Category: Canada

Fraser Institute still allowed space in WSJ

A friend sent me this piece from the WSJ from the seriously delusional Fraser Institute (whom I may have to give their own subject tag at this point, but I’ll stick them in with the Right Wing Noise Machine for now). My reply:

I love how these people love to site anecdotes. I note they never site the horrible anecdotes from the US.

I have some collected here: http://cmhmd.blogspot.com/search/label/%22Anecdote-Off%22

The first entry on my blog in my “anecdote-off” section is from a BBC documentary on US healthcare from January.

Have fun. See how many anecdotes you can count in this brief half hour program. I think there are at least a thousand if you count all those poor people at the RAM Medical program. But there are stories every bit, actually worse, than any Canadian anecdote I’ve ever seen.

Keep scrolling down, you’ll get the idea. If you are uninsured in America, you may as well be in Cambodia until you’re sick enough for the ER.

Oh, and hip replacements in the US do have a short waiting time, thanks to OUR single payer system, Medicare, which is funded well enough to make it so,

And finally, the Fraser Institute is full of poopy-heads, and dishonest ones at that. 😉

I love you, but aren’t you seriously tired of being systematically manipulated by Fraser, Heritage, Club for Growth and the rest of the noise machine?

Cheers,

Interview with Uwe Reinhardt on Inauguration Day | Worldfocus

How the U.S. measures up to Canada’s health care system Worldfocus:

“The Worldfocus signature story Canada’s hospitals cut the paperwork, emphasize care explores Canada’s health care system.

“In this extended interview, Uwe Reinhardt, a leading adviser on health care economics and professor of political economy at Princeton University, compares the Canadian and American health care systems. Reinhardt criticizes the U.S. health care culture and expresses his optimism about the Obama administration.

“As part of Worldfocus’ Health of Nations signature series, correspondent Edie Magnus conducted this half-hour interview with Uwe Reinhardt on January 20, 2008, the day of President Barack Obama’s inauguration.”

Terrific interview! Highly recommended!

The Health Care Blog: POLICY: Oh Canada

The Health Care Blog: POLICY: Oh Canada

“This article is about Canada’s health system and its relationship to the US health policy debate. It is not meant to be an endorsement of Canada’s system, or an endorsement of single payer for the US.”

Very well done, but a few years old. Most of the information is still pertinent. Very nice, very detailed compare/contrast piece on US vs. Canadian Healthcare systems.

Ohio.com – Health-care matchup finds Ohio falls short

Ohio.com – Health-care matchup finds Ohio falls short

From the article, which is a nice overview of US (Ohio) vs. Canadian (Ontario)

To explore how Ohio compares to the nation and the world, the Beacon Journal looked 60 miles across Lake Erie to the Canadian province of Ontario.
How does Ohio measure up to its neighbor?
Not very well:
• A 65-year-old Ontario resident can look forward to living about 20 more years — three years more than an Ohioan the same age can expect. At birth, the difference in life expectancy is greater — 76.4 years for Ohioans, compared to 80.7 years in Ontario.
• In Ohio, nearly eight of 1,000 newborns die each year — significantly higher than the U.S. rate of 6.8 deaths. In Ontario, the infant mortality rate is 5.5
• Ontario also has lower death rates for each of the top six causes: heart disease, cancer, stroke, emphysema and other chronic lower respiratory diseases, diabetes and accidents.
Overall, the gap in these key health-care yardsticks was wider between Ohio and Ontario than between the two nations as a whole in all but two categories: strokes and accidents.
That difference was striking because the state and the province are so similar demographically.
While the 300 million people in the United States are nine times more than Canada’s head count, Ohio and Ontario are close in population, overall economic size and demographic measures such as median age, average household and family size, and education.
Ohio and Ontario also have similar economies, with almost the same percentage of both work forces employed in manufacturing and retail and wholesale trade — the two largest industry categories. Wages and salaries also are comparable.

Rent hikes forcing out city (Calgary, Canada) doctors

Rent hikes forcing out city doctors:

“‘It’s scary,’ said Dr. Linda Slocombe, president of the Calgary and Area Physicians’ Association, who notes that doctors, unlike most other small businesses, can’t raise their prices to offset rising costs. ‘In another two or three years we’re going to have a real drastic shortage of family doctors.’

The study, which was commissioned by CHR last summer but only became public during a recent meeting of Calgary family physicians, comes as the city already struggles with a doctor shortage.

An estimated 200,000 Calgarians don’t have a regular family physician, a problem that has been compounded by at least 41 doctors who have closed their practice in recent years.

Experts say the physicians are retiring or leaving to pursue other jobs in medicine, where they earn a good salary and don’t have the hassle of operating an office.”

