You guys from Canada are beating us.....Geeeez ! Look at this...

[EE_Bota]

I started composing a pretty lengthy reply. But then I thought about what you said. I won't bother. You are spouting nonsense about the "cause of freedom". Please, it's not about freedom. It's about whether your fellow citizens ( btw, my bro is a vet ), get health care. It's about money. And you appear to be somebody doesn't care about anybody except you and your family. It's a case I've got mine, and screw you.

Ahh...but I KNOW who I am, and what I have done and continue to do for others. If you knew the truth of it, you'd feel like a fool. But don't, since I may just do it out of selfishness because it makes me feel good.

You, the one who demands other people's money for your charity through government approach are by tactical convention the better person in any debate. How this got to be the case, and how anyone but the deluded and the dishonest would allow it to continue is beyond me. But it does continue, where the folks who pay gobs of taxes and give loads time and money to charity while living very modestly themselves are bad people anytime they wish to mitigate to any extent the rate at which good decisions and hard work are made to look identical to bad decisions and no work in this society.

 

[Knight9]

The fact that the Canadian system is efficient, effective, ...

Our system is a lot of things....but EFFICIENT is NOT one of them. There is a lot of waste in our system. Waaayyy too much bureaucracy and overhead. When a province is spending almost half of their entire budget on health care, there is a problem with how it is being run.

 

[IslandTractor]

Our system is a lot of things....but EFFICIENT is NOT one of them. There is a lot of waste in our system. Waaayyy too much bureaucracy and overhead. When a province is spending almost half of their entire budget on health care, there is a problem with how it is being run.

Everything is relative. Canada's system is far more efficient than the literally hundreds (?thousands) of different insurers and multiple different systems used in the US. To make the point, MEDICARE is by far the most efficient insurance "company" in the US when looking at percent of income actually spent on care rather than overhead or profit.

Every big organization will have inefficiencies but look at comparisons with US systems before you complain that the Canadian system is inefficient.

 

[EE_Bota]

IMO the main reason many Americans react negatively is that 1) they know nothing about it, 2) they have been bombarded for fifty years with propaganda about how terrible "socialized medicine" is, 3) they have also swallowed hook line and sinker the notion that US medicine is the best in the world.

I think folks in the US are individuals fond of individualism. More and more folks are wanting to make the entire country their own group insurance policy against all bad outcomes...food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, no cell phone, water's rising and the sky is dark, but you decided to sit the storm out...the company adjuster and the emergency crew will be right along to make sure that you decisions and ideas don't harm you, so long as you remember who to vote for next election, and so long as we don't just go belly up financially.

The fact that the Canadian system is efficient, effective, more evidence based and provides care that for the vast majority is as good or better than any US community hospital or medical center can deliver gets lost in the hyperbolic ideologically based rumor mongering that all too often substitutes for rational discussion of the topic here.

I don't rumor monger, but I do have ideology a plenty. But so do you. I trust you to me honest, and I trust you are smart. I believe you mean well. I don't trust you to be right due to your ideology, which will cause you to miss the importance of questions I find important. You may instead find (at least potentially) correct answers to the questions you ask, but you will purposefully disregard the questions and concerns of others with ridicule. It is a self-indulgence that ought to be avoided.

Wait time arguments seem to predominate discussion of the Canadian vs US system. Horror stories of needing to wait until next week for an elective MRI or having elective surgery delayed seem to get a lot of traction as evidence that the Canadian system doesn't work. What doesn't get brought up is that one of the reasons the healthcare system in the US is bankrupting us is precisely because you can get a MRI at your local grocery store and therefore physicians order them like they were ordering a coffee at Starbucks. An American orthopedic surgeon is very likely to have you get an MRI before he ever examines you while that would virtually never happen in Canada or Europe. That creates a very profitable market for MRI scanners which are then purchased and installed between the bread and soup aisles at your local mall. Just like Starbucks. How did we ever manage before?

Elective surgery is another bugaboo. In Canada you are likely to wait longer. In the US you are more likely to have unnecessary surgery. Personally I'd rather wait than be fodder in the medical industrial system we have where medical decisions every day are influenced by the profit motive rather than patient need.

