Something Everyone Should Read!
As the presidential candidates take the stage to discuss health care and support, to varying degrees socialized medicine, the following article is truly frightening. I urge readers, whether you agree with me or disagree with me to read this piece. Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, the insured or the uninsured will find this very interesting!
This is by David Gratzer a physician licensed in Canada and the United States and was a staunch supporter of the Canadian Health Care system for 20 years.
Canadian Health Care We So Envy Lies In Ruins, Its Architect Admits
By DAVID GRATZER | June 25, 2008 4:30 PM
As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates' comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in Detroit, the overworked doctor in Orlando, to name a few.
But no one will mention Claude Castonguay — perhaps not surprising because this statesman isn't an American and hasn't held office in over three decades.
Castonguay's evolving view of Canadian health care, however, should weigh heavily on how the candidates think about the issue in this country.
Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.
The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: "the father of Quebec medicare." Even this title seems modest; Castonguay's work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.
Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in "crisis."
"We thought we could resolve the system's problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it," says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: "We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice."
Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.
In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It's as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced.
What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.
Years ago, Canadians touted their health care system as the best in the world; today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.
Sick with ovarian cancer, Sylvia de Vires, an Ontario woman afflicted with a 13-inch, fluid-filled tumor weighing 40 pounds, was unable to get timely care in Canada. She crossed the American border to Pontiac, Mich., where a surgeon removed the tumor, estimating she could not have lived longer than a few weeks more.
The Canadian government pays for U.S. medical care in some circumstances, but it declined to do so in de Vires' case for a bureaucratically perfect, but inhumane, reason: She hadn't properly filled out a form. At death's door, de Vires should have done her paperwork better.
De Vires is far from unusual in seeking medical treatment in the U.S. Even Canadian government officials send patients across the border, increasingly looking to American medicine to deal with their overload of patients and chronic shortage of care.
Since the spring of 2006, Ontario's government has sent at least 164 patients to New York and Michigan for neurosurgery emergencies — defined by the Globe and Mail newspaper as "broken necks, burst aneurysms and other types of bleeding in or around the brain." Other provinces have followed Ontario's example.
Canada isn't the only country facing a government health care crisis. Britain's system, once the postwar inspiration for many Western countries, is similarly plagued. Both countries trail the U.S. in five-year cancer survival rates, transplantation outcomes and other measures.
The problem is that government bureaucrats simply can't centrally plan their way to better health care.
A typical example: The Ministry of Health declared that British patients should get ER care within four hours. The result? At some hospitals, seriously ill patients are kept in ambulances for hours so as not to run afoul of the regulation; at other hospitals, patients are admitted to inappropriate wards.
Declarations can't solve staffing shortages and the other rationing of care that occurs in government-run systems.
Polls show Americans are desperately unhappy with their system and a government solution grows in popularity. Neither Sen. Obama nor Sen. McCain is explicitly pushing for single-payer health care, as the Canadian system is known in America.
"I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program," Obama said back in the 1990s. Last year, Obama told the New Yorker that "if you're starting from scratch, then a single-payer system probably makes sense."
As for the Republicans, simply criticizing Democratic health care proposals will not suffice — it's not 1994 anymore. And, while McCain's health care proposals hold promise of putting families in charge of their health care and perhaps even taming costs, McCain, at least so far, doesn't seem terribly interested in discussing health care on the campaign trail.
However the candidates choose to proceed, Americans should know that one of the founding fathers of Canada's government-run health care system has turned against his own creation. If Claude Castonguay is abandoning ship, why should Americans bother climbing on board?
Yes and hear the crickets
The membership of this blog reads like a Who's Who of liberal and progressive politics yet we still can only hear the crickets!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There is a reason for that...........they know they are wrong........but e.dog, that is the Socialist way.
They are just not able to have an intelligent conversation so they either attack or they fail to respond.
We have Mike but all I hear are the crickets!!!!!!!!!!!! Speaks volumes.
I want no part of your
I want no part of your fascist program, thank you very much. Just leave me out of it. Thank you.
99 banal blatherings on the Blog, 99 banal blatherings
Add one more ("I want no part of your fascist program") to Mikey's manure pile: "You rightwing wackjobs are so deluded you can't see beyond the end of your noses," "MaCains/McSames. OPEN your eyes, Judy, and see the REAL world," "this is just more rightwing propaganda. So what if you travel, unless you can document what you say, your statements are meaningless," "greed outweighs responsibility among rightwingers. I've got mine...screw you is their agenda and motto," "This is typical rant of folks who think like you Bill," "it is your type that has THE narrow world view. Get real. What does neo-conservative mean....status quo. Live in the past, fear everything you don't understand!!," "That is why progressives must defeat the immorality of the neo-conservatives and right wing brainwashed fascists that support them," "I'll never see the world through your corrupt eyes," "I'm not sure why you have to bring up the Kennedy family. There are many more gangsters on your team, as we all know."
I guess this is what liberal crickets sound like when they rub their tired ideas against their enfeebled brains. Your mother must be so proud.
By the by Mikey, how're you progressin' with them calculator lessons? I wonder if you will ever be able, or brave enough, to answer the challenge of using real math to answer that simple question.
- Movin' on.org,
C. dog e. doG
Hilarious!!
Oh Mikey,
I join Dog & Bill here in the laughter. Imagine a far left liberal, calling a Conservative or 'Independent' a "facist." You're a belly laugh, at best. No constructive argument for your beliefs.. because deep down you must know YOU'RE WRONG!! If you're not and believe your own empty rhetoric, please say something constructive instead of attacking others as your MO.
