Canadians Being Truthful About Socialistic Medical Care

49er, yes, they do and there are many ways that market forces could be allowed to operate within the confines of a single payer system but, for now at least, we are unable to take advantage of most of them.

By the way, none of my comments should be taken as an endorsement for the US system. Layers and layers of state and federal regulations seem to have created an enormous special interest group in the US consisting of doctors, hospitals, big pharma, insurance companies and tort lawyers all of whom benefit from from the status quo at the expense of everyone else. Prices of hospital care and prescription drugs are simply beyond ridiculous in many cases and the complexity is mind numbing; it's hard to believe that Americans continue to put up with it and, IMHO, Obamacare will only make things worse. As in Canada, very political.

Elle, no direct premium in Ontario although there is the health care surcharge added to provincial income tax.

Nova Scotia funds it through sales tax. Quebec through income and sales tax. Alberta through taxes but back in the 80's it was a charge of $30 per month.

A few years ago there was a suggestion in quebec of a $25 a year(?) charge but the up roar was amazing so it was shelved. Quebec also had an insurance for a while for things like hip and knee replacement queue jump (they would send you to where it was available quicker ) but no body bought it so they cancelled it.

For BC medical: "Effective January 1, 2014, monthly rates are $69.25 for one person, $125.50 for a family of two and $138.50 for a family of three or more." Not cheap.
You can apply for premium assistance if you need it and then you pay a percentage (according to your income) down to zero.
I have heard people in the US say that we don't have a choice regarding which doctor or hospital we use. That is not true. You can see who you want (if they are available) and change whenever you like. Emergency scans are done right away but there is a wait for elective (wait times vary according to where you live). That is very frustrating for some. My American sister gets most things done fairly quickly but her insurance premiums are very high.

See <http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/canada.asp> interestingly Snopes repeated refrain was that policies vary from Province to Province, but Snopes never falsified anything that the Canadian Author wrote.

A Canadian friend whose father was a Cardiac Surgeon in Manitoba told me that the average wait at that time for open heart surgery in Manitoba in the late 1990s was 5 YEARS, but hey no problem it's "Managed". Bull Shit, I've worked with one Cardiac cripple and known others that were created by medical circumstances and it looks like the terminal stages of acute Apnea to me.

From 2000 to 2005 I worked in the US, for ALSTOM Hydro Pwr of Canada. After the first year I was there my Canadian Supervisor, who was in Cardiac failure (supposedly with 15% of normal Cardiac output) at the time, retired and returned to Canada (Quebec) rather than go to a Hospital in the US because his health care in Canada (Quebec) was "FREE". I don't know the details of his Dx but three years later he was still in the que for open heart surgery, perhaps the wait was justified, see <http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/104 ... /I-92.full> But I know for a fact that if Leonce had been willing to drive 30 minutes West or 1 hour North or South from our jobsite in the US on ANY morning, if Open Heart (Bypass) surgery had been warranted he'd have been in the OR by mid afternoon, US or Canadian Citizen / Insurance or not.

Sleepybob,
It's my understanding that during that period or shortly there-after Lawsuits were brought in the Canadian court system claiming that long Ques for Cardiac Surgery and a couple of other medical issues were a violation of basic human rights (or some such logic). If my memory serves me well and Lawsuits were in fact filed, how were they resolved?

What goes on in Manitoba (was it fairly far north - makes a big difference) does NOT necessarily happen in other parts of the country and you just can't extrapolate what your friend said about the 90's to what goes on now and where it goes on. That 5 yr thing was way out of line for most places, especially populated ones.

rkuntz wrote:See <http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/canada.asp> interestingly Snopes repeated refrain was that policies vary from Province to Province, but Snopes never falsified anything that the Canadian Author wrote.

A Canadian friend whose father was a Cardiac Surgeon in Manitoba told me that the average wait at that time for open heart surgery in Manitoba in the late 1990s was 5 YEARS, but hey no problem it's "Managed". Bull Shit, I've worked with one Cardiac cripple and known others that were created by medical circumstances and it looks like the terminal stages of acute Apnea to me.

From 2000 to 2005 I worked in the US, for ALSTOM Hydro Pwr of Canada. After the first year I was there my Canadian Supervisor, who was in Cardiac failure (supposedly with 15% of normal Cardiac output) at the time, retired and returned to Canada (Quebec) rather than go to a Hospital in the US because his health care in Canada (Quebec) was "FREE". I don't know the details of his Dx but three years later he was still in the que for open heart surgery, perhaps the wait was justified, see <http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/104 ... /I-92.full> But I know for a fact that if Leonce had been willing to drive 30 minutes West or 1 hour North or South from our jobsite in the US on ANY morning, if Open Heart (Bypass) surgery had been warranted he'd have been in the OR by mid afternoon, US or Canadian Citizen / Insurance or not.