I know you are a doctor, but you are not my doctor. I will rely on those I know and those in my family for their ideas on things.
If doctor's in your part of the country are just lousy or crooked, and we have to modify the entire country to compensate, add that officially as a point so we can see if there are any alternatives other than a complete flip of the country. But there is no reason we cannot act preemptively by making up lots of doctor jokes so the lawyers can get a much needed break.

Politics makes it impossible for those right of the political center to accept much less promote anything that can conceivably be labeled as "socialism" even if it would otherwise be desirable. If the lefties and liberals advocate it, it must be wrong. Politics is therefore the answer to the question of why so many Americans think they don't want a Canadian type healthcare system.

It could be the "they will take your Medicare" scares the left launches each election. Maybe we don't need a "they will take your free cell phone" scare as we bust through the next trillion dollar debt threshold.

What is the left's universal and perpetual multi-coverage insurance policy for all individual problems once you make the country go bust due to insolvency? What then will happen to the countless millions who believed the lies, and so didn't otherwise prepare, even as our government is actively advertising for new food stamp recipients? Private and public will look the same then...empty and barren, since surely the public will deplete the private before the final plunge. Ah...at least it will all be fair, but it lacks the "diversity" the left often rambles on about.

 

[IslandTractor]

I think folks in the US are individuals fond of individualism. More and more folks are wanting to make the entire country their own group insurance policy against all bad outcomes...food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, no cell phone, water's rising and the sky is dark, but you decided to sit the storm out...the company adjuster and the emergency crew will be right along to make sure that you decisions and ideas don't harm you, so long as you remember who to vote for next election, and so long as we don't just go belly up financially.



I don't rumor monger, but I do have ideology a plenty. But so do you. I trust you to me honest, and I trust you are smart. I believe you mean well. I don't trust you to be right due to your ideology, which will cause you to miss the importance of questions I find important. You may instead find (at least potentially) correct answers to the questions you ask, but you will purposefully disregard the questions and concerns of others with ridicule. It is a self-indulgence that ought to be avoided.



I know you are a doctor, but you are not my doctor. I will rely on those I know and those in my family for their ideas on things.
If doctor's in your part of the country are just lousy or crooked, and we have to modify the entire country to compensate, add that officially as a point so we can see if there are any alternatives other than a complete flip of the country. But there is no reason we cannot act preemptively by making up lots of doctor jokes so the lawyers can get a much needed break.



It could be the "they will take your Medicare" scares the left launches each election. Maybe we don't need a "they will take your free cell phone" scare as we bust through the next trillion dollar debt threshold.

What is the left's universal and perpetual multi-coverage insurance policy for all individual problems once you make the country go bust due to insolvency? What then will happen to the countless millions who believed the lies, and so didn't otherwise prepare, even as our government is actively advertising for new food stamp recipients? Private and public will look the same then...empty and barren, since surely the public will deplete the private before the final plunge. Ah...at least it will all be fair, but it lacks the "diversity" the left often rambles on about.

We clearly disagree on many issues but the healthcare debate is something that really transcends right/left ideology in ways that could lead to a useful solution (other than our current broken, distorted system that is bankrupting us all). We don't ask individuals to purchase police insurance or subscribe individually to fire services. We provide a public option in education that the vast majority of us take advantage of and rely upon. We share public utilities, highways, airports etc etc not because we are half way to becoming a Commie nation but because over time it has been apparent to the population (the majority at least) that some services in life are better done as a group and organized for public purposes rather than leaving such matters for individual action only. I'm with you if you want to argue that we don't need public restaurants or other such matters but I think healthcare belongs solidly in the public arena as it affects too much of our economy and well being to continue to leave it to a mostly private system with very few rules.

The "private" system we have today has contributed mightily to our nation's economic problems (I recall we spend 17% of GDP on healthcare which is both absolutely and relatively far far more than any other nation. Indeed, if we spent the proportion of our GDP on health that the Canadians and Brits to then we could probably retire the entire US debt with the savings in a decade) and at the same time the current system is the single most common reason for personal bankruptcy in the USA. Add on top of that that the care we receive is certainly no better than what the Canadians, Brits, Aussies, Germans, French, Norwegians, Swedes, Dutch, Danes, etc etc receive at much lower cost (comparing taxes they pay to premiums we pay). I don't think anyone of any ideological stripe could stand back, review the US healthcare system in relation to what is delivered by other countries, and conclude that our system is best. Indeed, looking just at a single metric of life expectancy, the Cuban healthcare system is just as good as ours for about 10% of the relative cost to the nation. Find me even one important metric by which the US system excels over other industrialized nations. Waiting time for a boob job doesn't count.

