Canada: Socialized Medicine Going Broke?
My brother calls my attention to this:
CBS News
Americans who flock to Canada for cheap flu shots often come away impressed at the free and first-class medical care available to Canadians, rich or poor. But tell that to hospital administrators constantly having to cut staff for lack of funds, or to the mother whose teenager was advised she would have to wait up to three years for surgery to repair a torn knee ligament.
“It’s like somebody’s telling you that you can buy this car, and you’ve paid for the car, but you can’t have it right now,” said Jane Pelton. Rather than leave daughter Emily in pain and a knee brace, the Ottawa family opted to pay $3,300 for arthroscopic surgery at a private clinic in Vancouver, with no help from the government.
“Every day we’re paying for health care, yet when we go to access it, it’s just not there,” said Pelton.
The average Canadian family pays about 48 percent of its income in taxes each year, partly to fund the health care system. Rates vary from province to province, but Ontario, the most populous, spends roughly 40 percent of every tax dollar on health care, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
The system is going broke, says the federation, which campaigns for tax reform and private enterprise in health care.
It calculates that at present rates, Ontario will be spending 85 percent of its budget on health care by 2035. “We can’t afford a state monopoly on health care anymore,” says Tasha Kheiriddin, Ontario director of the federation. “We have to examine private alternatives as well.”
The federal government and virtually every province acknowledge there’s a crisis: a lack of physicians and nurses, state-of-the-art equipment and funding. In Ontario, more than 10,000 nurses and hospital workers are facing layoffs over the next two years unless the provincial government boosts funding, says the Ontario Hospital Association, which represents health care providers in the province.
In 1984 Parliament passed the Canada Health Act, which affirmed the federal government’s commitment to provide mostly free health care to all, including the 200,000 immigrants arriving each year. The system is called Medicare (no relation to Medicare in the United States).[snip]
Another watershed lawsuit was filed last year against 12 Quebec hospitals on behalf of 10,000 breast-cancer patients in Quebec who had to wait more than eight weeks for radiation therapy during a period dating to October 1997.
One woman went to Turkey for treatment. Another, Johanne Lavoie, was among several sent to the United States. Diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in 1999, she traveled every week with her 5-year-old son to Vermont, a four-hour bus ride.
“It was an inhuman thing to live through,” Lavoie told Toronto’s Globe and Mail.
“This is the first time someone has decided to attack the source of problems ‘ the waiting list,” said Montreal attorney Michel Savonitto, who is representing the cancer victims. “We’re lucky to have the system we do in Canada,” he told the court. “But if we want to supply proper care and commit to doing it, then we can’t do it halfway.”
An estimated 4 million of Canada’s 33 million people don’t have family physicians and more than 1 million are on waiting lists for treatment, according to the Canadian Medical Association. Meanwhile, some 200 physicians head to the United States each year, attracted by lower taxes and better working conditions. Canada has 2.1 physicians per 1,000 people, while Belgium has 3.9, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked France’s health system as the best, followed by Italy, Spain, Oman and Australia. Canada came in 30th and the United States 37th.
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and reunification only adds to the whole mess.