I’ll start with a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune, written by someone with magical fairy dust in their eyes—a liberal—who wrote indignantly about the wondrous Canadian healthcare system after one of the Tribune’s columnists summarily exposed it as the farce that it is.
It’s free, see!
Columnist Steve Chapman’s “Is Canadian health care a contradiction in terms?” (Commentary, June 16) details the economic woes of the Canadian provincial single-payer health systems.
This is a familiar script from economic conservatives and libertarians on both sides of the border.
Allow me to contribute an anecdote in favor of the Canadian system.
My family and I resided in Montreal when our second child was born in 1987. He had a heart murmur at birth, which is not terribly uncommon, and his condition was otherwise normal and healthy. Our obstetrician told us to have his heart re-examined when we moved to Toronto, which we were about to do.
At the cardiology department of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, one of the premier pediatric hospitals in the world, the pediatrician ordered an echocardiogram. We waited two hours.
When the echocardiogram had been completed, the pediatrician came out and informed us that one of our son’s heart valves was defective and that his condition required immediate surgery. He was admitted then and there, and surgery was performed the following morning.
Thanks to a then-novel surgical technique—pioneered in part by the Toronto pediatric staff—involving catheters, no massive incisions were required. The operation was a success, and he was sent home three days later. He has led a normal, healthy life since.
We presented our Ontario Health Insurance Program card to the cashier on the way out the door. The cost of this entire procedure to us: $0.
[—by Hugh Miller]
Wow! Nobody paid nothin! Countless hundreds of billions of dollars out of our pockets is…… $0 to liberals!….. because it came from “the government”—not from us!
No wonder liberals want “the government” to spend more!
And does this Mr. Miller not understand the concept of “insurance”? If he had a policy with ACME Health Insurance, the cost to him would similarly be “$0”! Or if he lived in France, or Sweden, or Germany, or Japan—all would charge him $0, just as they would in the U.S. if he had insurance which the vast majority do, and even if he didn’t and he was poor, that “the government” again would charge him “$0”.
Now the snippets from the column “
Is Canadian health care a contradiction in terms?” (hint: yes.):
[…] Any debate on health care eventually arrives at the point at which one participant says, “We should have what Canadians have. Free care, universal access and low cost—who could ask for more?”
Well, plenty of people could ask for more—starting with the Supreme Court of Canada. Last week, ruling on a challenge to the health care in the province of Quebec, the court sent a clear message south: Don’t believe the hype.
The program, said the court, has such serious flaws that it is violating constitutional rights and must be fundamentally changed. And the flaws, far from being unique to Quebec, are part of the basic structure of Canada’s health-care policy.
[…] The dirty secret of the system is that universal access is no guarantee of treatment. Sick Canadians spend months and even years on waiting lists for surgery and other procedures. In 1993, the average wait to see a specialist after getting a doctor’s referral was nine weeks. Since then, according to the Fraser Institute of Vancouver, it has increased to 18 weeks.
[…] The program has created a gap between supply and demand that is wider than Hudson Bay. Its failings, however, go beyond that. The single-payer approach, for example, is often held up as the only way to simultaneously control costs and deliver quality care. In fact, Canada has somehow managed to do neither.
After adjusting for the age of the population, the Fraser Institute compared 27 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that guarantee universal access to health care. By some mysterious alchemy, Canada has proportionately fewer physicians than most of these nations but spends more on health care than any except Iceland.
t would be a dubious feat to control costs only by depriving people of treatment. But to forcibly deprive people of treatment while letting costs surge is no achievement at all.
[…] The usual story we hear is that the health-care system next door provides first-rate care to all, at low cost. The realities—dangerous delays, bloated expenditures and mediocre results—are not so appealing. American liberals may not welcome evidence that the single-payer model works far better in theory than in practice. But for that, they can blame Canada.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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