My wife’s daughter flew in from Canada today. She’s working a temporary job, and it will end sometime this fall. My wife asked her what she would do about health coverage once her job ended. “Mom,” she was reminded. “it’s Canada. We all have health insurance all the time.”
Later in the conversation, she talked about a friend of hers who works in a laboratory of some sort. She gets fed up with her job on a regular basis, and takes off, this time for Africa.
Imagine such freedom, telling her boss to shove it. Health security is a big part of it. She doesn’t have to worry about health coverage, and so can save some money, leave her job at will, and take off. Do you know anyone down here in the states that has that much control of their own lives?
Universal health coverage is part of the essential freedom we say we love so much in this country, but practice so little. It gives us control of our own lives. This is an unspoken, but important part of the debate we are now having.
Piece of Mindful 
Mark, there is a vast difference between having coverage and being able to collect on it. See: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ib68vdWk5593qkAQFLj5-f1k9GnwD98QK5NO0
And from the WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124451570546396929.html
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Not long ago, I would have applauded this type of government expansion. Born and raised in Canada, I once believed that government health care is compassionate and equitable. It is neither.
My views changed in medical school. Yes, everyone in Canada is covered by a “single payer” — the government. But Canadians wait for practically any procedure or diagnostic test or specialist consultation in the public system.
The problems were brought home when a relative had difficulty walking. He was in chronic pain. His doctor suggested a referral to a neurologist; an MRI would need to be done, then possibly a referral to another specialist. The wait would have stretched to roughly a year. If surgery was needed, the wait would be months more. Not wanting to stay confined to his house, he had the surgery done in the U.S., at the Mayo Clinic, and paid for it himself.
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Mark, I’ve been living with intense pain for over 4 months. Finally I went to a specialist earlier this month. I got in for an MRI the same day and found the problem. My surgery is scheduled on June 22. That would not be possible in Canada.
Last year in June my daughter was run down in a crosswalk. She needed the urgent attention of several specialists such as a neuro-opthomoligist, neurologist, orthopedist, and physical therapist. Her level of recovered function would not be where it is today without such timely care.
Without having a robust healthcare infrastructure we would be stuck with rationing and inferior care as enjoyed by native Indians and Canada.
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Sorry about your own problems and your daughter’s. Most Canadians are happy with the care they receive. There would be a revolution up there if they tried to foist our system on them again. But when you travel south of the border the tenor changes, and we only hear about how bad it is up there. It’s mostly self-serving liars of one form or another – if you find a Canadian who is unhappy with the system up there, he has free and ready access to our media down here. Canadians that like the system? You don’t hear from them.
There is no evidence other than anecdotes to back up the notion that Canadians come here for care. They don’t. The waits apply to some procedures that are not life-threatening and in high demand, such as hip replacements. All of this would be true of our system if we even attempted to serve our entire population. That’s a critical point.
They are in better health than us, they pay half per capital compared to us. Go figure.
And please keep in mind – this too is critical – you have access to our system. Millions do not. 45% of all bankruptcies in this country are by people who could not pay their health care costs after insurance was used up. You’re in denial.
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More from the WSJ article that I linked:
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Indeed, Canada’s provincial governments themselves rely on American medicine. Between 2006 and 2008, Ontario sent more than 160 patients to New York and Michigan for emergency neurosurgery — described by the Globe and Mail newspaper as “broken necks, burst aneurysms and other types of bleeding in or around the brain.”
Only half of ER patients are treated in a timely manner by national and international standards, according to a government study. The physician shortage is so severe that some towns hold lotteries, with the winners gaining access to the local doc.
Overall, according to a study published in Lancet Oncology last year, five-year cancer survival rates are higher in the U.S. than those in Canada. Based on data from the Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health (done by Statistics Canada and the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics), Americans have greater access to preventive screening tests and have higher treatment rates for chronic illnesses. No wonder: To limit the growth in health spending, governments restrict the supply of health care by rationing it through waiting. The same survey data show, as June and Paul O’Neill note in a paper published in 2007 in the Forum for Health Economics & Policy, that the poor under socialized medicine seem to be less healthy relative to the nonpoor than their American counterparts.
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Mark, I am done denying that the pain that consumes my attention day and night will just get better on its own.
Safeway has a successful model for dealing with healthcare. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124476804026308603.html
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Canada does contract out for certain procedures that are not cost efficient to do on their own. 160 people out of the whole province of Ontario over two years is insignificant. If you go to their sources and talk to them, they will tell you this. They also complain about wait times. In the U.S., our government-run system, Medicare, does a better job with hip replacement than Canada’s government run system. You’re really comparing two government systems.
It seems as though I just got done writing about how Americans shut out Canadian voices and only talk to people who have bad things to say about their system, even as their population, who once had our system and booted the insurance companies out, are happy. Does that not mean a thing to you? That they had our system, switched, and don’t want it back?
Wait times in American emergency rooms are awful. Try LA or NY some time. Canadians don’t come to the U.S. for care – those Canadians who do travel here buy special insurance policies, as they are told it is very expensive to get sick down here.