If you wanted to be "left out of it" - you'd be quiet with the rest of the crickets.
I'll respond more tomorrow... You're amusing at best, Mike. Best of luck to you.
Judy
If They Can't Win
If the Left can't win in the arena of ideas, they mask their real thoughts with that kind of name calling.
I correspond with three progressives who all use the word "Fascist". I wish for once they would just admit: "yes we want Socialism". Instead they do a fancy dance around the truth.
They want to censor opposing opinion and then name call. Until we can have consensus with give and take, there will be no real "progress" .
Like the oil debate they view health care as either / or. It is not that simple. There can be common ground but not if they refuse to meet there!
Be careful Judy, this blog will get censored. Please make sure there are no personal attacks...I have been through this before. I just wish more progressives would reply so there could be reasonable debate....but....all I hear are crickets!
Thanks Judy
Sooooo, What Then Must We Do?
Bill -
With respect to health-care, dare I say the Canucks suck? I did, I did. Having said that, what are your ideas for improving this latest industry under attack by Republicrat and Demublican alike, or do you like it the way it is? I would also like to hear from liberals on this too, including Mikey if he promises to play nice in his corner of the sandbox. I haven't formulated my solution(s) on this topic yet, and could use your help. I suspect there might be common ground to make steps in a better direction.
- Sitting here on my Pondering Rock wondering how to finance my future well-being, C. dog e. doG
Best Idea
Here is how we should handle the 40 million uninsured. Of course liberals want to spread the pain and have everyone on the same system.
1) Find out who is not insured. Then determine if those folks have ability to pay for the insurance and if they could get it through their employer. I can tell you that I know people who do not want to pay for it but it is available.
2) How many of those 40 million are illegal? I bet that you would find it is a large number...do not offer services to that segment.
3) Then take a look at the cost of prescription and introduce a program that caps those costs. Therefore, no $135 prescriptions.
4) Allow taxpayers to write off from dollar one all medical expenses to directly offset their wages...imagine if you earned $60,000 and due to $8000 of medical expenses you could reduce your tax liability to $52,000.
So, plain and simple, help the 40 million.....leave the rest alone.
That would all work but you don't hear any of those ideas from politicians on either side of the aisle.
Medical treatment or Insurance wrangling?
Y'all -
Bill's program sounds better than Hillary-Care, and I'm not sure what tweedle-dee and tweedle-dumb are currently proposing in their presidential campaigns (I will vote for neither lesser-evil). So I have a few questions and comments:
• First, are we talking medical treatments or insurance? Sounds like insurance to me. But would we be better off focusing our efforts on medical treatments because we then eliminate layers of bureaucracy that add nothing to the objective (medical treatment), but do contribute substantially to cost.
• Is this a voluntary program, or another Nanny State make-the-medicine-go-down prescription? (I hated my ninny nanny)
• Is it limited to basic care, or includes platinum member multi-million dollar treatments? Are elective C-sections covered? Who decides and how?
• Does this cover lifestyle illnesses and injuries from smoking, drinking, huffin' crack with gang-bangers, participating in hot-dog eating contests, twinky binge-but-no-purges, skiing, hang gliding, hangin' with Dr. Kevorkian ...? If so, why should Joe Six-pack and Cindy Cigarette be forced to fund someone else's bad or risky lifestyle choices? Again, who decides, and how is their decision fair?
Regardless, here's what any such program should include, some of which builds on Bill's proposal:
1. Voluntary participation: otherwise we remain "dead" according to General Stark.
2. Participant pays up: why should government ruling class club someone else to pay before the patient pays as much as they can first? Think tax returns and net-wealth statements. A medical IRA might be a good compromise instrument here (it rolls over year to year, and provides incentive to be healthy to enjoy some of these dollars at a later date).
3. Tax Credits: If people really think this is so almighty important, then they must be willing to offer tax credits to those offering discount services to the indigent and those subsidizing such. Doctors are always looking for tax breaks. And certainly people should be able to take tax deductions for all non-cosmetic medical expenses ... (daaaa!).
4. Only applies to U.S. citizens. Yes, all others are second class except back in the country of their citizenship.
5. Basic care coverage, but tax credit contributions unlimited for expanded treatments.
6. Self proclaimed liberals/progressives pay any balance due. I'm sure Scarecrow Mikey would love to contribute to this most worthy of causes.
I think there are also some interesting issues to discuss regarding the current unholy Insurance-AMA (American Medical Assoc.)-Government triad, but that can wait for another day. Suffice it to say for now it's a driving force in ever escalating medical expenses and could benefit from a hair cut using hedge trimmers.
- Stayin' fit and eatin' right so I keep out of government medical camps,
C. dog e. doG
P.S. If you want to contribute to the Purge Non-essential Positions from New Hampshire Government (a/k/a PuNoPo-NH) blog-a-thon, go over to Daniel Hynd's blog "Governor Lynch Should Consider 4-Day Work Week". If you access the NH government website, you'll be amazed at what you'll find ... I was.
Bill -
Once again, another timely topic, especially during this campaign season. I think most thinking people find fault with the socialist solution, save for the apparatchik who have preferred access to the goods and services of those industries they usurp and monopolize. Who says class structure collapses when socialism intercedes?
But, the current system ain't so great, either. Need we divulge the details of: ongoing spiraling costs, ever burgeoning waistlines leading to outcome "illnesses", "private" information going "public", etc.? So, how would you restructure the medical mess, or would you leave as is?
- Avoiding dangerous pratfalls and eatin' right as I pay into my self-insurance program,
C. dog e. doG