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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/18/2008 2:52:13 AM | "additional hidden taxes a canadian pays and start including all the special tax exemptions an america will receive"
i actually laughed out loud...
when did this become the land of opposites for you? canadian taxes are more transparent, and i even stated earlier that amercians do receive an exemption here and there, nothing signifigant, lol, but you still insist on exaggerating the truth...
and i cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would defend their argument here bringing up mortgages...
woah | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/18/2008 3:36:40 AM | I came to this thread hoping that there would be some discussion about the candidates reform plans for health care. After following this thread for a few weeks, I see I needn't have waited.
Arguing about the merits of the current system(s) gets us where exactly? | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/25/2008 5:55:36 AM | http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/health/2188320/Cancer-sufferer-killed-himself-the-day-after-NHS-denied-new-drug.html
Cancer sufferer killed himself the day after NHS denied new drug
Albert Baxter, 75, was terminally ill with kidney cancer and was told by his primary care trust that the NHS would not pay for the new drug Sutent.
Trials of the drug have shown it can reduce the size of tumours by around 40 per cent and may have extended his life but it has not yet been approved by the National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence which means local health bosses are left to decide whether to fund it.
The day after Mr Baxter, from Eastbourne in East Sussex, learned he had been refused the drug he was found dead by his partner with a bin liner over his head, a coroner's court was told.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080624.wbc-hospital26/BNStory/National/home
Children's Hospital may send patients to U.S.
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
June 24, 2008 at 9:55 PM EDT
VANCOUVER — B.C. Children's Hospital may have to send some of its young patients out of province or to the United States for immediate care if it keeps having to reschedule surgery, the hospital's surgeon-in-chief says.
“If we have to send the child to Edmonton or Calgary or Toronto or Montreal or wherever, that's fine,” Dr. Geoffrey Blair said. “But ... critical-care nurses are in short supply there, as well, so that could mean that we'd have to send a child to Seattle, to Portland, Ore., to a host of places in the States. ... We're not going to compromise the child's care just to keep the child here.”
Children's Hospital has had to postpone 53 operations since April – 14 last week and three on Monday. In 2007-08, there were 49 cancellations, and five the previous year.
The hospital performed almost 8,200 operations in total last year, and does an average of 35 a day.
It's not a lack of resources, Dr. Blair said, but primarily a lack of nurses. The hospital has 112 critical-care nurses. Dr. Blair would like 25 more – 10 more than the 15 who've been recruited and will start at the hospital in the next few months.
“I'm given to understand that 10 more would actually alleviate our current problems; then we would actually not be going through the current throes of this surge of rescheduling cases.”
Emergency operations continue and children whose health would be in immediate danger are getting surgery, Dr. Blair said. No one has been sent out of province yet, but the hospital has had to become creative, sometimes teaming up ward nurses with nurses who have critical-care training.
But increased workloads, stress and overtime are taking their toll and make it more difficult to keep nurses.
Suzie Ford, an obstetrics nurse at Children's and Women's Health Centre and chair of the B.C. Nurses Union's Shaughnessy Heights region, said more than a fifth of Canadian nurses are near retirement age, and stressful conditions make early retirement attractive.
“Unless improvements are made to the working conditions of nurses, many will retire and we'll be in a health-care crisis,” she said.
Dr. Blair said he understands the conditions the shortage creates could motivate nurses to retire early or transfer to another hospital.
“The work that we do is fraught with emotion and anxiety, anyway. You add to that the emotion and anxiety of having to deal with patients that are waiting for their access to care. ... The stress of that could conceivably cause people to say, ‘You know, I can't take it any more. I'm going to go to an environment that is a little bit less intense.'”
The hospital is looking into alternatives that will place less of a burden on nursing staff, Dr. Blair said. He hopes that a “high-dependency unit” where patients who don't need ventilators or intense attention can receive post-operative care will be operating by the end of the year.
Dr. Blair, who's also chair of the Pediatric Surgical Chiefs of Canada board, said pediatric hospitals across Canada face the same problem.
