Thread: Canadian Alipacer's, please resond

I work for a Canadian Company in the US. When workers from Canada come here they get health related issues resolved. Those I've spoken to say that your Canadian Doctor appointment or operation sometimes coincide with your funeral..explains a lot.

Hidden costs of Canadian healthcare system
By Brett Skinner
23 Jun 2007

In a pivotal scene in ''Sicko,'' filmmaker Michael Moore marvels at Canada's single-payer health system, suggesting that it is a medical utopia. ''It's really a fabulous system,'' explains one healthy Canadian, ''for making sure that the least of us and the best of us are taken care of.''

But healthy people don't use much health care. If Moore had interviewed ill Canadians, he would have gotten a whole different story.

In reality, Canada's health care system is not the paradise Moore presents.

I should know: I live there.

Consider Canada's notorious waiting lists. In 1993, Canadians referred by their doctors to specialists waited an average of 9.3 weeks for treatment. By 2006, it was 17.8 weeks -- almost twice what's considered clinically reasonable.

In the words of Canada's Supreme Court, ''Access to a waiting list is not the same thing as access to health care.'' The court used that phrase when it struck down the single-payer system in one Canadian province in 2005. Yet somehow Moore missed this, the biggest story in Canadian health policy in the last 40 years.

Canada's long waits are partially caused by a shortage of doctors. Whereas the United States had 2.4 practicing physicians per 1,000 residents in 2004, Canada had only 2.1. That's a difference of 300 fewer doctors in a city of 1 million residents. New York's population is more than 8 million. Imagine what health care would be like in the Big Apple with 2,400 fewer physicians and you have some idea what it's like in Canada.

Over the last 10 years, about 10 percent of doctors trained in Canada decided to practice medicine in the United States. This is the result of low physician salaries, which are paid by the state. The average Canadian physician earns only 42 percent of what the average U.S. doctor takes home each year. Simply put, single-payer systems exploit medical labor. Any U.S. state that adopts a single-payer approach is going to lose doctors to other states.

Canada's single-payer system is also letting its hospitals rot. While the average U.S. hospital is only nine years old, the average hospital in Ontario, Canada's largest province, has been around for 40 years.

And Canada's system limits the adoption of new technology. Among the 24 Western nations that guarantee access to health care, Canada ranks 13th in access to MRIs and 17th in access to CT scanners. The lack of access to medical technology contributes to longer waiting times for diagnostic tests.

The rationing of medical procedures and drugs is another harmful result of Canada's system. In 2003, twice as many in-patient surgical procedures were performed in the United States per 1,000 residents compared to Canada.

And Canada's ''universal'' healthcare system doesn't offer universal drug coverage. Only about one-third of the population is eligible for government drug programs in Canada -- the rest pay cash or have private insurance.

Canada's cost advantage is also an illusion. True, Canada spends less per GDP on medical care than America -- but so does Ethiopia. Such comparisons are meaningless without considering value for money. And compared to Americans, Canadians get relatively little in return for the money they spend. Canada's single-payer system does not cover many of the advanced medical treatments and technologies that are commonplace in America, and Canadians have access to fewer doctors, fewer treatments and fewer new drugs.

Yet in Canada, public spending on health care is still growing faster than the ability of the government to pay for it. As of 2006, public health spending in six out of 10 Canadian provinces was on pace to consume more than half of total revenue from all sources by the year 2020 -- without even taking into account the added pressures from an aging population. As of 2003, the growing unfunded liabilities for health care reached 46 percent of Canada's total economic output.

These are the hidden costs of Canada's health system, and they're far worse than the monetary price of U.S. medical care. But Michael Moore is not interested in such facts. He makes fictional films.

Brett Skinner is Director of Health, Pharmaceutical and Insurance Policy Research at the Fraser Institute in Toronto.

http://www.criticalopinion.org/articles/39

Nothing worth a damn in this life is free. I say thank you, but no thank you, to Canada's socialist health care system.

An aside........

Do you know that Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather was the architect of the Canadian health system?

CitizenJustice wrote:

An aside........

Do you know that Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather was the architect of the Canadian health system?

Can I assume your're talking about Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather from his mothers side of the family vice Donald Sutherland's father? Just curious.

As a Canadian living in Vancouver , i can tell you firsthand its a nightmare . I have had a bad back since i was a young man and have always been blown off by every doctor i have seen . Three years ago , on a trip to Disneyland with my family in our car, by the time we got to SF my back was acting up . Although the pain was unbareable i sucked it up and continued down the coast . By the time i got to L.A i knew something was wrong . At the Coronado hotel in S.D. i couldn t take it anymore and went to an emergency hospital and they sent me home with some tylenol. After a horrible drive home i went to a doctor who set me up to get a MRI . Three weeks later after pain that made a grown man cry i crawled to emergency . They bumped someone else and gave me an MRI, and found that i had a blown disc like they had never seen and instead of blowing outward had instead had hit my spinal cord . The next day after an emergency operation i woke paralyzed from the waist down . A month later i was home in a wheelchair .Lucky for me i slowly got some use of my legs back .

con;t

If the doctor in S.D. or at home had realized the seriousness of my injury i could have had the pressure of the disc removed earlier and had a better chance of a full recovery. Getting an MRI in Vancouver is very hard to do and the wait list is at least 6 months . If it wasn't for the fact that i was falling down and had lost my balance i would still be sitting at home with instructions from my doctor to stretch it out . My doctor at the time was a granola nutbar and thinks all back pain can be fixed with a few laps at the pool .

