Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire About that ideal health care system in Canada...

We do have that.

Tort Reform is the first step boys.

He has already stated previously on the Fire he came to the US because medical care is in the can in Canada.

Prices are high here because dimocraps have illegals and the poor getting their hospital fees covered by jacking up the fees on those with jobs and insurance.

How about I give you some real data regarding taxation. I make just under 80k a year and I pay around 13k in income taxes a year. There's a 12% sales tax on most items in BC. I don't feel all that overtaxed. I guess you could add on property tax and license fees, but I guess you could do the same just about anywhere. My cottage in Hawaii seems to have property taxes I need to pay for it.

Health care in Canada has been getting better at prioritizing. If you go in to the ER with chest pains, they get you in and hooked up to all sorts of machinery right away. If you go in to the ER because you are an idiot and sliced off a chunk of your finger and nothing else is open, you might wait a few hours until more serious things have been taken care of. Per capita, Canada spends less on health care by a decent amount. But it's universal, meaning nobody gets left out. If you are chronically ill, you don't pay more than anyone else. If you make minimum wage, you can still get health care without taking food off your children's table.

The interesting thing is that we always compare ourselves to our nearest neighbors. I'm not sure it's productive to do so as neither of our countries is at the top of the health care rankings by a fair distance:

http://thepatientfactor.com/canadia...ns-ranking-of-the-worlds-health-systems/

If I wanted to pay for health care I'd go to Mexico, Colombia or India. It's much cheaper for those who can afford to pay and the quality of care is very good if you shop around. Hopefully I won't have to do that.

While in Mexico over the Christmas Holidays, I needed a trip to a doctor for a staph infection. I got right in with no wait, paid about $25 US, he cleaned up the wound, cut it open so it could 'breathe', washed it out, bandaged it up and gave me a prescription. The $25 was worth it just to avoid having a wait, much less the excellent care. My mom had a three day hospital stay there a couple of years back and it cost about $1200.00

I was under the impression that in the US "illegals and the poor" had their hospital fees covered by government rather than the private sector. Is this not the case? I know Obamacare threw a wrench into that idea but that's over now, right?

If you need a hip or knee replacement or have a sports injury you might have a fairly long wait in Canada. I think we should be looking to some of the best health care systems in the world however to give us some ideas on how to keep it affordable and efficient.

You live in socialist New York, I can get an appointment next week here in Texas. Good luck with your appointment. I have a friend in Canada and his Mother was killed by her gastroenterologist. She had stomach pain and he treated with antacids and such for years. The pain got so bad that they took her to the emergency room. One X-ray showed she was eaten up with cancer she died shortly after that.

NO!

https://spectator.org/obamacare-is-killing-rural-hospitals-and-their-patients/

I hope you don't either.

However, if you come down with something really bad like a brain tumor in a tricky location or you need a heart transplant, are you going to go to Mexico, Colombia, or India, or are you going to go to the U.S.? Make no mistake about it, the best health care period is available in the U.S., no where else comes close. You can argue "systems" all you want, but if you want the best you come here. One look at the ramp at the Rochester, MN, airport will tell you something when you see all the private jets with arabic writing on them. Those middle eastern kings and dictators fly right over europe and Canada to get to the Mayo Clinic when they have something that really needs to be fixed.

Canadian health care, like most socialized medicine countries, is pretty good if you have something common and minor. Canada's citizens benefit greatly from having the U.S. next door to pick up the slack when your "system" isn't able to handle something. When Saskatchewan's one MRI machine is overbooked you can pop across the border and pay for an MRI at almost any hospital in the U.S. Newfoundland and Labrador's premier Danny Williams said it well when he went to Florida for his heart operation instead of trusting the Canadian system. "I did not sign away my right to get the best possible health care for myself when I entered politics" Williams said.

Mike;
Good evening to you sir, I hope the weekend's been treating you acceptably well and spring has sorta sprung out in your part of the Island. Our daughter in Victoria indicated it's a bit nicer there than here - which is as it should be for this time of year.

