If the US goes the way of Canada be prepared for long waiting lines.
Last week the Independence Institute held a 'Real Canadian Health Care Field Trip' in Vancouver, Canada. This field trip to Canada last week allowed American journalists to speak with ordinary Canadians who have lived under a rationed health care system. Canadian health care providers and experts also attended the conference and warned Americans about eliminating the free market options from our American health care system.
One of the biggest drawbacks to a rationed health care system is increased waiting times. Rick Baker of Timely Medical Alternatives Procedures founded a business to address this. His organization helps Canadians "Leave the queue" and take personal responsibility for their own private medical services. Some 875,000 Canadians are currently on the waiting list for referrals to specialists or for medical procedures. Rick Baker helps these Canadians cut the waiting time by seeking service in the United States. His organization has helped clients to regain their mobility, to get relief from chronic pain, and to get diagnoses of illnesses by bypassing the Canadian system. This is an effective business model for those living under the Canadian health care system. In Canada the waiting time for a knee replacement is up to two years. It could take up to three years to have your gall bladder removed. Cardiac bypass could take up to twelve months. It could even take up to six months for you to get an MRI in Canada.
Nadeem Esmail, the Director of Health System Performance Studies at the Fraser Institute, talked about waiting times in the Canadian health care system at the conference. Nadeem said that the waiting times are 190 times longer in Saskatchewan than they were in 1990. A clinically reasonable waiting time is 4 weeks for radiation for cancer treatments. Canadians are waiting 45 percent longer than what Canadian physicians believe is acceptable. In Canada you wait 9.7 weeks for a MRI and 4.4 weeks for an ultrasound.
Esmail also released a study (pdf) last year where he compared Canadian wait times to wait times in comparable state run systems.
Canadians were more likely to experience waiting times of more than six months for elective surgery than Australians, Germans, the Dutch, New Zealanders, or Americans, but less likely than patients in the United Kingdom. Patients in Canada were also least likely to wait less than one month for elective surgery [table 14]. Access to see a doctor when sick was also relatively poor in Canada: Canadians were most likely to wait six days or longer and least likely to get an appointment the same or next day. Finally, Canada was also surpassed by the other nations surveyed in access to the ER: they were least likely to wait less than 1 hour to be treated in ER and most likely to wait 2 hours or more (Schoen et al., 2007).
Further confirmation of the length of Canadian waiting times can be derived from five international comparative studies. Coyte et al. (1994) found that in the late 1980s, Canadians waited longer than Americans for orthopedic consultation (5.4 versus 3.2 weeks) and for surgery post-consultation (13.5 versus 4.5 weeks). Collins-Nakai et al. (1992) discovered that in 1990, Canadians waited longer than Germans and Americans, respectively, for cardiac catheterization (2.2 months versus 1.7 months versus 0 months), angioplasty (11 weeks versus 7 weeks versus 0 weeks), and bypass surgery (5.5 months versus 4.4 months versus 0 months). Another study of cardiac procedures by Carroll et al. (1995), revealed that in 1992 Canadians generally waited longer for both elective and urgent coronary artery bypass than did Americans (whether in private or public Veterans’ Administration hospitals) and Swedes, and longer than Americans (in either hospital type) for either elective or urgent angiography. At the same time, Canadians had shorter waits than the British for elective and urgent bypasses and angiographies, and shorter waits than Swedes for both types of angiographies.
Nadeem Esmail, the Director of Health System Performance Studies at the Fraser Institute, discussed the more unflattering aspects of the Canadian health care system later in a private interview. Nadeem confessed that elderly patients have a particularly difficult time. They wait the longest in Canada. If you are over 80 you are in big trouble. Sick people, those with hypertension and diabetes, are also put at the bottom of the list.
This week the US Senate will likely begin deliberation on the democrat's rationed health care plan. Let's hope they don't look to Canada for all the answers. If democrats believe they can push a health care plan on America with long waiting lines they may find themselves in the employment line come 2011.
Jim Hoft's Bio
Jim Hoft is the proprietor of Gateway Pundit , a blog named one of the top 100 collective news resources at Memeorandum and listed as one of the top 100 blogs in a Carnegie Mellon University study. A million readers come to Gateway Pundit each month to read stories and news that are frequently missed by mainstream media outlets.
Posted
10-06-2009 12:01 AM
Link to this post: