There are howls of outrage coming from the liberal community in Alberta, Canada. It seems that some doctors, desperate to protect their patients from the overcrowded and failing socialized medical system in their country, have set up private clinics to treat them. To circumvent Canadian laws, which prohibit charging for medical care, they have set up private, membership clinics where, for $2,000 a year, patients can access well staffed and equipped clinics and avoid the long waits and compromised care of the public system.
The leading Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail, reports that “critics say that the clinics are taking physicians away from the public system making it even harder…to find a family doctor.” David Eggen, executive director of a group that supports the Canadian socialized system, Friends of Medicare, said that it’s already hard to find a family physician in Canada and that clinics like these, springing up in several Canadian cities, could make it even harder.
It does not seem to have occurred to defenders of socialized medicine that the system itself is causing the doctor shortage. Cuts in medical fees, overcrowding of facilities, shortages of equipment and space, and bureaucratic oversight have all combined to drive men and women out of family medical practice. Now, with a critical shortage looming, those who can afford to pay for adequate care are opting out of the public system and, literally, taking their lives into their own hands.
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I’m sure it’s happening. Just yesterday, the guy I was surveying a boat for got a call for an MRI, “Nope, can’t come in tomorrow but Friday will be fine, no I’d rather do it in the morning. Fine, see you then”
You guessed it, private clinic. As he put it, $750 and it’s done, medical would have meant a one year wait.
I have several close friends who can and have solely because of their stature in society accessed medical care tomorrow with but a simple phone call that the rest of us have to wait weeks, months or longer for. It is sad but it is reality.
Check out this ‘very’ interesting website.
http://www.timelymedical.ca/waitlist.html
Over the past number of years I have had opportunity to visit quite a number of doctor and dentist’s offices. The doctor’s offices tend to be smallish with very little decor. Rows of cheap chairs in the waiting room with a small TV high on the wall is normal. The exam rooms are equally spartan. The dentist’s offices tend to have state of the art equipment and some of the decor is quite spectacular. The one I was in last week had an interior wall done in fieldstone. I makes me wonder how many doctors we are going to have in the future since obviously dentistry pays so much better. However in talking to the dentists they have noticed a drop in business since the Alberta government eliminated medicare premiums. It seems that a lot of businesses dropped their benefit package at the same time which of course included dental.
My dentist’s office is also high tech state of the art. All computerized, no paper files. Several flat screens showing DVD’s on health care etc, very nice padded furniture in the waiting room, state of the art dental chairs, equipment shining and new looking, tastfully decorated both in front and behind the scenes. Every dental treatment station also has a flat screen tv for the dentist to pull up a patients records, or show a DVD on dental hygiene while waiting for freezing to take hold etc. Impressive to say the least. By comparison my doctor’s office looks like it was furnished through Value Village. Hard cheap wooden chairs, even the tattered magazines are months, a few years old, some travel posters tacked to the wall in lieu of framed pictures. Each doctor in my particular clinic has his own nurse with a tiny way to small desk and besides the computer stacked several feet high with patients record folders. The only use for their out of date computers are scheduling appointments, otherwise everything is done by hand and by fax! Who uses fax these days anyway? Answer, Canadian doctors. Sorta makes a fella wonder what’s holding up the government from moving in and screwing this all up.
I must point out.
I would be dead now were it not for Canadian medical services. I was suffering from an aerotic aneurism and had I not found the proper doctor I would be “yesterdays news”.
As it turned out I survived as Canadian doctors saw the trouble and reacted rapidly. Working together they “fixed the problem (no cost to me thanks to medical plans).
Dick is not entirely correct because he is not here and doesn’t know. Having said that he is not entirely wrong. We need to look at this situation more closely.
More to the point we need to fix it.
I cant speak highly enough of Ontario’s great universal health care system as my wife has recently gone through two cancer operations and has fully recovered. Thank goodness for early detection by our fantastic family physician.
The waiting time for each operation was minimal, excellent/compassionate surgeons and hospital staff (North York General Hospital) as well as great follow up by provincial home care staff.
