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Title: My Canadian Healthcare Horror Stories
Source:
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URL Source: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/leboeuf-schouten1.html
Published: Aug 13, 2009
Author: Cathy LeBoeuf-Shouten
Post Date: 2009-08-13 00:41:25 by Horse
Keywords: None
Views: 348
Comments: 27
I was born in the same year that my government adopted socialized healthcare in Canada. I am an educated, middle-class woman and I have never known any kind of healthcare but the kind that is provided by our government-run system. It has been a nightmare for my family and me. The following stories, told in second person and based on my personal experiences with socialized healthcare in Canada, constitute my personal warning to Americans. Imagine that you and your spouse, and three children under the age of six move to a new city and must find a family doctor. You are told at the local clinic that the doctors there are not accepting any new patients. (Canadian price controls have created shortages of everything when it comes to healthcare). The receptionist suggests that you go through the yellow pages and try to find a physician whose practice is not "full." You spend days, and weeks, doing this, and are repeatedly told "Sorry, we are not accepting new patients." You put your name on several waiting lists and persist in calling doctors’ offices. Finally, a receptionist tells you that, while the doctor is still accepting new patients, he requires a full medical history and an interview with each family member before you can be added to his roster of patients. Based on the questions asked during the interviews, you come to understand that he is screening out sick or potentially sick people. You are all healthy, fortunately, so he takes you on as patients. Others are just out of luck. There is a chronic shortage of doctors in Canada because price controls on doctors’ salaries have resulted in a "brain drain" where the best and brightest practice medicine in the U.S. and elsewhere, after being educated in Canada. In addition, the Canadian government cut medical school enrollment in half in the 1990s as a "cost-cutting measure," making the problem of doctor shortages much worse. Next, imagine that all of a sudden your six-year-old begins showing what seems to be signs of an appendicitis attack, shortly after recuperating from chicken pox. You take him to a hospital emergency room and carry him in because he is unable to walk. There is no one to help you as you enter the building, so you must lumber along to the reception area. A nurse interviews you for a couple of minutes, asks you for the reason for your visit, and then takes your son’s government health card and asks you to fill out paperwork while your son writhes in pain in your lap. You tell the nurse that your son must be seen by a doctor immediately – it’s an emergency! – as his condition is worsening by the minute. The nurse tells you, stone-faced, to go and sit in the waiting room to wait for a triage nurse. Having no choice, you do what you are told and join twenty or so others in line in front of you. You are given nothing to help make your son more comfortable – no damp facecloth, no bedpan for the vomit, nothing. When a triage nurse finally strolls in a half hour later your son is too weak to respond to her and you begin to panic. Finally, a doctor appears and says it’s just a "bug" and that you should not be playing "armchair doctor" by "diagnosing" appendicitis. He orders some time-consuming tests anyway, because you have shown him that you are very, very angry. Six hours later the test results come back positive for appendicitis. Your son is whisked away for an emergency appendectomy, after which the surgeon tells you that, had the surgery been delayed by another few minutes, he would probably have died. Your son’s appendix was gangrenous and on the verge of bursting. It reminds you of reading in the local news of three other people who were sent home from the emergency room, only to have their appendices burst and die. You are grateful that you were much more persistent and ornery than they apparently were. Our Soviet-style emergency rooms have waiting rooms equipped with hard metal chairs, vending machines that sell junk food, and maybe a television in one corner. There is no access to any medical equipment, beds, or even stretchers. In the emergency room everyone passes through triage and is given a code based on a nurse’s cursory evaluation of their affliction. If you are not satisfied with the "care" that is provided there is nowhere else to go, except to an American hospital if you are close enough to the border and can afford to pay cash. Canadians know that if you call an ambulance you can bypass the 10–12 hour wait in the emergency room, but this drives up the costs of healthcare even further. If there ever was a good fight, Americans, this is it. As we say in Canada, "Youse guys just gotta give ’er, eh! August 11, 2009 Cathy LeBoeuf-Shouten lives in Hudson, Quebec, Canada.