“We have to realize that for whatever reason that we don't have enough critical care nurses, that the solution to this is going to be systemic,” he said. | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/25/2008 7:40:05 PM | http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=299282509335931
Canadian Health Care We So Envy Lies In Ruins, Its Architect Admits
By DAVID GRATZER | Posted Wednesday, June 25, 2008 4:30 PM PT
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? | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/25/2008 8:03:21 PM | People in America don't get turned away at the ER in hospitals-that's illegal. We also have subsidized health care for the needy that is no worse than private insurance. I've seen instances working in healthcare when it's provided MORE treatment options than HMOs.
In areas where there are more uninsured than insured, hospitals are losing money. Not only in border states, but at hospitals that serve poor areas.
HMOs and frivolous law suits have massively hurt our healthcare system. Doctors and hospitals aren't making the profits they once did.
Universal health care will cost more than money. It will cost QUALITY of service. Because UHC is being pushed, suddenly America has poor healthcare. Well, the richest people in the world still come here for the most advanced and best quality care. | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/25/2008 8:10:59 PM | YearoftheCat,
Waiting until you're so sick that you have to go to an ER is not a healthcare system, it's a trauma system.
The purpose of a healthcare system is to maintain your health so that you don't end up in an ER.
Secondly, if you saw the Michael Moore movie sicko, there were various people who have insurance but were denied service for various reasons by their insurance companies with the result that many lost their loved ones.
There are now over 40 million Americans without health insurance. I'm sure those 40 million with no healthcare are proud that the richest people in the world come here for healthcare. a lot of good it does them.
Also, because of the demand, the cost of American healthcare goes up regularly by double digits. Pooling resources for the best rate would eliminate this crazy spike in costs. It works for other nations.
And there's no evidence that lawsuits are driving up costs exhorbitantly. fallacy. | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/25/2008 8:15:44 PM | by the way, while the richest people in the world are coming here for treatment, average Americans who are not in the top 1% income bracket are flying to dubai, india, thailand for treatment.
they can fly halfway around the world, have a prolonged stay in a hospital, fly home, and still save thousands.
Medical tourism is a huge business now. I ran into a bunch of American mennonites from georgia on a trip to india who were going there to update their communal medical plan. they told me they got fantastic treatment in great hospitals from American educated doctors at a fraction of the cost. | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/25/2008 8:17:19 PM | | Government isn't capable of good quality health care delivery. Look at the problems in the VA system...with medicaid...and what medicare has done to the system as a whole. As for the 40 million or should I save 47 million people without insurance? Those numbers a radically skewed. | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/25/2008 8:20:59 PM | i don't about you but my granny and grandpa received excellent care under medicare for decades at a fraction of what i pay.
it took the republicans and their idiotic medicare plan D to f it all up.
don't forget social security is a model system, run for less cents to the dollar than most private charities.
and the VA system was running fine until Bush trashed it.
The republicans have no interest in governing, that's why every agency they touch turns to crap, so they can then claim that big government doesn't work.
FEMA - Homeland Security
Education
VA
HUD
the Military..
the list goes on and on | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/25/2008 8:46:20 PM | | Sure the government track record in just about everything is fair to poor. I'm not sure how old you are but it's the same track record that's been going on long before Bush. Throwing the health-care system in the lap of the government isn't going to fix anything...it will just become part of the bloated goat and people will suffer. | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/25/2008 9:14:14 PM | So Conservatives in Canada and Britain cherish and fund their Government Healthcare systems. What is it that American Conservatives know that Conservatives in other parts of the world don't know? By experience and not conjecture please?
Conservatives in Britain and Canada have had the experience of Government single payer healthcare, and life before it. Why aren't they rushing back to how it was before? | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/25/2008 9:20:41 PM | | I've been messing around in healthcare for around 25 years....there has been talk about bailing on government control of it in Europe and Canada. Like I was saying the goverment has no business in it. The less the Government is involved the better. | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/25/2008 9:32:57 PM | " Well, the richest people in the world still come here for the most advanced and best quality care."
There you go, folks. Case closed. The U.S. health care system is for "the richest people in the world."
But if you're poor, you're f*cked.
