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Saturday, September 18, 2004
One More Before I Go Out…
...to help a teenaged girl spend money she doesn’t have on a car she doesn’t need. Have you heard enough lately about the superiority of Canadian health care—the sort of single-payer socialized system John Kerry and Hillary! [Rodham] [Clinton] would like to impose on the United States? Well, looky here:
Before Americans embrace those who advocate joining the Canadians in government-dominated health care, they ought to take a look north. Just as American pundits and politicians are calling for us to adopt policies that put us on a path to a Canadian-style system, Canadians fed up with rationed care are questioning their own.
A July poll conducted for the Canadian Medical Association (search) found that 40 percent of Canadians now grade their health care system as a C or worse.
“Year over year, Canadians have identified that their confidence in their health-care system is eroding,” said former CMA president Sunil Patel.
The reason is simple and the problem is structural.
In theory, Canadians enjoy an almost ideal system — the government pays for all necessary health care, which is delivered by private practice physicians and independent hospitals. The day-to-day reality is starkly different. When Canadians need care, they face a series of waits: one for access to a primary care doctor, another for access to scarce diagnostic equipment, and another for the necessary procedure.
Between 1993 and 2003, the median waiting time from referral by a general practitioner to treatment increased by 90 percent, from 9.3 weeks to 17.7 weeks, according to an annual survey of physicians by the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute. For cancer patients, the waiting time for medical oncology more than doubled from 2.5 weeks to 6.1 weeks, and the waiting time for radiation oncology increased from 5.3 weeks to 8.1 weeks.
[...snip...]
The waits for care are not aberrations, but the logical result of the incentives of a government-supported system. To the government, health care costs are merely the checks it must write. To the patients like Cernivz, however, costs are broader, including the value of lost or diminished work while waiting for care and the diminished quality of life, while waiting in pain.
Government planners control monetary costs by shifting non-monetary costs on to patients. The system then prohibits Canadians from avoiding those non-monetary costs by paying out of pocket for their care, unless they leave the country.
[...snip...]
“At the moment,” writes CMA president Dr. Albert Schumacher, “millions of Canadians would love to find just one family physician, let alone choose from among several.”
Nearly half of doctors and nurses polled in July reported that their patient’s conditions had worsened while waiting for care.
In their classic 1980 survey Socialism: The Grand Delusion, in which they accurately forecasted the fall of the Soviet Union and world Communism, British economists Brian Crozier and Arthur Seldon noted that socialism most effectively compensates for its inadequacies and hides its failings by making the ordinary citizen wait. It converts money costs into time costs and moves them off its own back, and onto that of John Q. Public. Mr. Public, having no choices and no say in the matter, must simply submit.
Canada is a bit better than the Soviet Union. Complaining about the waits in the Soviet Union would get you shot or sent to a gulag. In Canada, it merely gets you denounced as a would-be American.
Say, how much credit should we give to Canadian “iced socialism” for Mark Steyn’s decision to move to the United States?
Comments
Our homebased death cultists know full well what are the biggest cause for increases in health care costs.
I’m pretty sure the numbers, where available, will attest to my guesses here:
1. insurance coupled with human nature = “if it’s paid for already, get as much as you can get.” (This would have to be done in a double-blind study. What libertarian organization would fund such a study and what health providers would cooperate?)
You don’t even have to be a hypochondriac. But those “sickos” have struck the mother lode.2. Medical Malpractice Insurance costs. These must be passed onto the patients. Tort reform anyone? Sure, when HFO.
3. Development, FDA hoop jumps, and legal costs of all new drugs. These too must be passed onto the patients. Else we are back to the failure of no incentives. (For instance, what was the last medication to be discovered by Canada? How about Cuba?)
4. The failure of the AMA to penalize those doctors who need to be sanctioned. A problem older than the AMA, perhaps because so few remember to mention the dirt swept under the rug by the AMA equivalent to no-fault auto insurance.
5. Corporation profits are actually increased with all these costs. It appears they have less incentive to bring about truly systemic reforms. (Somewhat related to #4, but newer).
:Sigh: Isn’t this just another example of the decline of our civilization under the “leadership” of those who would let us do ourselves in by not exposing the real underlying issues above.
And greedy geezers (prominent among problem #1) are whipped into a frenzy by Old Media agitators like Saul Friedman, the guy who impelled you to write the adjacent commentary.
The complaints I hear from them “Oh, it’s bad for me, but it’ll be worse for my grandkids.” That’s true. Our death cultists are aiming at them by misleading you, grandpa, into crying over the needed reforms.
Posted by pascal on 09/18/2004 at 03:16 PM
