RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events A right to Health Care

...there is Canada and lots of other countries where everyone is more than glad for universal coverage....

Is Canada moving away from socialized medicine?

From the Wall St. Journal:

• When George Zeliotis of Quebec was told in 1997 that he would have to wait a year for a replacement for his painful, arthritic hip, he did what every Canadian who's been put on a waiting list does: He got mad. He got even madder when he learned it was against the law to pay for a replacement privately. But instead of heading south to a hospital in Boston or Cleveland, as many Canadians already do, he teamed up to file a lawsuit with Jacques Chaoulli, a Montreal doctor. The duo lost in two provincial courts before their win last week.
  
  The court's decision strikes down a Quebec law banning private medical insurance and is bound to upend similar laws in other provinces. Canada is the only nation other than Cuba and North Korea that bans private health insurance, according to Sally Pipes, head of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and author of a recent book on Canada's health-care system.
  
  "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care," wrote Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin for the 4-3 Court last week. Canadians wait an average of 17.9 weeks for surgery and other therapeutic treatments, according the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute. The waits would be even longer if Canadians didn't have access to the U.S. as a medical-care safety valve. Or, in the case of fortunate elites such as Prime Minister Paul Martin, if they didn't have access to a small private market in some non-core medical services. Mr. Martin's use of a private clinic for his annual checkup set off a political firestorm last year.
  
  The ruling stops short of declaring the national health-care system unconstitutional; only three of the seven judges wanted to go all the way.
  
  But it does say in effect: Deliver better care or permit the development of a private system. "The prohibition on obtaining private health insurance might be constitutional in circumstances where health-care services are reasonable as to both quality and timeliness," the ruling reads, but it "is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services." The Justices who sit on Canada's Supreme Court, by the way, aren't a bunch of Scalias of the North. This is the same court that last year unanimously declared gay marriage constitutional.
  
  The Canadian ruling ought to be an eye-opener for the U.S., where "single-payer," government-run health care is still a holy grail on the political left and even for some in business (such as the automakers). This month the California Senate passed a bill that would create a state-run system of single-payer universal health care. The Assembly is expected to follow suit. Someone should make sure the Canadian Supreme Court's ruling is on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's reading list before he makes a veto decision.
  
  The larger lesson here is that health care isn't immune from the laws of economics. Politicians can't wave a wand and provide equal coverage for all merely by declaring medical care to be a "right," in the word that is currently popular on the American left.
  
  There are only two ways to allocate any good or service: through prices, as is done in a market economy, or lines dictated by government, as in Canada's system. The socialist claim is that a single-payer system is more equal than one based on prices, but last week's court decision reveals that as an illusion. Or, to put it another way, Canadian health care is equal only in its shared scarcity.

The unintended costs of socialized medicine

• A new study by the Fraser Institute says the number of doctors per capita will drop over the next decade unless Canada relies on foreign-trained physicians.
  
  The study released in Calgary says government restrictions on education and training have caused the problem, which will only get worse between now and 2015.

Kerry, Clinton, Pelosi, et al...take note.

Reading journalist Ezra Klein's blog the other day, I noticed he had this to say about government-run health care:

• What's fun about the universal health care argument is how many facets it has. A good plan would be more efficient, more just, more economical, and more effective.

I was reminded of that when reading this article about Canada's health care system. To keep its health care budgets under control, Canada has to ration care and as a result has long-wait times for surgery and cancelled surgeries.

As a result, private clinics are now popping up like wild flowers in Canada. As the article notes:

• In British Columbia, the health care budget is ballooning and the provincial government is under fire for bed shortages and long waits in emergency rooms.
  In recent months, the B.C. New Democratic Party has attacked the provincial Liberal government for not cracking down on doctors it says have allowed patients to pay for access to private clinics.
  
  In some cases, patients have been able to use their access to the private clinics to get to the front of the line for diagnostic tests, saving months or even years of waiting.

That wait, sometimes, is fatal. So, what's the government's response? Why, close down private clinics, of course:

• A showdown over the future of medicare is expected to unfold in Vancouver today as the B.C. government threatens to shut down a private clinic that may start charging patients for services that should be free under the health care system.
  ''We need to ensure universal access to health care is maintained in this province,'' B.C. Health Minister George Abbott said Thursday.
  
  In what Abbott called ''an extraordinary move,'' the B.C. government pushed through a cabinet order Thursday that will empower government auditors to enter the premises of the Urgent Care Centre that has promised to open its doors today in Vancouver.

Yep, government going to make sure everyone has universal access, even if that means universal access to a waiting list. Sounds pretty efficient, just, economical, and effective to me. <img src="/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif" alt="" />

More evidence that socialized medicine kills:

• ...a study in the journal Circulation found that there was significant difference in the five-year post-heart attack survival rate between the U.S. and Canada.
  
  The U.S. had a better survival rate that the researchers found was attributable to the fact that the U.S. did more bypass surgeries and angioplasties than Canada. The data collected on both sides of the border was similar. Surely, over five years, many cultural factors not related to the health care system, such as diet and tobacco use, could account for the difference. Yet these factors probably cancel each other out; smoking rates are slightly higher in Canada, but obesity is higher in the U.S. Thus, it seems that our health care system is better at treating heart attack patients.
  
  A study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal compared a host of studies that looked at the rate of adverse events in hospitals (a disability, prolonged hospital stay or death caused by hospital error) in different countries. The U.S. had much lower rates of adverse events than hospitals in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. The data wasn't completely comparable across studies; for example, some studies left out death as part of their definition of adverse events. But even if the rates of death in those had been twice what it was in the Canadian study, the U.S. would still come out well ahead.
  
  Finally, a study in the British Journal of Surgery compared patients in the U.S. and U.K. who had major surgery (except cardiac surgery.) The study controlled for the patients' risk of death prior to surgery. Despite this, the rate of mortality post-surgery was four times higher in the U.K. than in the U.S.