I appreciated you taking the time to answer as you did and the way you articulated it. Well done sir.

Since I've been on the 'Fire here I've attempted to answer this topic a few times over the years and sometimes felt like I did a better job than others.

A few things to remind our friends south of the line which are in my view quite pertinent to keep in mind, the first of which is there's not a whole lot of us up here and even though most of us are within a couple hundred miles of the medicine line, we're still quite spread out.

That necessarily means that any infrastructure we're trying to maintain - healthcare, education, transportation, defense, etc and etc - is going to cost each and every one of us more to maintain.

Other Canucks have already touched on this, but "average healthcare" up here doesn't really exist in that it'll vary wildly by region within each province and even more so province to province. There's a number of reasons for that - local economy and ability to attract doctors being a huge variable.

For example while we've lobbied for better hospital facilities in Penticton for years, now that they're building it some local entrepreneurs have stepped forward with huge donations for equipment. There aren't folks like that in some areas of the Cariboo or Kootenays like there are here in the comparatively wealthy south Okanagan, right?

Lastly while I've got distant family who are involved in US healthcare - 2nd cousin who is a doctor in Missouri - it's been so long since I've had contact with her that I can't comment as to what her thoughts on the difference might look like.

We get additional insurance when we travel stateside and touch wood have yet to use it when we've been across the medicine line.

Anyway sir, that's all I've got for now, thanks again for your comments and all the best to you this spring.

Dwayne

As always the calm voice of reason from Dwayne.

Health care seems to be the unsolvable can of worms, north, or south of the "Medicine Line".

About 6-8 months ago a meeting of conservatives had a Canadian physician in to speak.. He told the group, in no uncertain terms, that Canadian health care is a nightmare.

He finally left Canada after over 30 years as chief of surgery for a major hospital there because he couldn't further stand the BS and lack of competency and care in Canadian hospitals..

He spoke for about an hour - and you could hear a pin drop during the entire time..

Here, along the border, you will find a lot of physicians who have come over here to practice because they can make a lot more money than they can in the Canadian system. I'm sure that contributes to the problem over there.

I did indeed practice in Canada prior to immigrating to the USA in 1996. Their healthcare economy was a mess then and continues to be so.

In addition to being a practicing doc, I also served on a working group of the Alberta Medical Association branch of the CMA, which was convened to study alternative funding mechanisms to fee-for-service for primary care docs. This expanded into a general study of healthcare systems in Europe and OZ/NZ, which formed my opinions on the roots of the problem and the possible solutions.

Canada's medical care system was founded on the idea that there should be a broad, basic healthcare plan for ALL citizens, paid for largely by taxes, but into which each participant made a small payment. Private medical care would still be allowed, but subsequent laws enacted in some provinces and eventually in Ottawa made private insurance and private medical practice illegal. There have been some exceptions made, but basically the law there says there's one system, and everyone is in it. Which is the biggest problem Canada faces.

Because in Europe and elsewhere, it was recognized from the get-go that a 100% national healthcare system would be overwhelmed quickly. So private care (both medical practice and insurance plans) were/are allowed, for those who can afford it. Some docs practice in both plans, particularly specialists, but most of the generalists/primary care docs are in the public system. The private system off-loads much of the medical care demand, and allows the public system to remain effective. You can get your hip replacement done faster in the private system, or you can have your COPD treated in a nicer hospital in the private system, but if you're in the public system you'll still get the treatment you need, eventually; you'll just have to wait longer to get it, and it will be frills-free.

Canada's solution was stupid. By eliminating the "hi-pressure safety valve" of the private system, they forced everyone to take the same kind of care and the system has bogged down more and more badly. Long wait times for elective surgeries such as hip replacements are very long, and even emergency surgeries may be delayed so long that people die before they get to see a surgeon.

