Canadian Health Care System "Imploding"

There are articles available everywhere, EXCEPT of course the main stream media in the US. I just liked this guy's angle. Just thought some of you folks who don't watch Fox news and would have never seen this because of that, might actually like to see it.

http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/10254

Also an excerpt from a panel of Canadians discussing their health care system's woes. Its a bit tedious but there's lots of good information in there.

Losing Favor

Those days have passed. Americans still sometimes come north and express awe; Senator Kennedy was in town a few years ago for a fund raiser. Sometimes Canadian politicians go south and talk up the Canadian system; our Prime Minister lectured your President about four or five years ago. By and large, however, the enthusiasm for the Canadian system has very much waned.

I'm a fan of polls. Of course, one should always take these things with a grain of salt, but a good poll can be informative.

For example, Angus Reid, a well-respected Canadian pollster, asked Canadians to rate their health care system. When they started doing this polling in 1991, a clear majority of Canadians gave the system top marks: excellent or very good. Last year, when they did the poll again, under one in four gave the system that rating.

Angus Reid has done other polls as well. A year and a half ago, a poll sent shock waves across the country when 73 percent of Canadians described their health care system as being "in crisis." Reid actually went back and redid the poll six months later: 78 percent of Canadians now thought the system was in crisis.

People who have had reservations about the Canadian system have often talked up ideas that are very common in other Western countries: user fees being one and two-tier health care, or the ability to buy private insurance, being another.

There isn't a single politician who advocates user fees. There isn't a single politician who will publicly state that they are in favor of private insurance. And yet, just before the end of last year, a major poll commissioned by Macleans magazine showed that a clear majority of Canadians now support user fees. On private insurance, we're divided.

That may not seem so incredible, perhaps, to outside observers. But in a country where no politician is willing to advocate such ideas, it's quite a remarkable development.

The Health Care Quality Problem

So what has happened in Canada? Why is it that we've gone from being very bullish on this health care system to having great reservations? Part of it is that Canadians read newspapers, and it doesn't much matter whether you're on the west coast or the east coast; it doesn't much matter whether you're a Globe and Mail reader, or a National Post reader; every single day, there are stories describing the system.

I've just randomly chosen a few stories that have come to light recently.

The head of trauma care at Vancouver's largest hospital announces that they turn away more cases than any other center in North America. He's quoted as saying this would be unheard of in the United States.

In Manitoba, which is my former home province, the premier--the political equivalent of a governor--concedes that his pledge to end hallway medicine has fallen short. Hallway medicine is the phenomenon where the emergency rooms are so filled with patients that people are forced to lie on stretchers in hallways, often for days. Overcrowding is a periodic problem. In fact, the overcrowding is worse than last year. The community is rocked by the death of a 74-year old man who had waited in the emergency room for three hours and had not been seen.

New Brunswick announces that they will send cancer patients south to the United States for radiation therapy. New Brunswick, a small maritime province, is the seventh to publicly announce its plans to send patients south. In the best health care system in the world, the vast majority of provinces now rely on American health care to provide radiation therapy. Provinces do this because the clinically recommended waiting time for treatment is often badly exceeded. Ordinarily, oncologists suggest that there should be a two-week gap between the initial consult by the family doctor and the referral to the oncologist, and then two weeks more from the oncologist to the commencement of radiation therapy. In most Canadian provinces, we exceed that by one to two months, sometimes three.

In Alberta earlier this year, a young man dies because of the profound emergency room overcrowding. He is 23. On a winter's night, he develops pain in his flank and goes to the local emergency room. It is so crowded that he grows impatient and goes to another. There, he waits six hours. No one sees him. Exhausted and frustrated, he goes home. The pain continues, so he finally decides to go to the local community hospital. It's too late: His appendix ruptured. He dies from the complications hours later.
Those are some of the examples of the cruelty of what goes on in Canada. But they don't give you the flavor of the insanity--and I'll use that term in a nonprofessional sense--of the Canadian system.

MRI scanners are very difficult to get in Canada. There are long wait times. In my book, I talk about a political struggle on Vancouver Island where the wait time for a non-urgent MRI scan was over a year--"non-urgent" being defined by government officials, not by physicians. In the province I now live in, Ontario, there are long wait times for MRIs.

Part of the problem is that we have so few of these scanners. Canada per capita has as many MRI scanners as Colombia and Mexico. It wouldn't be fair to try and compare us to the United States or Western Europe. And the few MRIs that we have tend to run on bankers' hours. MRI scanners are expensive to operate. So if an MRI scanner stops dealing with humans at 5 p.m., there are still hours you could run the scanner.

What many MRI clinics now do to make a little bit of money is rent out their facilities to veterinarians. There was a story, which caused quite a scandal, that a London man was expected to wait seven months for an MRI but his dog could get one in just a couple of weeks. They, of course, addressed this discrepancy in a very Canadian way: by preventing veterinarians from booking the off hours.

They're still renting out in some parts of the country. Where I live now, Toronto, there's an MRI scanner that was renting out to vets. A patient came up with a clever idea: He tried to book himself for an appointment under the name of "Spot." Spot was a good name to choose, because Spot could be seen a hell of a lot faster than a person bearing a less canine name.

The Fairness Issue

We had an election campaign several months ago, and the state of our health care system was an issue. Canadian politicians are a timid lot, and no one was directly willing to criticize the system's structure. One interesting point raised, however, was that despite the emphasis on equality and fairness, many people queue jump. One of the big accusations against the Liberal Party, Canada's government party, was that members periodically queue jump and get preferential care.

The National Post, one of Canada's national dailies, went to a number of prominent politicians and asked if they queue jump. They had done a little bit of work and knew of a clinic where VIPs received faster care. A reporter asked Senator Sharon Carstairs, government leader of the Senate, if it was true that her husband queue jumped. She said that that story was absolutely untrue and unfounded. Actually, she observed that the sort of surgery he needed wasn't available in Canada, so they went to the United States and paid $15,000--an unspeakable act by Canadian standards.

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It doesn't help when you have Stephen Dumbass in office.