Sleepybob,
It's my understanding that during that period or shortly there-after Lawsuits were brought in the Canadian court system claiming that long Ques for Cardiac Surgery and a couple of other medical issues were a violation of basic human rights (or some such logic). If my memory serves me well and Lawsuits were in fact filed, how were they resolved?

You are so full of it.... in my town in southern Alberta I have several friends that were diagnosed with needing cardiac surgery one day and were airlifted to Calgary the next day and had surgery that very same night. Me included.. and not a bit of it cost one cent..... even the Stars Medivac helicopter didn't cost me or them.
And I do not pay ANY healthcare premiums here in Alberta, including my testing for OSA and now I can get a new machine once every five years.... just bought a new one 2 days ago

The Snopes e-mail over-states the problems and the replies to each of the points are pretty much on the money. I can't speak to waiting times for by-pass surgery in Manitoba in the '90s but you won't wait 5 years for it here in Ontario today if your condition is critical. Rationing through wait times applies to non-critical care but, realistically, how else can you prioritize access to limited resources? Lottery? There isn't any other way that makes any sense in a universal care system. ER wait times are a particularly egregious issue because they are so obvious what with everyone sitting around reading old magazines, hospital brochures and watching the weather channel with no sound. But if you stagger into an ER anywhere in the country with a heart attack or doubled over with kidney stones you will get taken right in and treated immediately regardless of how full the waiting room is. I know this from experience (kidney stones twice) and atrial fib. People have also discovered that if they go to the ER and sit for 5 or 6 hours, they will get to see an on-duty specialist and will get a follow-up appointment with that specialist a few days later if there was a problem diagnosed in the ER. If that same person went to their family doctor they could wait for months to see that same specialist. Family doctors will often send their patients to the ER for this reason.

rKuntz, the lawsuits you mentioned pertained to unreasonable wait times somewhere in Quebec. I don't know how they were resolved or if they even were. Such things move at a glacial pace. However, these and other high profile cases have put pressure on governments to address the wait time issues and to even pay for urgent care in other provinces or the US in cases where timely care isn't available locally. This is as it should be and governments are trying to address the bottlenecks without breaking the bank.

Conservative Americans reject the idea of socialized medicine on principal and I don't think it's necessary to over-state the problems or even make things up to mount good arguments against it. What's ironic is that to avoid openly implementing a single payer system, Americans are now embracing a much more complicated and opaque one that really has the same universal coverage objectives. In return for a promise of 40 million or more new customers, insurance companies will insure higher risk customers who previously could not afford or even get insurance. Mandates are required to get all those young healthy people to buy it and the jury is out as to whether they will or not, especially after the web site is working and they discover how much it is going to cost them. If they don't buy it, the system will collapse as there is clearly no way that the insurance companies will continue to participate if their only potential new customers are already sick. Maybe that's the idea.

More politics.

rkuntz wrote:See <http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/canada.asp> interestingly Snopes repeated refrain was that policies vary from Province to Province, but Snopes never falsified anything that the Canadian Author wrote.

A Canadian friend whose father was a Cardiac Surgeon in Manitoba told me that the average wait at that time for open heart surgery in Manitoba in the late 1990s was 5 YEARS, but hey no problem it's "Managed". Bull Shit, I've worked with one Cardiac cripple and known others that were created by medical circumstances and it looks like the terminal stages of acute Apnea to me.

From 2000 to 2005 I worked in the US, for ALSTOM Hydro Pwr of Canada. After the first year I was there my Canadian Supervisor, who was in Cardiac failure (supposedly with 15% of normal Cardiac output) at the time, retired and returned to Canada (Quebec) rather than go to a Hospital in the US because his health care in Canada (Quebec) was "FREE". I don't know the details of his Dx but three years later he was still in the que for open heart surgery, perhaps the wait was justified, see <http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/104 ... /I-92.full> But I know for a fact that if Leonce had been willing to drive 30 minutes West or 1 hour North or South from our jobsite in the US on ANY morning, if Open Heart (Bypass) surgery had been warranted he'd have been in the OR by mid afternoon, US or Canadian Citizen / Insurance or not.

Sleepybob,
It's my understanding that during that period or shortly there-after Lawsuits were brought in the Canadian court system claiming that long Ques for Cardiac Surgery and a couple of other medical issues were a violation of basic human rights (or some such logic). If my memory serves me well and Lawsuits were in fact filed, how were they resolved?

