In a follow up to yesterday's post about Britian's terror over the idea that it might end up with a privatized, "American-style" health care system, today we're turning our gaze northward toward Canada. I mean, surely someone must covet our magnificent medical machine, and if not the Canucks, then who?
I've heard all the same horror stories you have about Canadian health care, but I decided to ignore what "they" say and do some actual investigating of my own when a friend of mine uprooted and moved his entire family, including three small children, back to Canada after many years in the U.S. primarily so that they could once again have full access to affordable medical care. My investigations turned up surprising - and for an American with medical issues, extremely frustrating - results. But The Incidental Economist says it all better than I could in a post summarizing Americans' misunderstanding of Canadian health care, complete with pretty charts and graphs. They point out the following:
Doctor emigration - Despite what you may have heard, doctors are not flocking to the U.S. from Canada - indeed, more doctors move TO Canada from the U.S. than the other way around.
Patient emigration - Canadian citizens aren't flocking to the U.S. to utilize our magnificent health care. While they acknowledge that wealthy Canadians might prefer to undergo certain rare procedures in American hospitals, the fact remains that the vast majority of Canadians prefer to utilize their single-payer system for the vast majority of treatment options available to them (at little or no cost, mind you).
Doctor satisfaction - Canadian doctors tend to report higher levels of satisfaction with practicing medicine in their country than American doctors do in ours.
Infant mortality - Despite the massive amount of money we spend on our health care, the U.S. continues to have one of the highest infant mortality rates of any industrialized nation - higher than Canada's or Britian's. Incidentally, also higher than Hungary, Taiwan, Cuba, South Korea, and Andorra, wherever that is.
Rationing (the biggie) - Let's have a word about the process of treatment rationing. One of the horror stories you've probably heard about the Canadian system is that it rations surgical procedures. I hated that idea too, until I learned first-hand that another word for "rationing" is "triage." Their single-payer system does not arbitrarily determine a number of procedures and only allow that many. What it does do is rank the availability of procedures based on their degree of medical necessity. In other words, it might take longer for a patient who needs a hip replacement to get that procedure than it does for, say, a cancer patient to get a tumor removed, because the latter procedure is more immediately life-threatening and therefore takes priority. I don't know about you, but God forbid I ever get cancer, I'd trade a quick hip replacement to get diagnosed, have the tumor removed, and be on the mend in the same week - as another Canadian friend of mine was. Meanwhile my own American family member, diagnosed with the same cancer at almost exactly the same time, waited almost two months for her first surgery, which didn't get it all, and another month for her second. Anecdotal evidence? Sure, but it's damn well enough to get me taking a second and third look at our system.
So to sum up, the Brits don't want our medical system. The Canadians don't want our medical system. Babies born in South Korea have a better chance of survival than ours do. Profit-based medicine is at the root of the vast majority of the billions of dollars we spend every year due to health care fraud, leaving us spending more per capita than virtually any other nation in the world, yet receiving less medical care or coverage. What exactly would it take for us to reconsider privatized medicine in the U.S.?
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