any kind of imaginable “health care plan”. How that rationing takes place depends on the specifics of each country’s medical and economic system. But it cannot be avoided or ignored, any more than the second law of thermodynamics can be ignored if a person were trying to build a perpetual motion machine.
In a market based economy, rationing happens through prices which are placed on all medical procedures. In a country where scarce resources are allocated through a system of kings and aristocrats (or despots and their cronies), rationing takes place through favoritism and bribes. And in socialist systems like Canada, where every citizen theoretically has access to “free” health care, the rationing takes place through long waits, aging equipment, and cutting the time each patient spends with the doctor. As an example, in the U.S.S.R., the average amount of time each doctor had to see each patient was seven minutes. It was routine for patients needing a series of injections to come in once for each separate injection, rather than just having them done all at once.
Rationing is going to take place. The empirical question which must be asked is, which system has the lowest cost of operation, that is, which system can provide the most care effectively to the largest number of people, while remaining responsive to true emergencies and needs.
I won’t fisk the whole article here, but I’ll provide a few more good quotes:
Raisa Deber, a professor of health policy at the University of Toronto, believes Canada’s system is one of the world’s fairest.
“Canadians are very proud of the fact that if they need care, they will get care,” she said. Of the United States, she said: “I don’t understand how they got to this worship of markets, to the extent that they’re perfectly happy that some people don’t get the health care that they need.”
Substitute “Americans” and “worship of socialism” and that quote is just as true in the other direction.
Another watershed lawsuit was filed last year against 12 Quebec hospitals on behalf of 10,000 breast-cancer patients in Quebec who had to wait more than eight weeks for radiation therapy during a period dating to October 1997.
One woman went to Turkey for treatment. Another, Johanne Lavoie, was among several sent to the United States. Diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in 1999, she traveled every week with her 5-year-old son to Vermont, a four-hour bus ride.
“It was an inhuman thing to live through,” Lavoie told Toronto’s Globe and Mail.
The Canadian system sent some folks to the US, but those not fortunate enough to live within easy “commuting” distance probably just got shafted, or, if they were wealthy enough, went to another country to get medical care. See, even in Canada’s so-called free health care system, the wealthy still get taken care of and the poor are left to fend for themselves.
So what’s the solution? For Canada? I have no idea. For the United States? Leave aside health insurance reform for the moment, because it’s too vast a topic to get into here. My proposal, (which I believe I’ve mentioned here before): abolish Medicaid, expand Medicare to cover all individuals, regardless of age, and then do means testing. I have a friend who doesn’t make much money; they live on maybe 21,000 a year. Him and his wife have three kids. Guess what? They qualify. I have other friends who don’t have kids, and both the husband and wife have jobs which pay over 60k a year. Guess what? They don’t get free medical care, they can pay for it themselves.