UK and Canada Prove That Government Medicine Kills

[Danno 1,228]

UK and Canada Prove That Government Medicine Kills

by Deroy Murdock

08/08/2009

Imagine that your two best friends are British and Canadian tobacco addicts. The Brit battles lung cancer. The Canadian endures emphysema and wheezes as he walks around with clanging oxygen canisters. You probably would not think: “Maybe I should pick up smoking.”

While that response would be highly irrational, the fact that America even is considering government medicine is equally wacky. The state guides healthcare for our two closest allies: Great Britain and Canada. Like us, these are prosperous, industrial, Anglophone democracies. Nevertheless, compared to America, they suffer higher death rates for diseases, their patients experience severe pain, and they ration medical services.

Look what you’re missing in the U.K.:

*Breast cancer kills 25 percent of its American victims. In Great Britain, the Vatican of single-payer medicine, breast cancer extinguishes 46 percent of its targets.

*Prostate cancer is fatal to 19 percent of its American patients. The National Center for Policy Analysis reports that it kills 57 percent of Britons it strikes.

*Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show that the UK’s 2005 heart-attack fatality rate was 19.5 percent higher than America’s. This may correspond to angioplasties, which were only 21.3 percent as common there as here.

*The UK’s National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) just announced plans to cut its 60,000 annual steroid injections for severe back-pain sufferers to just 3,000. “The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients,” Dr. Jonathan Richardson of Bradford Hospitals Trust told London’s Daily Telegraph. “It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate.”

Things don’t look much better up north, under Canadian socialized medicine.

*Canada has one third fewer doctors than the OECD average. “The doctor shortage is a direct result of government rationing, since provinces intervened to restrict class sizes in major Canadian medical schools in the 1990s,” Dr. David Gratzer, a Canadian physician and Manhattan Institute scholar, told the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee on June 24. Some towns address the doctor dearth with lotteries in which citizens compete for rare medical appointments.

• *“In 2008, the average Canadian waited 17.3 weeks from the time his general practitioner referred him to a specialist until he actually received treatment,” Pacific Research Institute president Sally Pipes, a Canadian native, wrote in the July 2 Investor’s Business Daily. “That’s 86 percent longer than the wait in 1993, when the [Fraser] Institute first started quantifying the problem.”

•*Such sloth includes a median 9.7-week wait for an MRI exam, 31.7 weeks to see a neurosurgeon, and 36.7 weeks to visit an orthopedic surgeon.

*Thus, Canadian Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps wrote in her 2005 majority opinion in Chaoulli v. Quebec, “…this case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care.”

A public option is just the opening bid for eventual nationalization of American medicine. As House Banking Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D – Massachusetts) told SinglepayerAction.Org on July 27: “The best way we’re going to get single payer, the only way, is to have a public option to demonstrate its strength and its power.”

Barack Obama seconds that emotion.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately,” Obama told a March 24, 2007 Service Employees International Union healthcare forum. “There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision [single payer] a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.” As he told the AFL-CIO in 2003: “I happen to be a proponent of single payer, universal health care coverage…That’s what I’d like to see.”

Government medicine has proved an excruciating disaster in the U.K. and Canada. Our allies’ experiences with this dreadful idea should horrify rather than inspire everyday Americans, not to mention seemingly blind Democratic politicians.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

When I wanted my MRI done, the time I had to wait between deciding to do it (it was my choice) and the actual exam was 24 hours. And this wasn't for some emergency, either.

Clearly, there are aspects of system that work, and work very well.

That does not, however, mean that the shortcomings of our system are non-existent and do not deserve resolution.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

*Canada has one third fewer doctors than the OECD average.

Let's put this claim into perspective, shall we?

OECD average is 3.1 physicians/1000.

Canada: 2.1 (-32%)

USA: 2.4 (-23%)

So, the US is a quarter below the OECD average. Guess what: Most OECD countries (I'm not aware of any exception bt the US) have universal health care coverage and they have that mostly via some form of a single payer system. And, on average, they are offering a better physician/patient ratio than the US. Hence, the suggestion that universal coverage or single payer is responsible for physician shortages is shallow nonsense. The numbers prove that claim wrong.

Edited August 9, 2009 by Mr. Big Dog

[Danno 1,228]

When I wanted my MRI done, the time I had to wait between deciding to do it (it was my choice) and the actual exam was 24 hours. And this wasn't for some emergency, either.

Clearly, there are aspects of system that work, and work very well.

That does not, however, mean that the shortcomings of our system are non-existent and do not deserve resolution.

We absolutely agree.

My objection in a nutshell is:

1. Gov has no authority to high-jack the Healthcare industry.

And they will absolutely do it, in fact, this latest step is just the last push before there is no turning back.

2. Gov. Can't do any better at Running Health care

than they do at running schools......the big difference...

with Schools we have a Private-school option

(which Obama takes advantage of with his kids).

3. Health care under control of the GOV will give unprecedented license to the State to control lives

as we have never seen before.

HAving said that, we do need to find a way to A. Bring down the cost of medical services and B. Make coverage available to the minority who do not now have it available.

Edited August 9, 2009 by Danno

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

When I wanted my MRI done, the time I had to wait between deciding to do it (it was my choice) and the actual exam was 24 hours. And this wasn't for some emergency, either.

