Saturday - July 28, 2007

So, You Want HillaryCare?

Kim over at WizBang, found a great article about Canada’s healthcare system.  This is what happens when you hand the keys to any program over to Uncle Sam.

Michael Moore, call your office.

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.

A five-day wait for an ER visit....I hope its not a, you know, EMERGENCY!

Here’s some more good news:

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.

Go read the rest and see your futute when the whiners get their way and get .gov to take over your health care.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/28/2007 at 07:31 AM   
Filed Under: • Health-Medicine •  
• Comments (5) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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