Re: Heath Care in the US
- From: noname <noname@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 11:56:02 -0700
On Fri, 27 Jul 2007 17:59:44 GMT, "JC" <dontbother@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
"John Galt" <whoisjohngalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:13akc7n4s4u5555@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Written by a Candian doctor.....
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=270338135202343
Excerpts:
"Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure,
such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we
referred to a pain clinic - with a three-year wait list; or the woman with
breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when
the standard of care was four weeks. 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."
"Consider, too, Rick Baker. He isn't a neurosurgeon or even a doctor. He's
a medical broker - one member of a private sector that is rushing in to
address the inadequacies of Canada's government care. Canadians pay him to
set up surgical procedures, diagnostic tests and specialist consultations,
privately and quickly. Baker describes a man who had a seizure and
received a diagnosis of epilepsy. Dissatisfied with the opinion - he had
no family history of epilepsy, but he did have constant headaches and
nausea, which aren't usually seen in the disorder - he requested an MRI.
The government told him that the wait would be 4 1/2 months. So he went to
Baker, who arranged to have the MRI done within 24 hours - and who, after
the test revealed a brain tumor, arranged surgery within a few weeks. "
"Canadian doctors, long silent on the health care system's problems, are
starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their
national association. Day has become perhaps the most vocal critic of
Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center
and challenging the government to shut him down. And now even Canadian
governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists.
In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80% of
government-funded diagnostic testing."
"This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain's Labour Party -
which originally created the National Health Service - now openly favors
privatization. Sweden's government, after the completion of the latest
round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80% of Stockholm's
primary care and 40% of its total health services."
"Americans live 75.3 years on average, fewer than Canadians (77.3) or the
French (76.6) or the citizens of any Western European nation save
Portugal. Health care influences life expectancy, of course. But a life
can end because of a murder, a fall or a car accident. Such factors aren't
academic - homicide rates in the U.S. are much higher than in other
countries. In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider
factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy
statistics and find that Americans who don't die in car crashes or
homicides outlive people in any other Western country."
"And if we measure a health care system by how well it serves its sick
citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear
this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50%; the
European rate is just 35%. Esophageal carcinoma: 12% in the U.S., 6% in
Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2% here, yet 61.7% in
France and down to 44.3% in England - a striking variation."
"That said, American health care is expensive. And Americans aren't always
getting a good deal. In the coming years, with health expenses spiraling
up, it will be easy for some to give in to the temptation of socialized
medicine. In Washington, there are plenty of old pieces of legislation
that like-minded politicians could take off the shelf, dust off and
promote: expanding Medicare to Americans 55 and older, say, or covering
all children in Medicaid. But such initiatives would push the U.S. further
down the path to a government-run system and make things much, much worse.
True, government bureaucrats would be able to cut costs - but only by
shrinking access to health care, as in Canada, and engendering a
Canadian-style nightmare of overflowing emergency rooms and yearlong waits
for treatment."
"America is right to seek a model for delivering good health care at good
prices, but we should be looking not to Canada, but close to home - in the
other four-fifths or so of our economy. From telecommunications to retail,
deregulation and market competition have driven prices down and quality
and productivity up. Health care is long overdue for the same
prescription."
JG
This won't even faze the "grass is always greener" group. To them, hell
would be a welcome change of scenery from heaven.
Do you have health insurance? Medicare?
.
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