Polipundit has an excerpt from a Mark Steyn column on Canada’s health care system. It’s by subscription only, but he has the meat of it, I think.
As [Canada’s] chief justice, Beverley McLachlin, put it, “Access to a waiting list is not access to health care” — and in Canada you wait for everything. North of the 49th parallel, we accept that if you get something mildly semi-serious it drags on while you wait to be seen, wait to be diagnosed, wait to be treated. Meanwhile, you’re working under par, and I doubt any economic impact accrued thereby is factored into those global health-care-as-a-proportion-of-GDP tables. The default mode of any government system is to “control health-care costs” by providing less health care. Once it becomes natural to wait six months for an MRI, it’s not difficult to persuade you that it’s natural to wait ten months, or fifteen. Acceptance of the initial concept of “waiting” is what matters.
True, they’ve not yet reached the stage of a ten-month waiting list for the maternity ward, but consider the experience of Debrah Cornthwaite, who last year gave birth to twin boys at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton. That’s in Alberta. Mrs. Cornthwaite had begun the big day by going to her local maternity ward at Langley Memorial Hospital. That’s in British Columbia.
They told her, yes, your contractions are coming every four minutes, but sorry, we don’t have any beds. And, after they’d checked with the bed-availability helpline “BC Bedline,” they brought her the further good news that there was not a hospital anywhere in the province in which she could deliver her babies. There followed seven hours of red tape and paperwork. Then, late in the evening, she was driven to the airport and put on a chartered twin-prop to Edmonton. In the course of the flight, the contractions increased to every two-and-a-half minutes — and most Lamaze classes don’t teach timing your breathing to the turbulence over the Rockies.
Would you want to do that on your delivery day? You pack your bag and head to your local hospital in Oakland, and they say not to worry, we’ve got a bed for you in Denver.
But forget the medical arguments and consider the purely political ones. The justification for “universal access” to health care is that a “decent society” does not let its sick suffer because they can’t afford an operation. But even as universal access decayed into universal lack of access, the utopian Left defended it all the more vigorously: The fact that we all received the same non-treatment testified to our virtue, though even this perverse defense was utterly phony: One of the most unattractive features of our ersatz egalitarianism was that it led to the creation of a humbug nomenklatura who (like Canada’s prime minister) use private clinics for their own health even as they continue to proclaim that decrepit incompetent monopoly public health is an eternal “Canadian value” that can never be changed.
[…]
Of course, despite the government monopoly, Canadian health care does have a private sector. It’s called America. In Montreal, we drive an hour south to Plattsburgh or Burlington. If the Democrats have their way and America moves (as it’s doing incrementally) to government health care, the entire system will fall apart and we Montrealers will have to drive a week south to Costa Rica
I have a friend up in Canada whose mom needed a valve replacement. While she waited, she became increasingly weak. When they were finally ready to operate, they had to wait for mom to get stronger. She DID finally get the replacement, over a year after her diagnosis, and nearly dying as she waited. She’s well, now. And my friend pays for supplemental insurance for herself and her mother, so that if anything else serious occurs, they can cross the border into America and get treatment. Cost to her: $550.00 per month. That’s some free health care.
June 20th, 2005 | 2:50 pm | #1
My great grandmother had 14 babies at home, and it’s a new trend in the US. Why must delivery be done in the hospital?
WSJ had an interesting op ed on this a few weeks ago- trying to find it. It was a comparision of the british/american systerm- very compelling.
June 20th, 2005 | 3:05 pm | #2
Here it is! Far from a ringing endorsement of socialized medicine, it’s not a condemnation either.
June 20th, 2005 | 3:15 pm | #3
Yes, it is even worse in the UK, according to my British friends. They even have a hard time keeping the public hospitals clean, or finding anyone to clean them. Forget anything other than simple blood tests, standard x-rays, and basic vital signs. And yet the Left–the MSM and all their little minions who keep writing to Blogs, writing to newspapers, keep asking for it here in the US. And you never here about any of the problems…Curious. Well, not really. When are Socialists ever concerned about truth? The Terri Schaivo case was a corner stone in their fight for Socialized medicine in the US. How do you think the Nation will be able to pay for it, when you take away all the incentives for innovation and profit, etc., inherent in the private sytem? Besides , the smartest people in the room will be able to make all decisions as to who lives and who dies…What they wanted all along….
June 20th, 2005 | 4:22 pm | #4
As a Canadian let me just say that, NO, you do not want out healthcare system.
June 20th, 2005 | 5:44 pm | #5
My friend in Paris raves about the socialized care there (and he has severe and multiple health conditions). I just read an article by someone very happy with the Swedish system. So, not everyone is unhappy. My question is: How do we do a better job of lowering costs and making health care more affordable HERE for those who aren’t covered by an employer-subsidized plan. I’m one of three sisters who are all stay-at-homers (two of us because of poor health, one who has raised children and is helping now with a grandchild), and I am the only one who has been consistently covered by hubby’s health care plan. One sister had to pay nearly a thousand a month for coverage after hubby retired and the other 13-hundred a month for coverage during hubby’s long unemployement (he’s near retirement age, and finding a job in one’s sixties is really hard, as I’ve come to see). Anyway, they had the savings to handle it, and it’s still a big drain. What about those without the savings? How do they afford medication, consistent medical attention? Socialized medicine may not be the solution, but what we have is troublesome, too. I remember when I worked at the local (and prestigious) public trust hospital, and those without insurance did sometimes have to wait months and months for diagnostics, which meant that cancers would be advancing meanwhile. We had more than one patient on our oncology floor whose cancer metastasized severely during the wait for diagnostic care for “free”. So, I think we can’t just sit back and say, “We’ve got the best health care in the world.” We’ve got to figure out how to fix what’s wrong in our system, not just point out what’s wrong in the foreign ones.
June 20th, 2005 | 5:45 pm | #6
I second Michele’s comment – our medical system is hopeless. Here in Canada, we follow Jane Eyre’s advice, “Keep in good health, and not die.” I’m in Ottawa, the nation’s capitol. We had a heat wave last week. You know what happened? All operations had to be cancelled at the General Hospital, because the high humidity and heat made it impossible to keep the equipment and operating areas sterile. Everything had to wait until the weather cooled down. I’ve never heard of this happening in a western hospital; it sounds like the sort of thing that would have occurred in India. That’s our wonderful medical system.
June 20th, 2005 | 7:07 pm | #7
At the time your great grandmother was having babies, there was a great deal more death in childbirth for women than there is now. The fact that your grandmother managed to survive fourteen births testifies only to her personal health, not the superiority of health care in her day.
June 20th, 2005 | 7:08 pm | #8
My comment was directed at the first commenter, Stephanie, by the way.
June 20th, 2005 | 9:31 pm | #9
Andrea,
My great grandmother is not the only one I know of to chose home birth. It’s a more common choice these days, especially for those without health insurance- having a hospital birth costs a lot. MY godson was born no insurance- her c- section was cancelled twice (though the baby was in distress) cause of others who had insurance. She’s been paying on for 8 years now- by 10, her son should be hers free and clear!
.
Childbirth is less dangerous b/c of better prenatal care and sanitary conditions, not b/c they are done in a hospital.
June 20th, 2005 | 9:55 pm | #10
I think home births are an okay option for women who have an easy time of childbirth. Then there are women like me who, if not for Csections, would have died in childbirth 100 years ago.
It’s not for everyone.
June 20th, 2005 | 11:13 pm | #11
That’s certainly true, Anchoress! But it’s not necessary for all to be hospitalized, either. The trick is figuring out the balance
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