The mostly private system we have is clearly broken. Efforts by Obama to implement a right wing solution (Obomneycare after all has it's individual mandate based system as an idea promoted by the Heritage Foundation and as we all know first implemented by a Republican governor) have been resisted and fought tooth and nail by the right. No alternative proposed, no willingness to participate in designing the system, just complaints that it is unAmerican to take actions that increase healthcare coverage for the population as a whole. It is sad to watch the silly debate as the real changes that are necessary to make the system sound and to reel in costs for all of us and the nation as a whole are barely even discussed. "Death panels", rationing, all manner of scare tactics continue to be brought up years after they have been clearly shown to be nothing but propaganda. The right has nothing constructive to add to the debate so they spend their time trying to throw monkey wrenches at any effort to move forward with even modest changes. The real "death panel" and rationing of care is happening in places like Texas where Perry has decided to pull out of efforts to expand Medicaid type systems to cover uninsured. The uninsured are the ones who are suffering from Perry's death panel and rationing today. The individual taxpayers in smaller communities in Texas that have to support public hospitals for uninsured are going to feel the pain of Perry's "principled" stand.

To get back to the Canadian vs US system question in this context, I have personally never heard of any Canadian (or British etc) politician or right wing group call for the disbanding of their healthcare system in an effort to have something more like what we have in the USA. If even the right wing in Canada, despite bitching and moaning about inefficiencies etc (undoubtedly correct in many cases), doesn't want to revert to a US type system that should cause our own right wing ideologues to stop and reflect rather than oppose change.

 

[tcartwri]

Refreshing to have a civil discussion on this topic.

 

[cdaigle430]

I for one am very happy for our Canadian neighbors I do worry about Russia and China becoming super wealthy and becoming super powers as they care nothing of others. Whenever there is a disaster in another part of the world you dont see them jumping at the chance to assist.

 

[cdaigle430]

As for me all I know is anything our Government controls or gets their hands on turns into a disaster and it really doesnt matter which side your on.

 

[3930dave]

No sane main stream Canadian politician will attack our healthcare systems directly.

But, creating a crisis to drive an agenda is a fairly old and trusted strategy. If wait times (non-boob job stuff, real medical problems in other words) get too out of hand, then the government may have the opening to throw up their hands and say "'We can't keep up with this, unless we increase health taxes 100%. Do you want that increase, our would you like to review our private, for profit solution waiting in the wings ?"

Remember, at a provincial level, the government controls it all: hospital budgets, staffing, med school enrollments...... and what the province does not control, the feds usually do. So, if there is a crisis in healthcare (intended or otherwise) who created it besides the government ?

Maybe all those immigrants suddenly showing up, and all those mega 5,000+ unit subdivisions popping up are creating the hospital loading problems ? No wait, the government is supposed to control that too !

We have a pretty good healthcare system here, my point is vigilance is required to ensure it stays "healthy". I've mentioned ORNGE (air ambulance privatization) earlier..... aside from making a few Bay Street boyz and their water-ski instructor girlfriends stupid rich, it has been a pretty big mess. There are a couple of dozen related fatalities on file, where the Chief Coroner (provincial) choose to remain silent - most were Inquest worthy. Well, we all have bosses, now don't we.

A major new hospital was built as a "Public/Private" partnership. How much of that was an accounting shell game, and how much of that was a new healthcare agenda, time will tell. I'm not a Forensic Accountant, so I can't make the call yet.

I've been around long enough to notice that in the few times I did visit a doctor's office over the last 10 years, you now get nickel and dimed for any forms that have to be filled out ($10 -30 or so per transaction). I'm not really slagging the docs, over the same time frame, the general level of hustle and shakedown has also crept up proportionally in society.

From what I've seen here, Canadian attempts at privatization in the healthcare sector have lead to higher costs, and decreased service.

Rgsd, D.

 

[brin]

I believe when it comes to my health care....there are only two people that should be involved....My Doctor and Me...that is it...I pay insurance premiums for coverage and even if on Medicare...the health decisions should be yours and your doctors...no one else....and that's all I have to say about that....Life is like a box of candy....ya never know what you are going to get....