This article is from Scott Johnson at Powerlineblog.com. His experiences and mine are similar with regard to Canadian Health Care. Mine include meeting Canadians seeking treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and listening to Canadians lament their own conditions.
This post is included here because it is becoming obvious that Obamacare was designed to fail by its own weight and to destroy the US health insurance industry, leaving us with a Canadian/UK style National Health System. We must be properly informed now because Obamacare was forced upon us without even being read, to find out what was in it. As bad as it is now, it only gets worse as we edge towards the single payer system.
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Scott Johnson: here
When our oldest daughter was in second grade her best friend was a classmate who was the
daughter of an ophthalmologist from Canada. He devoted much of his practice to treating
Medicaid patients at the county hospital.
The family moved to Ottawa at the end of the school year and we traveled to visit them. We
had lunch at a deli near his office, close by the Parliament building. Speaking about his
practice, he said he had a six-month waiting list to see patients for basic treatment, and that
once he saw them he was unable to provide anywhere near the same quality of care to his
prominent Canadian patients as he had to indigent Minnesotans. The necessary equipment
was simply not available.
This was twenty years ago, but the experience has stayed with me and I doubt the situation
has improved in the meantime. Here I turn to our friend Sally C. Pipes, the president, CEO,
and Taube Fellow in Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute . PRI is a non-profit
think tank based in San Francisco that’s dedicated to advancing opportunity for all people
through free-market policy solutions. Steve Hayward is a fellow of PRI.
Sally is the author, most recently, of the Encounter Broadside pamphlet The Cure For
Obamacare . The pamphlet is only the latest product of a long career warning us off
nationalized medicine and promoting constructive health care reform. You might say this is
her moment.
Sally testified this past Tuesday at a hearing held by a Senate subcommittee this week on
Canada’s single-payer, “Medicare-for-All” system — a system with which she is intimately
intimately familiar as a student of health care policy and a native of Canada. Her testimony is
posted here and worth reading in its entirety. Here Sally draws on painful personal
experience to give an example of several of the flaws of the Canadian system:
I’ve seen the failures of Canada’s system firsthand.
A few years ago, my mother suffered from severe stomach pain and suspected
that she might have colon cancer. Her primary-care doctor ruled out that
possibility following an X-ray. When she asked about getting a colonoscopy,
she was told that she was too old; there were too many younger people with
serious symptoms who were already on a six-month waiting list for the test.
Within four months, she had begun hemorrhaging and lost 35 pounds. After
two days in the emergency room and two in a “transit lounge,” she finally got
a colonoscopy. Sure enough, she had colon cancer. She died two weeks later.
Who knows how much more time we could have had with her, if her doctor
had been committed to treating her cancer early on?
Here in the United States, there are some limited, Canada-style single-payer
experiments underway. The Veterans Administration’s health system is the
most notable…
Canada’s system is the destination to which the American left want to deliver us. Please check
out Sally’s testimony if you have any interest in the issues.