Clearly, there are aspects of system that work, and work very well.

That does not, however, mean that the shortcomings of our system are non-existent and do not deserve resolution.

We absolutely agree.

My objection in a nutshell is:

1. Gov has no authority to high-jack the Healthcare industry.

And they will absolutely do it, in fact, this latest step is just the last push before there is no turning back.

2. Gov. Can't do any better at Running Health care

than they do at running schools......the big difference...

with Schools we have a Private-school option

(which Obama takes advantage of with his kids).

3. Health care under control of the GOV will give unprecedented license to the State to control lives

as we have never seen before.

HAving said that, we do need to find a way to A. Bring down the cost of medical services and B. Make coverage available to the minority who do not now have it available.

1) The health care industry has no authority to rob this country of economic resources. It has shown to be unable to effectively control cost and it has shown to be unable to deliver access to a sustainable health care delivery system that works for the people.

2) The government here and in other comparable nations has demonstrated quite impressively that it can do a better job delivering effective health care to the population. There are and will be private options. Health care providers are not government owned and operated and there is no proposal on the table to change that.

3) Nonsense. Again, there is no consideration to put health care providers under government control.

Please explain how, absent of government intervention, A and B can be accomplished. I'd sure appreciate if you could provide some practical examples where any such endeavor has been undertaken successfully.

Edited August 9, 2009 by Mr. Big Dog

[DIARD 1]

Actually the stats used in the article are not current.

1.Breast cancer death rates in the US are around 20% and in the UK are around 26% now. Also it depends on what color you are in the US, though the rates are the same in the uk no matter what your race. Black women in the USA have a high rate of death, around 33% mostly due to lack of insurance or money to pay for treatment. Also USA has the highest rate of breast cancer in the world. (Stats from the American Cancer Society)

2. Prostate cancer survival rates in the UK are around 71% not 54% has implied by the article. If treatment is sought early survival rates in the UK are 90% - all states based on National Statistics and and European Randomized Study of Prostate Cancer (ERSPC). Part of the problem with higher rates in the UK isn't NHS but the men themselves. The UK hasn't made as great of strides as the USA in getting men to go for help with their prostrates in the first place.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Actually the stats used in the article are not current.

1.Breast cancer death rates in the US are around 20% and in the UK are around 26% now. Also it depends on what color you are in the US, though the rates are the same in the uk no matter what your race. Black women in the USA have a high rate of death, around 33% mostly due to lack of insurance or money to pay for treatment. Also USA has the highest rate of breast cancer in the world. (Stats from the American Cancer Society)

2. Prostate cancer survival rates in the UK are around 71% not 54% has implied by the article. If treatment is sought early survival rates in the UK are 90% - all states based on National Statistics and and European Randomized Study of Prostate Cancer (ERSPC). Part of the problem with higher rates in the UK isn't NHS but the men themselves. The UK hasn't made as great of strides as the USA in getting men to go for help with their prostrates in the first place.

Lung cancer mortality rates are actually higher in the US than in Canada, for example. France and Japan fare better than the US on certain common cancers. These stats don't actually serve as evidence that the US health care system is superior to single payer systems in other developed countries. But they'll sure try and convince the population that we're getting something in return for the insane expense we shoulder for health care in this country. Dollar for dollar, we don't.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Actually the stats used in the article are not current.

1.Breast cancer death rates in the US are around 20% and in the UK are around 26% now. Also it depends on what color you are in the US, though the rates are the same in the uk no matter what your race. Black women in the USA have a high rate of death, around 33% mostly due to lack of insurance or money to pay for treatment. Also USA has the highest rate of breast cancer in the world. (Stats from the American Cancer Society)

2. Prostate cancer survival rates in the UK are around 71% not 54% has implied by the article. If treatment is sought early survival rates in the UK are 90% - all states based on National Statistics and and European Randomized Study of Prostate Cancer (ERSPC). Part of the problem with higher rates in the UK isn't NHS but the men themselves. The UK hasn't made as great of strides as the USA in getting men to go for help with their prostrates in the first place.

The racial disparity is interesting because its also those communities which are (by and large) the poorest, and have the least access to healthcare. If we weren't talking about aggregate averages, the survival rate would probably be a lot lower.

Conversely, it is true that survival rates in the UK for things like cancer can and do vary depending on where you live.

Actually the stats used in the article are not current.

1.Breast cancer death rates in the US are around 20% and in the UK are around 26% now. Also it depends on what color you are in the US, though the rates are the same in the uk no matter what your race. Black women in the USA have a high rate of death, around 33% mostly due to lack of insurance or money to pay for treatment. Also USA has the highest rate of breast cancer in the world. (Stats from the American Cancer Society)

2. Prostate cancer survival rates in the UK are around 71% not 54% has implied by the article. If treatment is sought early survival rates in the UK are 90% - all states based on National Statistics and and European Randomized Study of Prostate Cancer (ERSPC). Part of the problem with higher rates in the UK isn't NHS but the men themselves. The UK hasn't made as great of strides as the USA in getting men to go for help with their prostrates in the first place.

Lung cancer mortality rates are actually higher in the US than in Canada, for example. France and Japan fare better than the US on certain common cancers. These stats don't actually serve as evidence that the US health care system is superior to single payer systems in other developed countries. But they'll sure try and convince the population that we're getting something in return for the insane expense we shoulder for health care in this country. Dollar for dollar, we don't.

