The broken rationed health care system
...Meanwhile unregulated veterinary service are available on one days notice in Canada. Rationed health care would be in even more trouble if Canada was not free riding on medical innovations from the US by buying drugs after people in the US pay for the cost of development with higher prices. Then, if we did not facilities in small towns like Great Falls, Montana Canada would likely have four fewer citizens to add to their waiting list.
One basic problem with nationalized health care is that it makes medical services seem free. That pushes demand beyond supply. Governments deal with that by limiting what's available.That's why the British National Health Service recently made the pathetic promise to reduce wait times for hospital care to four months.
The wait to see dentists is so long that some Brits pull their own teeth. Dental tools: pliers and vodka.
One hospital tried to save money by not changing bed sheets every day. British papers report that instead of washing them, nurses were encouraged to just turn them over.
Government rationing of health care in Canada is why when Karen Jepp was about to give birth to quadruplets last month, she was told that all the neonatal units she could go to in Canada were too crowded. She flew to Montana to have the babies.
"People line up for care; some of them die. That's what happens," Canadian doctor David Gratzer, author of The Cure, told "20/20". Gratzer thought the Canadian system was great until he started treating patients. "The more time I spent in the Canadian system, the more I came across people waiting. ... You want to see your neurologist because of your stress headache? No problem! You just have to wait six months. You want an MRI? No problem! Free as the air! You just gotta wait six months."
Michael Moore retorts that Canadians live longer than Americans.
But Canadians' longer lives are unrelated to heath care. Canadians are less likely to get into accidents or be murdered. Take those factors into account, not to mention obesity, and Americans live longer.
Most Canadians like their free health care, but Canadian doctors tell us the system is cracking. More than a million Canadians cannot find a regular family doctor. One town holds a lottery. Once a week the town clerk gets a box out of the closet. Everyone who wants to have a family doctor puts his or her name in it. The clerk pulls out one slip to determine the winner. Others in town have to wait.
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Canadians stuck on waiting lists often pay "medical travel agents" to get to America for treatment. Shirley Healey had a blocked artery that kept her from digesting food. So she hired a middleman to help her get to a hospital in Washington state.
"The doctor said that I would have only had a very few weeks to live," Healey said.
Yet the Canadian government calls her surgery "elective."
"The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live," she said.
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I was one of the first to find the buried lead in an AP story about the identical quads and my post on the rationed health care reason for them being born in the US, was linked at several blogs. It is good to see that the news is escaping into the mainstream media. It is just one of many health care stories, about the problems with rationed health care some of which have a less happy ending. One of the horror stories is of a woman being left to deliver her dead baby after an abortion was induced. For more examples of the horrors of rationed health care click on the HEALTH CARE label below. There is enough there to make a Michael Moore horror movie.
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