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I took these off a Notre Dame College football blog, where I relapse subscribe.
These arguments are against any governmental influence over health care, not just single payer. Nontheless, they are a critical impediment in the public relations battle. If anyone knows of the Canadian quality control resource, for appealing a physician’s ruling, I’d appreciate a link. Also any reliable links to comparisons of health in various countries, (infant mortality rates, percentage of the population that is covered, vaccinations…), would likewise be appreciated. Finally any information about whether Canadian citizens have a "personal physician/physician’s assistant" would be appreciated.
anyone who has lived in a country where the government runs the healthcare system will tell you it sucks. Think it’s just a coincidence that the British have bad teeth? Try and get an appointemnt with a dentist in the UK, good luck on that long wait. Hell what is it that government actually runs well? And some people want them running the healthcare system!! The celebrity who died from the head injury a few weeks back up in Canada might be alive today had she had her accident in the U.S. MRI??? is it an absolute necessity? Does the local hospital even have the equipment? Or a trama unit? I have lived around the world and travel abroad quite often, trust me, you don’t want the government deciding when and where you should get treatment, or if you’re worth the money the treatment would cost.
——————————————————————————–I can say that I whole-heartedly agree with everything you just posted, inamar. My wife and I currently live in Canada and I can tell you this medieval healthcare system flat out sucks. A lady that my wife worked with was diagnosed with breast cancer in which she was later told by her doctor that her cancer had gone into remission. Everything was fine for about a year until she again began feeling ill. After repeated visits to the doctor in which she was told each time that she was okay and had nothing more than a cold, in November of 2008, sadly, she passed away – she had succumbed to breast cancer. Oh, before she had actually passed, her doctor finally decided that it was time to order an MRI which revealed that her cancer had come back and was more agressive than before.
I won’t even go into the number of cancer screenings that had to be redone because the original tests were botched… by clinics in India where the testing had been outsourced.
In January of this year, my wife was wheezing, coughing, had a fever and aches, etc. Well, she went to see our family doctor here and was told that she had a very bad chect cold… keep in mind, no blood work, no chest X-rays, nothing. Three days later she had to go to Detroit on business. Since her mom and dad live in Taylor (nearby where she had to go for her supplier meeting), she stayed with them. On that Monday night, my wife had to be rushed to the E-room because she was having tremendous difficulty breathing. Low and behold, not three days later, the doctor in Detroit diagnosed her with Acute Bronchitis. Now, you tell me, how does a bad chest cold progress to Acute Bronchitis in just three days? Tha answer is that it doesn’t. That’s what she had when she went to the goof here in Canada. Keep in mind, the doctor in Detroit did a full panel of bloodwork, chest X-rays, etc, before arriving at her diagnosis. She asked if the doctor in Canada had done the same, my wife said no. The doctor then asked, "well, how would he have known what you had?" Good question.
Since that time, I let my Canadian healthcare card lapse and refuse to renew it. We’re within 2 hours of the border in either Buffalo or Detroit so I’d much rather take my chances driving to a hospital in either location. Good thing we still have healthcare through Toyota in the US.
MRI you say? Listen to what a nurse said to my wife and I when we told her that a doctor did not order an MRI for a back injury that she sustained after slipping and falling hard down our hardwood stairs (landlord refuses to install a carpet runner down the center)…. "Well, in the US you spend money to make money. Thus, your doctor, in an attempt to make more money, will order an MRI even when one is not needed" … as if I’d never gone to a doctor in the US. I will only say that I looked her dead in the eye and laughed as I walked away. If only that nurse had known how truly daft she sounded. As God as my witness, this was exactly what we were told by that nurse.
What does the government actually run efficiently? If you would like to see a true picture of this, simply look at our public school system in America. Some of them are good, mind you… but the vast majority are about as slack as they come.
Hat tip to robspierre for his comment on Scarecrow’s Post:
May 19th, 2009 at 4:43 am. I pasted his post into the football thread and that’s what sparked the reactions I quoted above.
This is nuts. The only way that a private insurer can make money on health care is to deny coverage to those that might make claims, to deny or delay claims, and to set premiums as high as possible. It basically is not a real insurance market.
With homeowners or auto insurance, only a minority of policy holders will ever make a claim during the life of the policy. So the actuaries can figure a premium that is profitable yet practical for consumers. There is money to be made, so consumers have a choice of competing providers.
Not so with health–everyone is sick at some point in their lives and most are sick to some degree in any given year. Premiums can’t cover costs and provide profit without chicanery and price-gouging. There are so few providers that competition is almost nil–neither patients nor doctors have much choice. Sweetheart deals with hospitals, diagnostic labs, and drug companies and captive mail-order pharmacies further undercut competition. The overhead that comes with risk shifting, delaying and denying claims adds to the cost of the outright profiteering.
Healthcare is like highways, air traffic control, and the Army: since there is no legitimate way to compete and make a profit, it has to be a public service, not a private cash cow.
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Here’s some links:
http://74.125.155.132/search?q…..=firefox-a
http://content.healthaffairs.o…..ll/23/3/89
BUT a couple of keypoints; U.S. stats do NOT include the almost 15 per cent of the population that hasn’t any healthcare and the other countries stats include ALL of their citizens; Is the debate about healthcare or mechanisms of insuring citizens(which I think is the ‘real’ argument).
Again I point out Obama’s fallacious argument that the U.S. has a ‘historical tradition’ of health insurance.
Thanks u.
I believe, with the system in Canada, that if you get sick and go to a government-run clinic, they promptly pack you off to medical experiments.
I can say, with respect to breast cancer, that the delay tactics and arbitrary denial of care cited in your Canadian example, even if true, are exactly the sorts of thing that happen here with the “best” private insurance. It is called “pre-approval”. The difference is that, under US private care, your MD’s professional opinion matters relatively little. The person making the decisions is a minimum-wage call-center employee working from a script, possibly in a foreign country. The only doctor involved is one who receives a fat fee for putting his name on the claim-rejection letters.
Choice is, moreover, an illusion in most if not all of the US. Where we are, ALL employers offer a United Healthcare plan or a Cigna plan. They switch back and forth as each vendor cuts them a price to poach on the other vendor’s current clients. But any price advantage is worth only pennies by the time it gets to me, if it gets to me. I, of course, get no choice as to which vendor they choose. Sometimes, I get a choice between PPO and HMO plans from the same vendor. But that is less and less common.
I do not get to choose my own physician. I can only choose physicians that are “in-network”, which means that the said physicians are willing to be strong-armed into charging the insurance giant less than they do everyone else.
I hear as many anecdotes about great care in Canada and Europe as I do about horror stories, even though horror is inherently more memorable than all went well (Mr. Moore’s “Sicko” is a great source). More importantly, comparing the morbidity statistics for US adults and children with those from the rest of the modern world seems to support the good stories hands down.
In the UK, I am told, the GP’s will make HOUSE CALLS.
For free.
Somehow I never hear about things like this, however, when I hear the “socialist scum” arguements from the conservatives.
France too.
Moore’s “Sicko” is a really gentle, fair-minded, informative movie, contrary to the press it got. In the movie, they ride along on a doctor’s house call, talk with physicians about the adequacy of their incomes, and talk with patients about the adequacy and cost (nill) of care.