Tuesday, May 20, 2008

We Should Not Kill Canadians

By Donald R. May

Categories: Single-Payer Follies

That’s right! If we allow our remaining private health care to be replaced with socialized health care, our Canadian neighbors will lose their access to the high quality medical services presently still available in the United States. Many will unnecessarily suffer and some will prematurely die. Of course, our own health and lives will also be at much greater risk if politicians and bureaucrats have increased access to the control of our health care.

There are extensive waiting times in Canada’s socialized health care system for diagnostic procedures, hospital admissions, and surgical procedures. These have resulted in Canadian provinces sending many of their patients each year to the United States for medical care that cannot be provided to them in a timely matter.

Canadian bureaucratic planning problems have resulted in shortages of neurosurgical, cardiovascular, and complex obstetric care. Ontario has been particularly heavily hit and has sent hundreds of patients to the United States for medical care it cannot provide. British Columbia and other provinces have also sent patients. These are the fortunate patients as they receive timely quality care and their government pays the bills.

Thousands of other Canadians simply come to the United States at their own expense each year for medical care they cannot receive in Canada. Often they have serious medical or surgical conditions such as cancer or cardiovascular disease. They travel to the United States and willingly pay for their own medical care. With waiting times for medical care in Canada of often many months, the decision to seek care in the United States is life saving for many Canadians.

Patients also come to the United States from Britain and many other socialized health care countries seeking high quality care they cannot receive in their own countries. These patients travel to the United States and personally pay for care they cannot even purchase at home. Many such patients are evaluated and treated at the Mayo Clinic and at other medical facilities in Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle, and many other cities.

These health care tourists add billions of dollars each year to our economy by purchasing medical, surgical, and other health care services. While they are in the United States, they and those who accompany them spend money at hotels and restaurants. They shop and purchase other goods and services.

In Britain, patients are being left waiting in ambulances for hours at a time. These seriously ill patients are kept out of the hospital emergency rooms so as not to produce adverse statistics showing long waiting times for emergency room care. Such deception seeks to hide the inefficiency of the vastly overcrowded and understaffed British emergency rooms. The ambulances become the temporary waiting rooms keeping them out of service and unable to respond to other emergency calls. Such is some of the insanity created by the bureaucracy of socialized single-payer health care systems.