General life expectancy and infant mortality are lower in the US than other developed nations. Of course noone considers it fair to link this to the healthcare system...

[Tahoma 2,298]

Danno...

How do you expect to be taken seriously? First you offer up birfer techdude. Now you show up with fringe-of-the-fringe nutcase Deroy Murdock.

For anyone following this thread, I'll save you some time:

> Murdock believes in global cooling.

> Murdock still thinks there were links between Saddam Hussein and Al Quaida.

> Murdocks still asserts that Saddam had yellowcake uranium.

> Murdock thinks the answer for anything is more tax cuts for the rich.

> Murdock thinks waterboarding is a great idea.

> Murdock supports tax relief for polluters.

> Murdock thought it was a terrible idea when Obama, before the Wall Street meltdown, proposed a market oversight commission to monitor the finance industry.

> Murdock refers to Republicans who don't agree with his far-right ideology as RINO's (Republicans in name only).

> Murdock cherry-picks his "facts" about health in single-payer countries.

> You get the idea.

However, I do agree with Deroy Murdock (albiet for different reasons) that "the Right now must spend years scrubbing away Bush's stain with brushes and Ajax", and "his ranch in Crawford, Texas, is the perfect place for G.W. Bush to disappear and never be heard from again."

For anyone interested in how the U.S. stacks up against many countries with single-payer health insurance, I recommend the OECD web site.

[luckytxn 2,265]

When I wanted my MRI done, the time I had to wait between deciding to do it (it was my choice) and the actual exam was 24 hours. And this wasn't for some emergency, either.

Clearly, there are aspects of system that work, and work very well.

That does not, however, mean that the shortcomings of our system are non-existent and do not deserve resolution.

We absolutely agree.

My objection in a nutshell is:

1. Gov has no authority to high-jack the Healthcare industry.

And they will absolutely do it, in fact, this latest step is just the last push before there is no turning back.

2. Gov. Can't do any better at Running Health care

than they do at running schools......the big difference...

with Schools we have a Private-school option

(which Obama takes advantage of with his kids).

3. Health care under control of the GOV will give unprecedented license to the State to control lives

as we have never seen before.

HAving said that, we do need to find a way to A. Bring down the cost of medical services and B. Make coverage available to the minority who do not now have it available.

1) The health care industry has no authority to rob this country of economic resources. It has shown to be unable to effectively control cost and it has shown to be unable to deliver access to a sustainable health care delivery system that works for the people.

2) The government here and in other comparable nations has demonstrated quite impressively that it can do a better job delivering effective health care to the population. There are and will be private options. Health care providers are not government owned and operated and there is no proposal on the table to change that.

3) Nonsense. Again, there is no consideration to put health care providers under government control.

Please explain how, absent of government intervention, A and B can be accomplished. I'd sure appreciate if you could provide some practical examples where any such endeavor has been undertaken successfully.

Have they now.

Lets start with Canada and then go on to the other countries. I have a few minutes:

Socialized Medicine Leaves a Bad Taste in Patients' Mouths

By Mr. Lawrence W. Reed / Posted: Feb. 23, 2000

Hospital food is rarely mistaken for gourmet cuisine anywhere, but at least in Michigan it is not an issue over which major political campaigns are waged. In Canada, however, it is—and the lesson it provides for American health care is profound.

Last fall, a colleague of mine visited the Canadian province of Manitoba. With just a few days left before the elections, political campaigning there was at a fever pitch. My friend was astonished to observe that the dominant issue was indeed hospital food.

According to a national poll, four out of five Canadians are unhappy with their socialized health care system. Doctors in Manitoba apparently agree: Almost half of them have left the province in the past decade alone.

The patients of Manitoba's hospitals had complained for months about the introduction of "re-thermalized food"—cut-rate meals prepared 1,300 miles away in Toronto, then frozen and shipped to Manitoba where they are nuked in microwaves and served. Peter Holle, president of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg, explained that re-heating meals was a cost-saving "innovation" of government bureaucrats employed by regional health authorities.

"Never mind that they taste like cardboard," says Holle. "Never mind that individual tastes and circumstances might dictate decentralized food services. Re-heated meals became a symbol of efficiency for the supposedly compassionate do-gooders in government. Why pay hundreds of workers in dozens of Manitoba kitchens when we can just zap up frozen dinners from Toronto?" As it turned out, the incumbent government in Manitoba and many of its supporters went down to defeat. Vile victuals were a key reason.

How does hospital food become a political issue? The same way anything—from the important to the utterly inconsequential—becomes a political issue: socialize it. Take any matter that people normally resolve quickly, peacefully, and privately by their own choices, turn it over to government, and watch as factions arise, conflict ensues, and problems appear.

Minor problems become intractable because government decisions are financed by taxes and imposed with police power. Government coercion guarantees that somebody, if not everybody, will be unhappy. If people cannot escape the system because they are forced into it, then they will bicker and fight endless and often silly battles. Politics is simply no way to run a kitchen or a car factory or a whole lot of other things.

But hospital food is probably among the least of Manitoba patients' concerns. According to a national poll, four out of five Canadians are unhappy with their socialized health care system and believe it has worsened noticeably in just the past five years. Doctors in Manitoba apparently agree: Almost half of them—an astonishing 1,800—have left the province in the past decade alone.

