Saturday, July 28, 2007

A Canadian Doctor Describes How Socialized Medicine Doesn't Work

Story as heard on The Mark Belling Program hosted by Kevin Fischer...

I have not yet been able to understand why liberals want socialized medicine so bad. Yes, everyone is covered, but this liberal idea happens like all others. Instead of raising the level of service to the best, this idea would give it to all, but everyone would then have bad health coverage and bad health care:

I was once a believer in socialized medicine. As a Canadian, I had soaked up the belief that government-run health care was truly compassionate. What I knew about American health care was unappealing: high expenses and lots of uninsured people.
My health care prejudices crumbled on the way to a medical school class. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute.
Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care.
I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic — with a three-year wait list; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.
Government researchers now note that more than 1.5 million Ontarians (or 12% of that province's population) can't find family physicians. Health officials in one Nova Scotia community actually resorted to a lottery to determine who'd get a doctor's appointment.
These problems are not unique to Canada — they characterize all government-run health care systems.
Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled — 48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave — when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity — 15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren't available. And so on.
Single-payer systems — confronting dirty hospitals, long waiting lists and substandard treatment — are starting to crack, however. Canadian newspapers are filled with stories of people frustrated by long delays for care. Many Canadians, determined to get the care they need, have begun looking not to lotteries — but to markets.

Please, do not let this happen to our health care system. We have the best health care around. Liberals, for some reason, want you to think that we have worse health care than Cuba. Yes, some people do not have insurance. That does not mean we should ruin it for everyone.

7 comments:

The Game said...

If this is the kind of system I was trying to get EVERY SINGLE American to pay for I would not want to talk about it either

blamin said...

Why Game,

Don't you know, you gave nothing for the left to cherry pick from?

Straight foward examples of why "state sponsored universal health care" may not be the Utopian solution lefties wish for is the last thing "they" want to hear.

Of course it's perfectly allright to show examples of the one-in-ten thousand where our current system fails (Mr. Moore!), but don't you dare show the one in twelve where their system may fail. What's wrong with you? You must hate poor people.

The Game said...

Okay, it if now official. Liberals agree that socialized medicine is crap, but they are for it anyway because they want to keep the streak going of failed liberal social programs that weaken our society.

Chet said...

I don't get it. Are you saying that nobody waits in America for health care?

I assure you, that's most definately not the case. I mean, your British guy who waited for cancer treatment still got treatment faster than this guy, whose life-saving care was delayed for an entire month, right up to the point where me might very well not have recovered at all, simply because his insurer was trying to extort him to move to a more expensive plan.

So it's not clear to me what you think these examples prove. Indeed, under government-run health care, you wait for doctor's appointments, examinations, and treatments. Much like in the American system, where you wait for doctor's appointments, examinations, and treatments. Once again, you guys couldn't possibly be more wrong on this issue.

Chet said...

Additionally:

"In reality, both data and anecdotes show that the American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living with universal health-care systems. Take Susan M., a 54-year-old human resources executive in New York City. She faithfully makes an appointment for a mammogram every April, knowing the wait will be at least six weeks. She went in for her routine screening at the end of May, then had another because the first wasn't clear. That second X-ray showed an abnormality, and the doctor wanted to perform a needle biopsy, an outpatient procedure. His first available date: mid-August."

"There is no systemized collection of data on wait times in the U.S. That makes it difficult to draw comparisons with countries that have national health systems, where wait times are not only tracked but made public. However, a 2005 survey by the Commonwealth Fund of sick adults in six nations found that only 47% of U.S. patients could get a same- or next-day appointment for a medical problem, worse than every other country except Canada.

The Commonwealth survey did find that U.S. patients had the second-shortest wait times if they wished to see a specialist or have nonemergency surgery, such as a hip replacement or cataract operation (Germany, which has national health care, came in first on both measures)."

There's simply no relationship between government-run health care and increased wait times.

The Game said...

So, you are comparing needing a day or two for treatment in the US to months for soical medicine...
amazing

Chet said...

So, you are comparing needing a day or two for treatment in the US to months for soical medicine...

A "day or two?" Did you read the articles? One guy waited a month for life-saving care because his insurance was giving him the runaround. A woman calls her doctor in April for a mammogram six weeks later - and then has to wait three months to find out if the lump in her breast is cancer or not.

You're just being disingenuous, Game. To the extent that wait times in America are known, they appear to be just as long or longer in America as under any nation's government-run health care system.