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 24.
#6. To: Horse, Prefrontal Vortex, Tatarewicz, all (#0)
The Misinformation About the Canadian Health Care System Misinformation of the Canadian Health Care System is bad for US Citizen’s Health
There's no 9 hour minimum wait in the Emergency, no weeks wait to get a doctor. I think the wait for an MRI went up a bit. Big deal. People just like to complain about shit. Healthcare here is good. And EVERYONE gets it.
At whose expense?
Health care (in Canada) is good. And everyone gets it EVENTUALLY. In Edmonton, the unavailability of adequate personnel in Emergency wards has been so bad that ambulance paramedics have had to attend to patients in the hospital rather than being at their stations or on the road to pick up new cases which of course, in true Rube Goldberg fashion, led to a call for more ambulances and paramedics. [i]At whose expense (is Canada's health provided)?[i/] Taxpayers'. Thus there's no direct-line accountability to anyone for the quality (promptness) of service or how the money is spent/wasted. Another example of Rube Goldberg-type of administration at the city hospital is that a patient is dispossessed of jewelry and valuables upon admission and the items are placed in the Emergency's "safekeeping." Once the patient is assigned to a ward the valuables follow to a particular Nursing Station where a nurse signs in responsibility for them. Move to another ward, another nurse signs for them. So we have a nurse burdened with the chore of looking after trinkets instead of devoting full attention to a patient's condition, medications, etc. Seems that no one has thought of having the valuables in one place until discharge but then it would be much harder to have the valuables "disappear."
This is just ridiculous. Have you ever been to the hospital in Canada? Do you believe everything you read? Of course it's paid for by the taxpayers. Did you expect it would be paid by donation? LMAO
CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER - The majority of the American people want a single-payer health care system - Medicare for all. The majority of doctors want it. A good chunk of hospital CEOs want it. But what they want doesn't appear to matter. Why? Because a single-payer health care plan would mean the death of the private health insurance industry and reduced profits for the pharmaceutical industry. Presidential candidates John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Mitt Romney and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger talk a lot about universal health care. But not one of them advocates for single-payer - because single-payer too directly confronts the big corporate interests profiting off the miserable health care system we are currently saddled with. "Currently, we are spending almost a third of every health care dollar on administration and paperwork generated by the private health insurance industry," said Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler, an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. "Countries like Canada spend about half that much on the billing and paperwork side of medicine. If we go to a single-payer system and are able to cut the billing and paperwork costs of health care, that frees up about $300 billion per year. That's the money we need to cover the uninsured and then improve the coverage for those who have private insurance but are under-insured." "The idea behind single-payer is you don't have to increase total health care spending," Woolhandler said in an interview with Corporate Crime Reporter. "You take the money we are now spending but cut the administrative fat and use that money to cover people." None of the declared Presidential candidates - with the exception of Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) - is supporting single-payer. Last year, Kucinich and Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan), introduced a single-payer bill, HR 676, which garnered support of more than 75 members of the House. Woolhandler expects that number to grow substantially this year. Dennis Kucinich Confronts MD Who Claimed Canadian Health Care Was Worse Than The US's
This is a lie. Blatant, outright lie.
There are no replies to Comment # 24. End Trace Mode for Comment # 24.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestI've lived in Canada for 41 years. Believe me, most of what they're telling you about how the healthcare here is bad, is bullshit. Don't ask me why. I can only guess.
#7. To: All (#6)
(Edited)
#9. To: wudidiz (#7)
Healthcare here is good. And EVERYONE gets it.
#12. To: Mr Nuke Buzzcut (#9)
#13. To: Tatarewicz, Nuke Buzzcut, all (#12)
#14. To: All (#13)
(Edited)
#24. To: wudidiz (#14)
The majority of the American people want a single-payer health care system - Medicare for all. The majority of doctors want it. A good chunk of hospital CEOs want it.
Replies to Comment # 24.