David Gratzer, a Canadian health policy commentator, published a blockbuster book last year entitled Code Blue. Gratzer revealed that the quality of care Canada's system provides to ordinary citizens matters less to its apologists than the quality of care it denies to the so-called rich. The egalitarian impulse that drives Canada's "universal" health care system calls for treating everybody the same; all patients get "free" care in the public system and are generally denied the option of getting faster or better care for a fee in the private sector.

Gratzer asks, "With health care, is our true goal that Mr. Smith, who owns three cars, not be allowed to get a quick (private) cataract surgery? Or is it that Mr. Jones, who just makes rent every month, gets (publicly funded) heart surgery when he needs it? The way [the system's] advocates carry on, you'd think that it was fine that Mr. Jones suffered crushing chest pain after walking three steps just as long as Mr. Smith had to stumble around blindly for six months."

Thanks to this idiocy, an estimated 212,990 Canadians were on hospital waiting lists for surgical procedures in 1998. The average total waiting time of 13.3 weeks was up from 11.9 weeks in 1997 and up a shocking 43 percent since 1993. No wonder that when former Quebec Premier Bourassa was diagnosed with cancer, he avoided "free" care in his home country and instead sought treatment in Cleveland.

Advocates of socialized health care in America—including the Clinton administration and Michigan Congressman John Dingell—would like to move us toward the Canadian model one step at a time. Indeed, Dingell's bill, the National Health Insurance Act (H.R. 16), would take us more than just a few steps in that direction.

But if the sorry state of Canadian health care tells us anything, it is that politicians and their bureaucracies should not be trusted with the care hospitals provide any more than they should be trusted with the food hospitals serve.

[Marilyn. 340]

the hospital food I have eaten in the US is pretty gross and tasteless too

[luckytxn 2,265]

WHY ONTARIO KEEPS SENDING PATIENTS SOUTH

LISA PRIEST

From Saturday's Globe and Mail March 1, 2008 at 12:45 AM EST

More than 400 Canadians in the full throes of a heart attack or other cardiac emergency have been sent to the United States because no hospital can provide the lifesaving care they require here.

Most of the heart patients who have been sent south since 2003 typically show up in Ontario hospitals, where they are given clot-busting drugs. If those drugs fail to open their clogged arteries, the scramble to locate angioplasty in the United States begins.

“They rushed me over to Detroit, did the whole closing of the tunnel,” said Eric Bialkowski, 47, of the heart attack he had on March 14, 2007, in Windsor, Ont. “It was like Disneyworld customer service.”

While other provinces have sent patients out of country - British Columbia has sent 75 pregnant women or their babies to Washington State since February, 2007 - nowhere is the problem as acute as in Ontario.

At least 188 neurosurgery patients and 421 emergency cardiac patients have been sent to the United States from Ontario since the 2003-2004 fiscal year to Feb. 21 this year. Add to that 25 women with high-risk pregnancies sent south of the border in 2007.

Although Queen's Park says it is ensuring patients receive emergency care when they need it, Progressive Conservative health critic Elizabeth Witmer says it reflects poor planning.

That is particularly the case with neurosurgery, she said, noting that four reports since 2003 have predicted a looming shortage.

“This province and the number of people going outside for care - it's increasing in every area,” Ms. Witmer said.

“I definitely believe that it is very bad planning. ...We're simply unable to meet the demand, but we don't even know what the demand is.”

Tom Closson, the Ontario Hospital Association's president and chief executive officer, said 30 per cent of Ontario's hospital medical beds are currently occupied by patients awaiting more appropriate placements, such as assisted living centres, a nursing home, a rehabilitation facility or even their own homes with proper home-care supports.

That squeezes the system at both ends: Patients in intensive care units whose condition improves cannot get into step-down units, and some emergency patients can't get a bed at all, he said, adding that “everything is jam-packed at the moment.”

A method for determining the right mix of beds and health services required in Ontario needs to be developed, he said, noting that that task has not been undertaken on a provincial basis for a decade.

Laurel Ostfield, press secretary to provincial Health Minister George Smitherman, said that in emergencies, where the patient goes becomes a clinical decision.

It is preferable for someone with a heart attack in Windsor to be sent to Detroit, a few kilometres away, rather than on a long ride to London, Ont.

When demand has peaked, government has responded, she said. It struck a neurosurgery expert panel to study the problem and $4.1-million has been provided to stem the tide of U.S. neurosurgery patients.

As well, stand-alone angioplasty services were created in Windsor in May.

Canadian Medical Association president Brian Day said he couldn't speak about the Ontario problem, but noted this country is the last in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development to finance hospitals with global budgets.

Under that model, patients - and often doctors - are sometimes viewed as a financial drain.

“We keep coming back to the same root cause,” Dr. Day said in a telephone interview from Ottawa. “The health system is not consumer-focused.”

Patients first learn of the problem when they are critically ill.

Jennifer Walmsley went to Headwaters Health Care Centre in Orangeville in October and was diagnosed with a cerebral hemorrhage due to a ruptured aneurysm. That acute-care hospital does not have neurosurgery and no Ontario hospital that does could take her. She was then rushed to a Buffalo hospital.