Originally Posted by bigpcanuck

As a Canadian living in Vancouver , i can tell you firsthand its a nightmare . I have had a bad back since i was a young man and have always been blown off by every doctor i have seen . Three years ago , on a trip to Disneyland with my family in our car, by the time we got to SF my back was acting up . Although the pain was unbareable i sucked it up and continued down the coast . By the time i got to L.A i knew something was wrong . At the Coronado hotel in S.D. i couldn t take it anymore and went to an emergency hospital and they sent me home with some tylenol. After a horrible drive home i went to a doctor who set me up to get a MRI . Three weeks later after pain that made a grown man cry i crawled to emergency . They bumped someone else and gave me an MRI, and found that i had a blown disc like they had never seen and instead of blowing outward had instead had hit my spinal cord . The next day after an emergency operation i woke paralyzed from the waist down . A month later i was home in a wheelchair .Lucky for me i slowly got some use of my legs back .

Welcome bigpcanuck. Im real sorry this happened to you. How awful!

I have Canadian friends and they can also attest first hand that the healthcare in Canada is a nightmare.

Guess it's where you are located, and who your doctor is! I've never had a problem with OHIP except when I needed an MRI. I just crossed over into Buffalo got it done the day after the Doctor told me I needed one. I sent my bill to OHIp and was re-imbursed within a few weeks.

After reading all of this I wonder if my being Native and living on a rez has anything to do with it? In all honesty I would have thought it works in reverse, but that doesn't seem to be the case! Maybe it also helps that I live near a big city ( Hamilton, Ont ) and do prefer to go there instead of to a smaller town of Brantford.

I also have a bad back, had surgery for a disc removal. I have never had a problem getting pain medication, and I mean GOOD medication, until I visited a Doctor here in the US. In the US they wanted to give me meds that had the same effect as a sugar pill, back home they have always given me narcotics ( not that I am a drug seeker, but if you have had bad back problems you know you need strong medicine for the first few days).

I also can attest to the waits to get to see a Doctor. It can take several months to get in, but it's the same here in the US! My Mom lives in Florida, and she has to make some appointment months in advance... same as me.

About the ESL issue. Our maintenance guy has a private contractor who comes in to do some of the work he is not ok'd to do. This guy is also Hispanic and sometimes he comes by late in the evening, and has one of his young kids with him.

One evening he had his 7 year old daughter. Usually at this age, their English is still terribly behind, but not this girl, hers was the same, with NO accent, as her age peers. Although her Spanish was impeccable too. I asked about this of him, and he said they put her in Early Head Start, Head Start and they also spoke English with their kids, alongside Spanish, from day one.

He said they did not want them to go to school knowing only Spanish and be behind. BRAVO to these parents, that is where the responsibility lies.

Although the intentions of the schools might be good, it is a faulty program with faulty ideals and should be scrapped.

This guy, and his wife are here legally, and it seems that with the people here illegally, in the very least, from Latin nations (such as Mexico as our main supplier of illegal aliens), there is this lackadaisical attitude about learning English and integrating their kids into the general system here early on, they balkanize themselves and their kids, and this puts their kids at a HUGE disadvantage.

Speaking of, this teen girl who had befriended us last summer, her family was here from El Salvador illegally (although she was born here) even her ability to converse fluently in English was limited. Her depth of use of words to describe things or situations was very one dimensional, and within the range of my 11 year old, and this girl was 16 at the time.

The health care issue, at least here in Oregon, the illegal aliens can walk into these county run or private run charity care clinics and get free care (they claim NO income) and no one questions them. If I walk in, I am asked to pay on a sliding scale, and the fee is sometimes more than I have in my pocket. I have witnessed this, and suspect it is the same scenario down in Texas, check out the goings on in those charity clinics and see how it all goes down.

BTW jshhmr, a story you may have not been here for I told to all a while back, I can PM you about, it has to do with social workers playing around with the income numbers and such to qualify people here illegally for entitlement programs.....

Me and my brother began preparing a story board over the weekend. He is one that has been affected directly, being someone that comes from the home repair business. I will be following a family friend who is also in the same business. He has been struggling recently. I am approaching this as if I were Michael Moore, except it will be about illegal immigration. I will be going to construction sites to confront the contractors about their workers while I have the guy with me asking for a job. Jobs are my first focus.

Thanks to Canadian ALIPACer's for your responses. It sounds like there are good and bad experiences, but it is still 100 times better than what we have here. At least you can get care when needed, I can't. Emergency rooms and healthcare will be my second focus for the film. I want to show Americans lives being ruined with medical bills, while illegal aliens get free healthcare. I will be going to John Peter Smith (where I went for a bleeding ulcer, but it was over run by illegals and I was not cared for) where illegals use the emergency room for coughs and sniffles.

Crimes will be another part of the story. Since I am a victim of ID theft, I have all of the documentation that I need.

Are there any Texans in or near the DFW area that have a personal story to tell? I would like to give you some camera time to tell your story. You don't have to be on camera if you don't want to.