Thanks for that, "YearoftheCat" | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/25/2008 9:44:39 PM |
Secondly, if you saw the Michael Moore movie sicko, there were various people who have insurance but were denied service for various reasons by their insurance companies with the result that many lost their loved ones.
.... the most brilliant part of that movie was that he focused on the people WITH insurance and how the insurance companies make it a policy to screw people.....
didn't somebody post the conversation that had Nixon and one of his men talking about how they were going to create a nice scam with HMO's? that deserves a re-read..... | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/25/2008 10:05:20 PM | Canada has a very different system than the US will ever have, if they have problems, so what? What system doesnt have problems?
The fact is: they insure ALL their people and they do it at HALF the percapita cost than the US does.
The 47 millionUNINSURED is skewed, of course, because it doesnt count the bigger problem, the UNDERINSURED.
Anyway, I am done with this pissing contect.
What will happen is that Medicare will be reformed and offered to all, including employers, as a free choice of insurance plans. It will save itself from collapse by the babyboomers and provide a federal insurance plan for all who choose it. | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/26/2008 6:02:44 AM |
What will happen is that Medicare will be reformed and offered to all, including employers, as a free choice of insurance plans.
Keep going...I know it's scary going down the right path for a change. You are on the right track tho. | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/26/2008 6:18:37 AM | nefarious, its not my path, but that is what I believe is underfoot once they level the playing field. And the "free choice" would mean that the size and scope of the program means you get far more benefit for the premium dollar so anyone who would buy "private" insurance would have to be nuts, rich, or limited to special benefits as a supplement.
That is what I believe will happen and whether you see it or not, it is national health care.
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/26/2008 7:33:41 AM |
People in America don't get turned away at the ER in hospitals-that's illegal.
Your right it is illegal, so are drugs, people under 21 drinking alcohol, murder, and crossing the street without a crosswalk. And yet it happens everyday. I thought the same way until I got brought on a task force to investigate it. You can't imagine how many times it happens.
We also have subsidized health care for the needy that is no worse than private insurance. I've seen instances working in healthcare when it's provided MORE treatment options than HMOs.
funny I've never seen that except where treatment started in a public hospital er. And I've been in healthcare a LONG time.
HMOs and frivolous law suits have massively hurt our healthcare system. Doctors and hospitals aren't making the profits they once did.
All of which pales in comparison to the costs of equipment and drugs the supply companies are negotiating.
Universal health care will cost more than money. It will cost QUALITY of service. Because UHC is being pushed, suddenly America has poor healthcare. Well, the richest people in the world still come here for the most advanced and best quality care.
Provide any real facts to support this? Our healthcare has been deteriorating for years and several of the richest people in the world have gone to many countries for advanced and best healthcare. Contrary to what once was the American healthcare system has been failing for years its not sudden and its not because UHC is being pushed. Infact its exactly the opposite. For decades this problem has been bubbling and they have tried everything from cutting nursing staff to using janitors as care givers rather then face the facts. The problem has never been on the public service sector of medicine but on the for profit side. | |
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| So you think universal health care is good for America huh?
Posted: 6/26/2008 6:19:43 PM | Well, I only get little rumors but that's the scuttlebutt at CMS, a Democratic president will be given plans to expand Medicare to all.... and the fellow who began health reform here in Mass. recently announced he was going to work at CMS, so I feel pretty confidant.
If McCain gets in, though, it probably will not happen. He is the one barrier.
It makes sense, though:
1. Medicare is all high cost poor and disabled, no one can buy into it now, and with the boomers retiring it will become a far more expensive entitlement, even though it is paid for through Social Security taxes.
2. Opening it up to the huge general population as a good, very competitive health plan that an employer or individual can buy in the market brings in a whole lot of revenue for people who are far less likely to be high cost, so it subsidizes the big elderly population and pencils out, maybe even less tax burden on everyone.
3. As a competing plan, at 5% overhead vs. 30% for private insurance, it is bound to be cheaper than private insurance.
4. As it rules and becomes THE major American health plan, by choice, it is in a position to keep a lid on the market, better reward primary care, etc. so it has the potential for solving the rising cost problem, etc.
Sounds like a win-win to me, national health insurance to pay for private medical care.
One reason to vote for Obama. | |
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