Headwater's chief of staff, Jeff McKinnon, said three neurosurgery patients have been sent to Buffalo in the past year. Others have gone to Toronto, Mississauga, Hamilton and London.

Radiologist Louise Keevil said Headwaters has an arrangement with neurosurgeons at other Ontario hospitals to send electronic images for their assessment, but “the limiting factor is availability of beds in their hospital.

“The physicians are very accommodating but their hands are tied by availability of service.”

Kaukab Usman had a heart attack after a gym workout in Windsor on Dec. 9. She was rushed to hospital and given clot-bursting drugs.

When they failed, she was sent to Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, where she had angioplasty on one clogged artery and two stents inserted.

“It was a miracle for me to be alive,” Ms. Usman said in a telephone interview from Somerset, New Jersey, where she is recuperating.

Aaron Kugelmass, director of the cardiac catheterization laboratory at Henry Ford Hospital, said a system is in place to get these patients the care they need expeditiously.

“We try to make their length of stay in the U.S. as short as possible,” said Dr. Kugelmass, associate division chief of cardiology. “If they are stable for discharge, we discharge them to home in Windsor, with clear follow-up plans.”

Cross-border emergency health care should become less frequent when Amr Morsi, an interventional cardiologist currently in Orlando, Florida, comes to work at Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital in Windsor in April; a second interventional cardiologist is to come on board there by end of year.

When the program is fully functional, Dr. Morsi expects Hotel-Dieu Grace to be able to do 500 angioplasties a year.

“The idea of starting the program in Windsor is that we will be able to do more of the angioplasty procedures in Windsor without having to send them to Detroit or London,” said the Toronto native who did his cardiology training at the University of Toronto.

“It will take some time to decrease the numbers entirely, but that certainly is the long term plan.”

Mr. Bialkowski of Lakeshore, a town east of Windsor, had angioplasty and received four stents. The stents, typically made of self-expanding, stainless steel mesh, were placed at the site of the fully blocked artery to keep it open.

The price to treat him, including a two-day hospital stay in March, 2007, was $40,826.21 (U.S.) With a 35 per cent discount from Henry Ford Hospital, the bill to the Ontario Health Insurance Plan tallied $26,537.03(U.S.), according to a health ministry document, a copy of which was sent to Mr. Bialkowski.

The father of six, a human resources manager for a manufacturing company based in Windsor, is back at the gym and feels great. It didn't matter where he received the lifesaving care, he said, just so long as he obtained it.

“I guess the Canadian government took care of me,” he said.

[luckytxn 2,265]

Wait times for surgery, medical treatments at all-time high: report

Compared to 1993, wait times in 2007 are 97 per cent longer, report finds

Last Updated: Monday, October 15, 2007 | 4:09 PM ET

CBC News

The average wait time for a Canadian awaiting surgery or other medical treatment is now 18.3 weeks, a new high, according to a report released Monday.

That's an increase of 97 per cent over 14 years, the report says.

A patient undergoes MRI screening. The median wait for an MRI across Canada is 10.1 weeks, according to the report.

(CBC)

"Canadians wait longer than Americans, Germans, and Swedes for cardiac care, although not as long as New Zealanders or the British," it reads. "Economists attempting to quantify the cost of this waiting time have estimated it to amount to $1,100 to $5,600 annually per patient."

The report, the 17th annual edition of Waiting Your Turn: Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada, is published by the Fraser Institute, an independent Canadian research organization.

"Despite government promises and the billions of dollars funnelled into the Canadian health-care system, the average patient waited more than 18 weeks in 2007 between seeing their family doctor and receiving the surgery or treatment they required," said Nadeem Esmail, director of Health System Performance Studies at the Fraser Institute and co-author of the report, in a release.

The total median waiting time for patients between referral from a general practitioner and treatment, averaged across all 12 specialties and 10 provinces surveyed, increased to 18.3 weeks from 17.8 weeks in 2006, according to the report.

"The small increase in waiting time between 2006 and 2007 is primarily the result of an increase in the first wait – the wait between visiting a general practitioner and attending a consultation with a specialist," the report says.

The report also found that total wait times increased in six provinces: Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. British Columbia, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island lowered their wait times.

Waiting times best in Ontario

Ontario recorded the shortest wait time overall (the wait between visiting a general practitioner and receiving treatment) at 15.0 weeks, followed by British Columbia (19.0 weeks) and Quebec (19.4 weeks). Saskatchewan (27.2 weeks), New Brunswick (25.2 weeks) and Nova Scotia (24.8 weeks) recorded the longest waits in Canada.

Despite have one of the shorter waits among the provinces, Quebec's 19.4-week wait shows that despite more money directed at fixing the problem, there hasn't been any improvement, Tasha Kheiriddin, the Quebec director of the Fraser Institute, told CBC News Monday.

She says Quebec has invested millions of dollars over the past few years in efforts to reduce wait times, but that inefficiencies in the public system are proving to be obstacles.

"What this tells us is spending more money in the system does not decrease wait times. In fact it's the opposite result, so we have to look at other solutions," she said.

Across Canada, the wait time between referral by a GP and consultation with a specialist rose to 9.2 weeks from the 8.8 weeks recorded in 2006. The shortest waits for specialist consultations were in Ontario (7.6 weeks), Manitoba (8.2 weeks) and British Columbia (8.8 weeks).

