Canadian Socialized Health Care

John Hudock pointed me to this piece by Walter Williams who discusses at some length the Canadian health care system. Williams makes several salient points and they must be disturbing to the Canadians.

First, waiting periods before diagnosis and treatment are astonishingly long and, according to a recent survey, increasing in length. For example,

[T]he average time a patient waited between referral from a general practitioner to treatment rose from 16.5 weeks in 2001-02 to 17.7 weeks in 2003.

[ ... ]

[H]ip-replacement patients often end up non-ambulatory while waiting an average of 20 weeks for the procedure, and that's after having waited 13 weeks just to see the specialist. The wait to get diagnostic scans followed by the wait for the radiologist to read them just might explain why Cleveland, Ohio, has become Canada's hip-replacement center.

That's waiting over four months just to get treated after seeing a GP! And, there's a 33 week wait to get a hip replaced. The durations are unfathomable.

It's also reported that Canada is losing doctors in droves. During the 1990s, about 10,000 doctors left the country and set up shop elsewhere. That equates to about three doctors leaving the country every day for the entire ten year period.

Compounding the health care problems is legislation which makes it illegal for a patient or doctor to opt out of the Canadian health care system. Citizens are not allowed to pay for their own surgery and doctors can be fined $20,000 for accepting any form of private payment.

The current situation is troubling and the fact that it's getting worse is more troubling. As an agenda item at this week's Annual Premier's Conference at Niagara-on-the-Lake, the provincial and territorial leaders have proposed that the federal government give the provinces and territories a blank check without any strings attached. The bottom line is that there are too few dollars available to provide acceptable free health care to every Canadian on a timely basis.

Lastly, while the Canadian health care mess gets messier, realize that their experiment with socialism is subjected to a population of about 30 million people. Now multiply their problems tenfold and one gets the idea of what a national health care system would be like in the United States with a population of 300 million people. Nonetheless, even as I write, Michael Moore has started planning his next mendacious film. It will be called Sicko and it will be a direct attack on the American health care system. So, expect new calls for socialized medicine to be mandated in the United States.