Posting this in keeping with my “warts and all” policy of reporting the good and the bad of other systems.

BUT, does any of this not apply to PCP’s in America? Can’t raise our prices? The hassle of operating an office? (And they don’t even have to deal with dozens of private health insurers, so they are mainly talking about the other hassles.)

Cheers

Doctors demand action on private health insurance

CNW Group CANADIAN DOCTORS FOR MEDICARE Doctors demand action on private health insurance:

“TORONTO, March 12 /CNW Telbec/ – Canadian Doctors for Medicare today called on the federal and provincial governments to immediately take all necessary steps to stop the spread of private health insurance for medically necessary services in British Columbia.

‘The recent exposé that Acure Health Corp is selling ‘Medical Access Insurance’ for services already covered under Medicare undermines the public health care system to the detriment of the vast majority of Canadians, and contravenes the Canada Health Act’, said Dr. Danielle Martin, Chair of Canadian Doctors for Medicare.
…
“Those who think private health insurance is a panacea for our system should take a look at the Australian experience. The major beneficiaries there have been higher income Australians, private insurance companies, private hospitals and medical specialists – and not the wider Australian community,” said Dr. Martin.
…
“In its 2006, in its discussion paper “It’s About Access”, the Canadian Medical Association reviewed all the evidence and found: – Private insurance for medically necessary physician and hospital services does not improve access to publicly insured services
– Does not lower costs or improve quality of care
– Can increase wait times for those who are not privately insured; and
– Could exacerbate human resource shortages in the public system.”

heritage foundation – Moral costs of socializedmedicine

Vindy.com News – Youngstown, Ohio – Moral costs of socializedmedicine:

“Anyone who considers Canada’s health system a role model for the U.S. should consider the case of Samuel Golubchuk. His case shows the inevitable collision course between government-controlled health care and the rights of private conscience.”

Typical hack rubbish. My comments are on the Vindy web site below the article…

Quebec commission makes recommendations

Quebec commission makes recommendations:

“Quebec – The Castonguay task force on health care proposes a $25 charge for every visit to a doctor and an increase up to one percentage point in the Quebec sales tax to help pay for medicare.

Claude Castonguay, the chair of the task force, notes that health care, as a share of the provincial budget is growing 5.8 per cent a year, while total government spending increases 3.9 per cent annually.

He proposes capping health spending at 3.9 per cent and making up for the shortfall with a new health-stability fund, financed by the $25 doctor’s charge and the sales-tax increase.

Extra billing for health care is currently illegal under the Canada Health Act, which Castonguay concludes ‘hampers the evolution of the provincial public health systems.'”

In keeping with the “warts and all” approach to comparing helathcare systems…

The feedback to the story was mostly negative.

AlterNet: 10 Myths About Canadian Health Care, Busted

AlterNet: 10 Myths About Canadian Health Care, Busted:

“2008 is shaping up to be the election year that we finally get to have the Great American Healthcare Debate again. Harry and Louise are back with a vengeance. Conservatives are rumbling around the talk show circuit bellowing about the socialist threat to the (literal) American body politic. And, as usual, Canada is once again getting dragged into the fracas, shoved around by both sides as either an exemplar or a warning — and, along the way, getting coated with the obfuscating dust of so many willful misconceptions that the actual facts about How Canada Does It are completely lost in the melee.

I’m both a health-care-card-carrying Canadian resident and an uninsured American citizen who regularly sees doctors on both sides of the border. As such, I’m in a unique position to address the pros and cons of both systems first-hand. If we’re going to have this conversation, it would be great if we could start out (for once) with actual facts, instead of ideological posturing, wishful thinking, hearsay, and random guessing about how things get done up here.

To that end, here’s the first of a two-part series aimed at busting the common myths Americans routinely tell each other about Canadian health care. When the right-wing hysterics drag out these hoary old bogeymen, this time, we need to be armed and ready to blast them into straw. Because, mostly, straw is all they’re made of.”

Read on…

Joint Canada/United States Survey of Health: Findings and public-use microdata file: Analytical report

Joint Canada/United States Survey of Health: Findings and public-use microdata file: Analytical report:

“Overall, most Canadians (88%) and Americans (85%) reported being in good, very good or excellent health. However, the range of health status was more polarized in the United States. More Americans reported being at either end of the health status spectrum – in excellent health (26%) and in fair and poor health (15%) – compared with Canadians (24% and 12% respectively).”

I saw a post arguing that this data proved the US system is better, and I just wanted to post the summary report for reference. Follow the link for the rest of it. It’s worth remembering how much more we spend here than there as you review the numbers, and it’s worth restating that we want to build an American system that is the best in the world in its totality, not just in niches of high tech and procedural related care.