The longest waits for consultation with a specialist were recorded in New Brunswick (14.7 weeks), Newfoundland and Labrador (13.5 weeks) and Prince Edward Island (12.7 weeks).

The wait time between a specialist consultation and treatment – the second stage of waiting – increased to 9.1 weeks from 9.0 weeks in 2006. The shortest specialist-to-treatment waits were found in Ontario (7.3 weeks), Alberta (8.9 weeks) and Quebec (9.4 weeks), while the longest waits were in Saskatchewan (16.5 weeks), Nova Scotia (13.6 weeks) and Manitoba (12.0 weeks).

The shortest total waits (between referral by a general practitioner and treatment) occurred in medical oncology (4.2 weeks), radiation oncology (5.7 weeks) and elective cardiovascular surgery (8.4 weeks).

Patients endured the longest waits between a GP referral and orthopedic surgery (38.1 weeks), plastic surgery (34.8 weeks) and neurosurgery (27.2 weeks).

Nova Scotia best for CT scans

Patients also experienced significant waiting times for various diagnostic tests across Canada, such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound scans.

The median wait for a CT scan across Canada was 4.8 weeks. British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia had the shortest waits for CT scans (4.0 weeks), with Manitoba experiencing the highest wait (8.0 weeks).

The median wait for an MRI across Canada was 10.1 weeks. Patients in Ontario experienced the shortest wait for an MRI (7.8 weeks), while Newfoundland and Labrador residents waited the longest (20.0 weeks).

[luckytxn 2,265]

Just wanted to say that these are articles from canadian sources on their own system.

The Ugly Truth About

Canadian Health Care

by David Gratzer, Summer 2007 City Journal

Socialized medicine has meant rationed care and lack of innovation. Small wonder Canadians are looking to the market.

Mountain-bike enthusiast Suzanne Aucoin had to fight more than her Stage IV colon cancer. Her doctor suggested Erbitux—a proven cancer drug that targets cancer cells exclusively, unlike conventional chemotherapies that more crudely kill all fast-growing cells in the body—and Aucoin went to a clinic to begin treatment. But if Erbitux offered hope, Aucoin’s insurance didn’t: she received one inscrutable form letter after another, rejecting her claim for reimbursement. Yet another example of the callous hand of managed care, depriving someone of needed medical help, right? Guess again. Erbitux is standard treatment, covered by insurance companies—in the United States. Aucoin lives in Ontario, Canada.

When Aucoin appealed to an official ombudsman, the Ontario government claimed that her treatment was unproven and that she had gone to an unaccredited clinic. But the FDA in the U.S. had approved Erbitux, and her clinic was a cancer center affiliated with a prominent Catholic hospital in Buffalo. This January, the ombudsman ruled in Aucoin’s favor, awarding her the cost of treatment. She represents a dramatic new trend in Canadian health-care advocacy: finding the treatment you need in another country, and then fighting Canadian bureaucrats (and often suing) to get them to pick up the tab.

But if Canadians are looking to the United States for the care they need, Americans, ironically, are increasingly looking north for a viable health-care model. There’s no question that American health care, a mixture of private insurance and public programs, is a mess. Over the last five years, health-insurance premiums have more than doubled, leaving firms like General Motors on the brink of bankruptcy. Expensive health care has also hit workers in the pocketbook: it’s one of the reasons that median family income fell between 2000 and 2005 (despite a rise in overall labor costs). Health spending has surged past 16 percent of GDP. The number of uninsured Americans has risen, and even the insured seem dissatisfied. So it’s not surprising that some Americans think that solving the nation’s health-care woes may require adopting a Canadian-style single-payer system, in which the government finances and provides the care. Canadians, the seductive single-payer tune goes, not only spend less on health care; their health outcomes are better, too—life expectancy is longer, infant mortality lower.

Thus, Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “Does this mean that the American way is wrong, and that we should switch to a Canadian-style single-payer system? Well, yes.” Politicians like Hillary Clinton are on board; Michael Moore’s new documentary Sicko celebrates the virtues of Canada’s socialized health care; the National Coalition on Health Care, which includes big businesses like AT&T, recently endorsed a scheme to centralize major health decisions to a government committee; and big unions are questioning the tenets of employer-sponsored health insurance. Some are tempted. Not me.

I was once a believer in socialized medicine. I don’t want to overstate my case: growing up in Canada, I didn’t spend much time contemplating the nuances of health economics. I wanted to get into medical school—my mind brimmed with statistics on MCAT scores and admissions rates, not health spending. But as a Canadian, I had soaked up three things from my environment: a love of ice hockey; an ability to convert Celsius into Fahrenheit in my head; and the belief that government-run health care was truly compassionate. What I knew about American health care was unappealing: high expenses and lots of uninsured people. When HillaryCare shook Washington, I remember thinking that the Clintonistas were right.

My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.

I decided to write about what I saw. By day, I attended classes and visited patients; at night, I worked on a book. Unfortunately, statistics on Canadian health care’s weaknesses were hard to come by, and even finding people willing to criticize the system was difficult, such was the emotional support that it then enjoyed. One family friend, diagnosed with cancer, was told to wait for potentially lifesaving chemotherapy. I called to see if I could write about his plight. Worried about repercussions, he asked me to change his name. A bit later, he asked if I could change his sex in the story, and maybe his town. Finally, he asked if I could change the illness, too.

