I was once a believer in socialized medicine. As a Canadian, I had soaked up the belief that government-run health care was truly compassionate. What I knew about American health care was unappealing: high expenses and lots of uninsured people.
My health care prejudices crumbled on the way to a medical school class. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute.
Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care.
I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic — with a three-year wait list; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.
Government researchers now note that more than 1.5 million Ontarians (or 12% of that province's population) can't find family physicians. Health officials in one Nova Scotia community actually resorted to a lottery to determine who'd get a doctor's appointment.
The article goes on to say that a medical broker in Ontario sets up surgical procedures, diagnostic tests and specialist consultations, privately and quickly, paid for by Canadians. In one case, a man had a seizure and was diagnosed as an epileptic. He was dissatisfied with that diagnoses as he was having symptoms not associated with epilepsy. He asked for an MRI and was told there was a 4.5 month wait. So the man contacted the medical broker who arranged for the MRI within 24 hours. The man had a BRAIN TUMOR and had surgery, also brokered, within a few weeks.
This man would have been dead by the time of his Canadian Socialized Medical Care MRI appointment, had he waited. This is what Hillary's Health Care will do in the USofA.
As I've often said before, if something sounds good on paper, don't expect it to work out in reality. I'm tired of people saying that medical care in the USofA is too expensive. A regular type vehicle costing $40,000 is expensive. A 2000 cubic foot house costing $300,000 is expensive. A Motor Home costing half a million dollars is expensive. Private Health Care in the USofA is not expensive. Comparing Private Health Care to Medicaid gives the illusion that private health care is expensive because it would cost a person approximately One Thousand Dollars a Month to give each child the type coverage that Medicaid provides "free" to low income children and the disabled.
And therein lies the problem. Someone will have the onerous duty of weaning low income families off of "full coverage" Medicaid. I have tried my best to get Senators to change the S-CHIP to include a co-pay and a deductible "just like real health insurance" (real meaning what all the rest of us with private health care have to deal with). But no one listens.
If this makes sense to anyone reading this, PLEASE contact your Senators and Representative in Washington, D.C. and advocate for a change in "medical mind set" for low income families. The USofA cannot live with Hillary Health Care. Universal Health Care will be the death of us all.
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