Shilling for Big Healthcare

<![CDATA[The Wall Street Journal has a scary piece, very intentionally scary, about the “drab” hospitals and long waits to see doctors and surgery in Canada. Did you know that, just like in some American hospitals, some Canadian hospitals make people wait? The article goes on to say that the Canadians don’t adopt new technology as quickly, too. Horrors.
You’d think that since I live so close to the border the smell of gangrenous Canadian bodies would fill the air around here. But all I can smell is the paper mills from the Tacoma tideflats, and even that only on rare occasions these days.
The assumption in the article is that if the U.S. went to a single-payer system we’d fall into this same nightmare our friends north of the border are living in. That’s not necessarily true, since we may manage things differently and, since we are already spending far more than any other country on healthcare as a share of GDP, our single-payer system could stay right on the cutting edge while offering largely the same services, including innovative treatments, as are available today. We won’t know unless we try and why not try something, anything, since the cost of healthcare is still rocking upward. The difference would be that the decision to buy a device that would save a few lives would not be in the hands of the few people who could afford it (and, presumably, still would seek out high-end private treatment). Society might actually decide to save people with rare diseases on the basis of the fact that most folks don’t know whether they will get them — basically, that’s what insurance is all about.
The article goes on and on about the bad care in Canada, becoming “balanced” only at the end, when a Canadian heart patient rates his care as “pretty excellent,” though we don’t hear about the fact he is not facing the tens of thousands of dollars in deductible payments an American might after the same procedure.
By the way, Canadians and everyone else spend less on medical care and live longer than we do. What a horror show. Faced with a growing problem, Americans resist experimentation, the very thing that made this country great.]]>