Our system is not perfect but certainly better than whats offered to many in America.
Be thankful for what we fhave.
Canada’s health care system is pathetic. A couple of years ago at the age of 45, I suffered an aortic dissection that first presented itself as a massive chest pain, and was then drugged up and turned away from the emergency room for three days in a row because they had nobody available to operate the CT scanner, and an x-ray showed nothing, which of course it would not since soft tissue doesn’t show up very well on an x-ray. Duh. Due to the massive chest pain, I hadn’t slept at all by the fourth day, and my cardiologist figures I suffered a heart attack in the interim, but when they finally diagnosed the problem using the CT scanner, all the sudden it became a medical emergency.
In the US they can repair many aortic dissections by placing a stent into the aorta, however here in Ontario, we don’t have that technology yet, so we get the most invasive surgery possible, where they have to stop the heart and perform surgery on the aorta next to the spinal cord. From what I understand, there is a less than 50% chance of surviving the operation, and even then, there would be a further less than 50% chance of not becoming a quadriplegic as a result of it.
Since there is so little chance of surviving the Canadian operation intact, my doctors are making me wait until the aortic tear reaches 5cm in size before they will have to perform the operation I need, because then it will all the sudden become a medical emergency again. In the interim life is mostly on hold, and my life savings are being drained while I wait. Since it could cause me to drop dead at any moment, I am supposed to have a CT scan every 6 months, but I have no idea how big my aortic tear currently is, because I am averaging 14 month waiting times in-between CT scans. Needless to say if I could have back some of the tax money I paid out over many years to support our Canadian system, then just like Danny Williams, I would go to the US and pay for a much less invasive operation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aortic_dissection
Since nobody has attempted to top my health care system horror story yet, I will have to put all the support for Canada’s outdated, unprogressive, and inefficient healthcare systems down to survivorship bias.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and ignoring those that didn’t.
The vast majority of people who have had extensive experience with Canada’s healthcare systems are just far too dead to complain very loudly about them now.
As excellent as it is to see someone invoke the idea of survivorship bias (nods to Taleb), it must be said that your criticism is somewhat a criticism of medicine in general. Does modern medical science work or doesn’t it? Looking to the south, those who can afford excellent medical care do live longer than those who don’t. The same quality of care is available in Canada – just not to as many people.
People who have extensive experience with any health care system are more likely to die to begin with. To compare fairly, we’d have to take groups of people in similar circumstances and measure how much longer they live on average (with additional variance measurements) for several medical systems.
The more entrepreneurial US system progresses, innovates and develops new and improved products and procedures, while our system stagnates. The US system developed the procedures, products and medicines we currently use to treat aneurysms, dissections and cancer back in the seventies and eighties. Some of those treatments are effective, but many others need improvement. Along with most of the world, Canada relies completely on the US to develop the vast majority of those improvements.
I will add that since our systems became too socialized, the US has produced a hundred or so Nobel prize winners who advanced the field of medicine, while Canada has produced none.
Alright, America is the world’s research lab. How is this paid for? By an expensive health care system. The fallout is an American health care system that is little better than a third world system. Is that trade off fair in your mind? Heck even haters of ObamaCare admit the system needs reform.
The US system needed to develop improved access, though everyone who showed up at an emergency room was covered. The US system did not need to become as backward as ours is to improve access, as if that was what Obamacare was all about. Obamacare was about growing government for government’s sake, and access to their system will not improve under it, while, innovation, product development and the millions of very good jobs, as well as the export and tax revenues that depend on both, will suffer because of it. At least until it is inevitably repealed anyway.
And how are you going to improve access without a government-backed system?
Vouchers, for one. Leaving healthcare system decisions at a state level would help. Removing the government interference that prevented competition across states lines, reigning in the lawyer/vultures a bit, …… along with hundreds of other ideas that came up and were completely ignored because they didn’t serve to grow the federal government’s power, which is what Obamacare was really all about, and why it will inevitably be repealed.