My book’s thesis was simple: to contain rising costs, government-run health-care systems invariably restrict the health-care supply. Thus, at a time when Canada’s population was aging and needed more care, not less, cost-crunching bureaucrats had reduced the size of medical school classes, shuttered hospitals, and capped physician fees, resulting in hundreds of thousands of patients waiting for needed treatment—patients who suffered and, in some cases, died from the delays. The only solution, I concluded, was to move away from government command-and-control structures and toward a more market-oriented system. To capture Canadian health care’s growing crisis, I called my book Code Blue, the term used when a patient’s heart stops and hospital staff must leap into action to save him. Though I had a hard time finding a Canadian publisher, the book eventually came out in 1999 from a small imprint; it struck a nerve, going through five printings.

Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada—they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled—48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. A while back, I toured a public hospital in Washington, D.C., with Tim Evans, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe. The hospital was dark and dingy, but Evans observed that it was cleaner than anything in his native England. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave—when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity—15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren’t available. And so on.

But single-payer systems—confronting dirty hospitals, long waiting lists, and substandard treatment—are starting to crack. Today my book wouldn’t seem so provocative to Canadians, whose views on public health care are much less rosy than they were even a few years ago. Canadian newspapers are now filled with stories of people frustrated by long delays for care:

vow broken on cancer wait times: most hospitals across canada fail to meet ottawa’s four-week guideline for radiation

patients wait as p.e.t. scans used in animal experiments

back patients waiting years for treatment: study

the doctor is . . . out

As if a taboo had lifted, government statistics on the health-care system’s problems are suddenly available. In fact, government researchers have provided the best data on the doctor shortage, noting, for example, that more than 1.5 million Ontarians (or 12 percent of that province’s population) can’t find family physicians. Health officials in one Nova Scotia community actually resorted to a lottery to determine who’d get a doctor’s appointment.

Dr. Jacques Chaoulli is at the center of this changing health-care scene. Standing at about five and a half feet and soft-spoken, he doesn’t seem imposing. But this accidental revolutionary has turned Canadian health care on its head. In the 1990s, recognizing the growing crisis of socialized care, Chaoulli organized a private Quebec practice—patients called him, he made house calls, and then he directly billed his patients. The local health board cried foul and began fining him. The legal status of private practice in Canada remained murky, but billing patients, rather than the government, was certainly illegal, and so was private insurance.

Chaoulli gave up his private practice but not the fight for private medicine. Trying to draw attention to Canada’s need for an alternative to government care, he began a hunger strike but quit after a month, famished but not famous. He wrote a couple of books on the topic, which sold dismally. He then came up with the idea of challenging the government in court. Because the lawyers whom he consulted dismissed the idea, he decided to make the legal case himself and enrolled in law school. He flunked out after a term. Undeterred, he found a sponsor for his legal fight (his father-in-law, who lives in Japan) and a patient to represent. Chaoulli went to court and lost. He appealed and lost again. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. And there—amazingly—he won.

Chaoulli was representing George Zeliotis, an elderly Montrealer forced to wait almost a year for a hip replacement. Zeliotis was in agony and taking high doses of opiates. Chaoulli maintained that the patient should have the right to pay for private health insurance and get treatment sooner. He based his argument on the Canadian equivalent of the Bill of Rights, as well as on the equivalent Quebec charter. The court hedged on the national question, but a majority agreed that Quebec’s charter did implicitly recognize such a right.

It’s hard to overstate the shock of the ruling. It caught the government completely off guard—officials had considered Chaoulli’s case so weak that they hadn’t bothered to prepare briefing notes for the prime minister in the event of his victory. The ruling wasn’t just shocking, moreover; it was potentially monumental, opening the way to more private medicine in Quebec. Though the prohibition against private insurance holds in the rest of the country for now, at least two people outside Quebec, armed with Chaoulli’s case as precedent, are taking their demand for private insurance to court.

Rick Baker helps people, and sometimes even saves lives. He describes a man who had a seizure and received a diagnosis of epilepsy. Dissatisfied with the opinion—he had no family history of epilepsy, but he did have constant headaches and nausea, which aren’t usually seen in the disorder—the man requested an MRI. The government told him that the wait would be four and a half months. So he went to Baker, who arranged to have the MRI done within 24 hours—and who, after the test discovered a brain tumor, arranged surgery within a few weeks.

Baker isn’t a neurosurgeon or even a doctor. He’s a medical broker, one member of a private sector that is rushing in to address the inadequacies of Canada’s government care. Canadians pay him to set up surgical procedures, diagnostic tests, and specialist consultations, privately and quickly. “I don’t have a medical background. I just have some common sense,” he explains. “I don’t need to be a doctor for what I do. I’m just expediting care.”

He tells me stories of other people whom his British Columbia–based company, Timely Medical Alternatives, has helped—people like the elderly woman who needed vascular surgery for a major artery in her abdomen and was promised prompt care by one of the most senior bureaucrats in the government, who never called back. “Her doctor told her she’s going to die,” Baker remembers. So Timely got her surgery in a couple of days, in Washington State. Then there was the eight-year-old badly in need of a procedure to help correct her deafness. After watching her surgery get bumped three times, her parents called Timely. She’s now back at school, her hearing partly restored. “The father said, ‘Mr. Baker, my wife and I are in agreement that your star shines the brightest in our heaven,’ ” Baker recalls. “I told that story to a government official. He shrugged. He couldn’t ###### care less.”

