If You Support Canadian-Style Health Care Plans

A letter from the Moncton Hospital to a New Brunswick heart patient in need of an electrocardiogram said the appointment would be in three months. It added: "If the person named on this computer-generated letter is deceased, please accept our sincere apologies."

Story here, and it's worth reading the whole story.

But it's this type of thinking that institutes such a heartless and inefficient programs.

Despite the financial burden, Canadians value their Medicare as a marker of egalitarianism and independent identity that sets their country apart from the United States, where some 45 million Americans lack health insurance.

Raisa Deber, a professor of health policy at the University of Toronto, believes Canada's system is one of the world's fairest.

"Canadians are very proud of the fact that if they need care, they will get care," she said. Of the United States, she said: "I don't understand how they got to this worship of markets, to the extent that they're perfectly happy that some people don't get the health care that they need."

"[G]et the health care that they need."? That's the problem; health care, like any good or service, suffers from scarce resources and has to be rationed in some manner. Nationalized medicine simply supplants the market, where entrepreneur doctors better serve the interests of their customers or face losses, with the values of a careless political and bureaucratic institution that suffers no harm should it fail to serve its "customers' needs.

Those 45 million uninsured in the U.S. (many are recent immigrants into this country) receive medical attention, and in a timely manner. When I discovered a mole that turned out to be malignant melanoma three years ago it was biopsied and excised within two weeks. How does Canada's system compare?

Meanwhile, the average wait for surgical or specialist treatment is nearly 18 weeks, up from 9.3 weeks in 1993, according to the Fraser Institute, a right-wing public policy think tank in Vancouver. A Fraser study last year said the average wait for an orthopedic surgeon was more than nine months.

India offers an affordable alternative.

Comments

[Peter]

Please don't take anything the Fraser Institute says seriously. It's a joke in Canada. It's just a propaganda machine for right wing extremists in Canada who want to bring about a Darwinian jungle economy like we have here in the States.

I have lived in both countries so feel qualified to make this statement.