Like America's Democrats after the 2016 election, Canada's healthcare plutocrats keep doubling down on their bad bet... they keep trying to make the public system, which has been failing badly for decades... work. They continue to refuse to encourage a higher-tier self-pay private system. They keep pouring good money after bad.

In the USA, we can learn from this mess. First, I believe a broad, basic "safety net" healthcare plan can be practical and sustainable. It's proven so in Europe and elsewhere. But it's imperative that a private system be encouraged simultaneously, and that private system needs to be clean and straightforward, unlike our current US healthcare insurance laws.

I have no idea if the political will to take this on exists. Interesting times.

I have no idea if the political will to take this on exists. But if it did, here's what I would prescribe, in the broad brushstrokes.

1. Initiate a NHS (national healthcare system) that all citizens would be eligible for. Make a quarterly premium, based on income, mandatory to participate in the system. This token payment has been proven time and again to be necessary for people to value the system, because if healthcare is free, it's worthless.

2. Require all state-funded hospitals to accept NHS patients and NHS fee schedules. These would be negotiated, not just set by Medicare/Medicaid decree. Scrap the current Medicare/Medicaid administration. Bureaucracy is choking the system out.

3. Require private hospitals to be self-funding. No state money goes to them, but on the other hand they don't have to waste money/resources on the BS that currently clogs the hallways of ALL hospitals. If all their patients are funded, they can provide fast top-notch care at a lower price because they don't have to inflate their prices to compensate for the lousy Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement model, which only pays pennies on the dollar.

4. Revamp healthcare insurance legislation so all plans must be available nationwide. Make the companies compete in a true free market rather than the protected regional/state markets they now enjoy and profit from.

5. Establish nationwide tort/liability reform so frivolous and greedy lawsuits don't continue to destroy the system from the bottom up. States that have enacted such laws have benefitted enormously. At the same time, you have to enact meaningful patient compensation systems for folks who have bad medical outcomes, such as the Wisconsin Patient Compensation Fund.

6. Establish financial incentives to encourage our best and brightest to go into medicine. We are currently losing our smartest kids who want to study medicine because the cost of a medical education is enormous and the level of payment for medical practice continues to shrink, relatively speaking. We need AMERICAN kids who can speak English and love America to be our next generation's doctors, not immigrant doctors who are unable to function effectively in what is, to them, a foreign country.

Etc, etc, etc.

Thank you Doctor.

Strangely, there was never any public discourse involved in the now prevalent view that healthcare should be free. Good food or good care will never be free.

I practiced with an eye surgeon who left Canada because he had skills that could not be developed when he was only allowed to do cataract sx and intraocular lens implants 4 hours per month. He had patients needing sx backed up for a year the govt wouldnt foot the bill for.

Posts by DocRocket and BC30cal are ALWAYS worth reading -- as again shown in this thread.

John

our Supreme Court should have batted Obongocare back into the trash bin. also queers getting married. both are absurd and ridiculous.

jagtx... your eye guy's experience betrays the dark underbelly of the "free-for-all" healthcare mentality, which is RATIONING.

You can pick any two of the three attributes of a healthcare system:

CHEAP
FAST
GOOD

Pick any 2. You can't have all 3.

Canada picked Cheap and Good, so they lost Fast. Somebody has to direct traffic, i.e., manage the rationing, which is reallly unpopular among consumers... but Canada had a compliant population after decades of socialist governments.

Decisions on OR time and position on waiting lists for "emergency" surgery are made by non-clinical bureaucrats. Since the docs are all too busy actually delivering medical care to patients, this falls on the shoulders of RN's, mostly, and typically not RN's who have any clinical experience.

So the major decisions made on people's healthcare are being made by bureaucrats.

Not a good situation.

Thanks for the kind words, jpb. Looking forward to reading BC30CAL's comments.

My first introduction to the Canadian health care system involved the husband of my wife's best friend who had a history of heart problems.

At age 38 he began suffering severe Angina. He called to make an appointment with a doctor and was told to be there in 2 weeks.

He was dead in a week.