Anyway, close the pages of the WSJ, and read more. WSJ is a little biased, since most American health insurance companies are large corporations, and the WSJ serves large corporations.
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“Does that not mean a thing to you?”
Mark, I tend to think in terms of priorities and sequence. Health care is meaningless without a robust, accessible, and professional infrastructure. When the pols get off their high horses and address that, then we can talk about the insurance side. The first link I gave was about the state of govt healthcare on Indian reservations. Not pretty…and not even in the WSJ!
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This is so typical – you refuse to address the core issues and instead wander off into distantly related issues. The keys to success of a health care system are accessibility and affordability. In the U.S. we spend twice as much per capita as our nearest competitor, at least 47 million are uninsured, millions more are underinsured. It is dysfunctional for maybe half of us.
A large part of the problem are the insurance companies, who have overlayed an inefficient and self-serving business model over the system, adding an additional $400 billion in costs each year. The health insurance industry is lice on the economic body.
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Huh????
How is the “core” issue anything but “Health care is meaningless without a robust, accessible, and professional infrastructure.” The disasterous Indian reservation example fully demonstrates govt “insured” healthcare as per the linked article above.
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We have always mistreated Indians, and that problem should be addressed. you’re obfuscating, I think. Government sponsored or single payer works in every other industrial country. Once it is tried, people never go back – Medicare is more efficient than the private sector, doesn’t turn people away and is not driven by greed. It works. The VA systems offers the best health care available, and is an exemplary system.
I should retract – no country has ever gone back to private health care after using a public system. One did – Iraq, but we forced them to adopt our model at the point of a gun. That’s what it takes to get other countries to use our system.
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It’s funny how we all form judgments about the “other guy” from the little snippets we write. Here I thought you were being willfully obtuse. Perhaps we are both wrong.
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i’m not judging you as I don’t know you. I am judging your words, which fail to address the specific problems I raised with our health care system, and instead talk about the Indian reservations.
Am I not being fair?
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You are being inaccurate about MY concerns regarding where to start. As I said, I tend to think in terms of priorities and sequence. Health care is meaningless without a robust, accessible, and professional infrastructure. The Indian healthcare situation is an example of putting the financial cart before creating the horse.
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Since they can’t afford health care, they don’t have it. Isn’t that the market at work?
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No, it is the result of the govt failure to live up to its obligations. Why should we ever expect more? http://www.ihs.gov/PublicInfo/PublicAffairs/Welcome_Info/IHSintro.asp
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The Indian Health Service (IHS), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, is responsible for providing federal health services to American Indians and Alaska Natives. The provision of health services to members of federally-recognized tribes grew out of the special government-to-government relationship between the federal government and Indian tribes. This relationship, established in 1787, is based on Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, and has been given form and substance by numerous treaties, laws, Supreme Court decisions, and Executive Orders. The IHS is the principal federal health care provider and health advocate for Indian people, and its goal is to raise their health status to the highest possible level. The IHS provides a comprehensive health service delivery system for approximately 1.9 million American Indians and Alaska Natives who belong to 562 federally recognized tribes in 35 states.
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ok – now do the same intensive research on Medicare, explain why other industrial countries are doing so well, why no country that has gone public has ever gone back, why other countries are healthier than us, why we cost at least twice as much as everyone else, why the VA is considered the best health service in the country, and why WHO rates dirt-poor Cuba and the U.S. about the same …
Oh – right, I gotcha. Let’s talk about BIA, and project that horribly corrupt agency onto the rest of the world.
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Advocates of the status quo must have no financial challenges. Most Montanans live on modest (around $30,000/yr. median) incomes and couldn’t pay for private care if their employer didn’t provide some type of coverage. Most government workers are covered, which is a huge percentage of Montana’s workforce. The real pinch is in the small and micro-business sector. Taxes are high, health insurance premiums are high, medical care costs are high, profits are hard to manage. Many of these numerous businesses are family run, and tend to identify with Republicans, who oppose any public health options. This is the uninsured/under-insured sector free-marketeers would deny. Go figure. What is the matter with Kansas?
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“Imagine such freedom, telling her boss to shove it.”
We all have that freedom,here, but there are consequence. In Canada, some of those consequences to her actions are paid by others. The work of others pays for the freedoms and lifestyle you describe.
That’s not freedom, forcing others to pay for your freedoms. The slaveowners of the south lived a great lifestyle too, paid for by the labor of others.
“I want what he has, but I don’t want to work for it or make choices that make it happen”. That’s the “I’ll take off a few months and somebody else will pay for my health care” model.
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Uh, everyone pays for health care up there through the tax system. It’s called “insurance”, but it is done in a different way, coming without chains. It gives them freedom of movement, as bosses have less control over them.
Here in the land of the free, we are chained to our desks. You call that freedom? You don’t even know what it is, do you.
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“You don’t even know what it is, do you.”
Was that a question, or a rhetorical question?
Yes, freedom is control of one’s own physical self, and the labor of our physical self and the ability of our self to speak and think and act independently.
Either that or “just another word for nuthin left to lose”.
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Then who has freedom – the guy chained to his desk, or the gal who gets up and leaves when she gets fed up?
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