Most of this is far out of date, due to location or total bullshit. My father has had several heart surgeries and the only reason for the wait was parts. Sign your donor cards. If his open heart bypass surgery was an emergency he would have been in surgery the same day, I know because his surgery was bumped once when he was prepped in order to do an emergency surgery.

I am sure the US hospitals will do the surgery at the drop of a hat because it is INCOME regardless of who. They have to do the emergency surgery but forget anything else unless you plan to mortgage your life. We don't have 50,000 people dying per year due to lack of health care.

Is there a Scrooge virus going around?

For the last day or so, I've been doing some searching and reading about the Canadian healthcare system. I did a Google search on the following: "how is the Canadian healthcare system paid for"

It seems that so many people have an "agenda" when writing about healthcare, but I tried to find some links which were somewhat neutral. Some of them were from typically "liberal" sites, but seemed to have somewhat negative information about the Canadian system. So, I included them in this list.

I think this subject is like a divorce.......there's his side, her side and the truth. Or, family squabbles......we can bad mouth our family all we want, but don't anybody else try to.

I think alot of this has to do with what people have lived with most of their lives. There's good and bad in everything.


Den

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as usual, take the spaces out of the links

http : // en . wikipedia . org/wiki/Health_care_in_Canada

http : // www . canadian-healthcare . org/


https : // secure . cihi . ca/free_products/Lifetime_distEffects_overview_EN . pdf


http : // ctalkcanada . com/2012/02/18/canadian-health-care-the-pros-and-cons-of-canadian-health-care/

http : // ctalkcanada . com/2012/02/18/canadian-health-care-the-pros-and-cons-of-canadian-health-care-part-2/


http : // www . huffingtonpost . ca/nadeem-esmail/canada-free-health-care_b_3733080 . html

http : // www . cbsnews . com/news/canadian-health-care-in-crisis/

http : // www . washingtonpost . com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/01/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-canadian-health-care-in-one-post/

http : // www . theglobeandmail . com/life/health-and-fitness/health/actually-canada-health-care-isnt-free/article4230286/

http : // www . fraserinstitute . org/uploadedFiles/fraser-ca/Content/research-news/research/articles/how-much-do-we-really-pay-ff010111 . pdf


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Choker: "Paul Krugman is a fraud". Yeah, the way it works is, name calling doesn't count as points in a reasoned debate. for example:
Einstein: e=mc2.
Choker: no it doesn't, you fraud. I win.
Einstein: show my how I'm wrong.
Choker: you stink.
etc.

I have heard that in the Canadian healthcare system, if you are past thirty and get really, really sick, the doctors stop trying to really help you. Someone told me when I was up in Lake Erie this past summer (Sandusky area along the Ohio Turnpike/Route 2) that if you get super sick in Canada, the Canadian doctors will put a heavy narcotic drip on you, that suppresses your normal breathing. They claim it is the normal, standard procedure for "pain control" in trauma, but really what they are trying to do is kill you slowly by suppressing your breathing over several days.

What happens is after several days of being on heavy narcotic drips, you develop "complications" and soon youre dead.

Its all because of lack of money, but Canadians wont admit that because they honestly believe "stuff is free." Aint nothing free in this world, except for air.

So Canadian socialized medicine system is already practicing involuntary euthanasia up there, to save Canadian taxpayer $$$.

Eric

cerebral cortex worn out? ^^^

SWO45 - Your note is really not worth answering, but read it again yourself - how ridiculous is it for heaven's sake?

A little common sense can go a long way sometimes... try it for a change.

I remember working with someone years ago, not a kid or anyone from an info starved country. They tried to tell me Jewish people were buried standing upright. And of course had to be corrected, but it was difficult to believe we'd grown up in the same part of the country... which was a big city. Try not to believe everything you read randomly on the net... it'll really rot your brain.

SuddenlyWornOut45 wrote:I have heard that in the Canadian healthcare system, if you are past thirty and get really, really sick, the doctors stop trying to really help you. Someone told me when I was up in Lake Erie this past summer (Sandusky area along the Ohio Turnpike/Route 2) that if you get super sick in Canada, the Canadian doctors will put a heavy narcotic drip on you, that suppresses your normal breathing. They claim it is the normal, standard procedure for "pain control" in trauma, but really what they are trying to do is kill you slowly by suppressing your breathing over several days.

What happens is after several days of being on heavy narcotic drips, you develop "complications" and soon youre dead.

Its all because of lack of money, but Canadians wont admit that because they honestly believe "stuff is free." Aint nothing free in this world, except for air.

So Canadian socialized medicine system is already practicing involuntary euthanasia up there, to save Canadian taxpayer $$$.

Eric

Stop reading fox news sites while shooting up.