Not everyone has kind words for Baker. A woman from a union-sponsored health coalition, writing in a local paper, denounced him for “profiting from people’s misery.” When I bring up the comment, he snaps: “I’m profiting from relieving misery.” Some of the services that Baker brokers almost certainly contravene Canadian law, but governments are loath to stop him. “What I am doing could be construed as civil disobedience,” he says. “There comes a time when people need to lead the government.”

Baker isn’t alone: other private-sector health options are blossoming across Canada, and the government is increasingly turning a blind eye to them, too, despite their often uncertain legal status. Private clinics are opening at a rate of about one a week. Companies like MedCan now offer “corporate medicals” that include an array of diagnostic tests and a referral to Johns Hopkins, if necessary. Insurance firms sell critical-illness insurance, giving policyholders a lump-sum payment in the event of a major diagnosis; since such policyholders could, in theory, spend the money on anything they wanted, medical or not, the system doesn’t count as health insurance and is therefore legal. Testifying to the changing nature of Canadian health care, Baker observes that securing prompt care used to mean a trip south. These days, he says, he’s able to get 80 percent of his clients care in Canada, via the private sector.

Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system’s problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down. “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,” he fumed to the New York Times, “and in which humans can wait two to three years.”

And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. Day’s clinic, for instance, handles workers’-compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital’s emergency room.

This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain’s government-run health care dates back to the 1940s. Yet the Labour Party—which originally created the National Health Service and used to bristle at the suggestion of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization”—now openly favors privatization. Sir William Wells, a senior British health official, recently said: “The big trouble with a state monopoly is that it builds in massive inefficiencies and inward-looking culture.” Last year, the private sector provided about 5 percent of Britain’s nonemergency procedures; Labour aims to triple that percentage by 2008. The Labour government also works to voucherize certain surgeries, offering patients a choice of four providers, at least one private. And in a recent move, the government will contract out some primary care services, perhaps to American firms such as UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente.

Sweden’s government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80 percent of Stockholm’s primary care and 40 percent of its total health services, including one of the city’s largest hospitals. Since the fall of Communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany: increasing co-pays, enhancing insurance competition, and turning state enterprises over to the private sector (within a decade, only a minority of German hospitals will remain under state control). It’s important to note that change in these countries is slow and gradual—market reforms remain controversial. But if the United States was once the exception for viewing a vibrant private sector in health care as essential, it is so no longer.

Yet even as Stockholm and Saskatoon are percolating with the ideas of Adam Smith, a growing number of prominent Americans are arguing that socialized health care still provides better results for less money. “Americans tend to believe that we have the best health care system in the world,” writes Krugman in the New York Times. “But it isn’t true. We spend far more per person on health care . . . yet rank near the bottom among industrial countries in indicators from life expectancy to infant mortality.”

One often hears variations on Krugman’s argument—that America lags behind other countries in crude health outcomes. But such outcomes reflect a mosaic of factors, such as diet, lifestyle, drug use, and cultural values. It pains me as a doctor to say this, but health care is just one factor in health. Americans live 75.3 years on average, fewer than Canadians (77.3) or the French (76.6) or the citizens of any Western European nation save Portugal. Health care influences life expectancy, of course. But a life can end because of a murder, a fall, or a car accident. Such factors aren’t academic—homicide rates in the United States are much higher than in other countries (eight times higher than in France, for instance). In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don’t die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.

And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England—a striking variation.

Like many critics of American health care, though, Krugman argues that the costs are just too high: “In 2002 . . . the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman, and child.” Health-care spending in Canada and Britain, he notes, is a small fraction of that. Again, the picture isn’t quite as clear as he suggests; because the U.S. is so much wealthier than other countries, it isn’t unreasonable for it to spend more on health care. Take America’s high spending on research and development. M. D. Anderson in Texas, a prominent cancer center, spends more on research than Canada does.

That said, American health care is expensive. And Americans aren’t always getting a good deal. In the coming years, with health expenses spiraling up, it will be easy for some—like the zealous legislators in California—to give in to the temptation of socialized medicine. In Washington, there are plenty of old pieces of legislation that like-minded politicians could take off the shelf, dust off, and promote: expanding Medicare to Americans 55 and older, say, or covering all children in Medicaid.

But such initiatives would push the United States further down the path to a government-run system and make things much, much worse. True, government bureaucrats would be able to cut costs—but only by shrinking access to health care, as in Canada, and engendering a Canadian-style nightmare of overflowing emergency rooms and yearlong waits for treatment. America is right to seek a model for delivering good health care at good prices, but we should be looking not to Canada, but close to home—in the other four-fifths or so of our economy. From telecommunications to retail, deregulation and market competition have driven prices down and quality and productivity up. Health care is long overdue for the same prescription.

[Ban Hammer 14,619]

the hospital food I have eaten in the US is pretty gross and tasteless too

the hospital food nessa had while she was in having the baby, nessa ranked it as very good.