****Re: guess what....

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2009-08-02 at 19:16 -0700, Vaughn Treude wrote:
> Lisa Kachold wrote:
> > On 7/30/09, JD Austin <jd at twingeckos.com> wrote:
> >   
> >> The 'other' model isn't working any better.  My wife works in an Urgent
> >> Care; tons of Canadians come here to get the health care they need.  I think
> >> the whole industry needs to be more competitive; most things in health care
> >> shouldn't cost what they do.
> >>
> >>     
> > Inefficiency in preventative care, diagnostics, errors in surgery, the
> > truth is incredibly expensive.
> >
> > But just because Canadians come here for care doesn't mean it's not working.
> >   
> <rant>
> If by "working", you mean the majority of Canadians people accept it, 
> and even think it's a good thing, I suppose it is. They're just very 
> lucky they have a "safety valve", that is, a large semi-free country 
> whose borders are within 100 miles of 90% of their population. 
> Single-payer is, IMHO, the biggest piece of economic foolishness ever 
> devised. Let's give an absolute monopoly to the most inefficient, 
> corrupt organization ever invented by humans (government.) As for the 
> notion that socialized medicine is cheaper, I don't believe it for a 
> second. Governments can shift their costs to other agencies; the 
> Pentagon does it all the time. I assume, for example, the cost of having 
> "premiums" collected by the CRA doesn't get counted in the balance 
> sheet. Not to mention the fact that a huge portion of the overhead costs 
> of private insurers in the US is red tape imposed by government 
> bureaucracies.
> Not that I'm necessarily endorsing the current system. There were a lot 
> of good not-for-profit medical insurers in this country until Richard 
> Nixon changed the tax laws, causing a massive takeover by greedy HMO's. 
> I'd like to see a system of decentralized medical cooperatives with 
> for-profit companies as a supplement.
> BTW, I don't blame the immigrants, but I do blame the lawyers. :-)
> </rant>
> 
> No offense, just my two cents. :-)
> There, I feel so much better.
> Vaughn
----
seeing as how the political discussions do not die off, I am going to
sound off here.

The entire premise of the Canadian health care system was to provide a
single tier of medical coverage for all and no amount of wealth would
provide a better level of health care. You cannot devise a system that
is more fundamentally fair to everyone.

The people who come here from Canada are doing elective surgeries either
not covered by the health care system in Canada or prioritized in a
manner that does not suit the person with money to pay elsewhere.

The language that you use Vaughn is loaded and inaccurate...
- we are not a safety valve, we provide elective medical care to those
who want to pay and go elsewhere.

- the issue of a monopolized health care run by the government happens
to be that which is practiced in all other western nations. We spend
more per capita on health care than any other industrialized nation and
yet approximately 25% of our citizens do not have coverage.

- the insurance companies do worse managing the health care than
government could ever do. They practice murder by spreadsheet. They
invent rules for exclusions. Someone in this country WITH health
insurance goes bankrupt in this country every 30 seconds because of
exclusions, deductibles, etc.

- blaming the government red tape for the profits of insurers is absurd
to its core.

An American citizen visiting Canada can get free health care if needed.

Any solution short of single-payer will fail and we will be back here
again, with more people excluded from coverage by insurance companies,
more people bankrupted by illness only because the companies with
profits at stake...insurance companies and drug companies will spend
unreasonable amounts of money to influence public opinion and elected
candidates.

Craig


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