cur-mud-geon:
anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner
We have heard discussions of the Canadian health care system as contrasted to the U.S. health care system for more than a decade. What would our system look like if we were to adopt Canada's approach? Information gathered from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) statistics for 2005, and The Fraser Institute's Waiting Times Survey for 2006 give us a glimpse of the changes we'd experience.
If U.S. citizens were to be provided with the equivalent of the Canadian citizens' health care access, the United States would need to:
* scrap most technological equipment including 330 Lithotripters, 6,000 MRI units and 23,750 CAT scanners
* stop covering prescriptions outside hospitals
* make half the drugs approved by the FDA in the past five years illegal
* collect 10% more of each citizen's gross income each year
* cut national Research and Development by 25%, or $77 Billion annually
* stop covering mental health care entirely
* prevent patients from ever again being allowed to visit a specialist or get even a single test without first having a visit with and a referral from a family doctor
* place 7,730,000 people on waiting lists for everything - doctor visits, tests, surgeries and so on
Beyond this stark look at the new reality, we would each face a wait time of 17.7 weeks from the time we saw the doctor and received a referral to the time required surgery would occur (Fraser Institute Survey 2006). That is up from a wait time of 9.3 weeks in 1993 by the way; obviously not going in the right direction from our point of view.
How can anyone suggest that the Canadian Single-Payer system surpasses our own health care system?
A recent USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation/ABC News Poll (October 2006) produced these results:
* 76% of Americans surveyed opposed a single-payer system if treatments covered today would no longer be paid for
* 68% opposed a single-payer system if it would limit their choice of doctors
* 60% opposed a single-payer system if it meant higher taxes or increased health insurance premiums
How can anyone tell us the Canadian Single-Payer system surpasses our own when we know the real answer to all three questions posed above? Incidentally, nothing of these three questions was ever reported in the mainstream media, to my knowledge. Could that have been due to the fact these answers didn't support the bias with which the Polling was conducted?
The Canadian Single-Payer system is not the right solution for the problems we face today in our country. Our health care system is the best in the world and we want to keep it that way.
We need to provide access for those who have little or no health care insurance coverage to protect the financial stability of our system. We need to keep the private sector squarely in the mix. We'll discuss other aspects of this problem in weeks to come.
