Canadian Doctor Bashes Socialized Medicine
Weren’t we supposed to look to Canada for solutions to our helath care problem?
Dr. David Gratzer cuts loose on why universal health care doesn’t work:
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 statistics and the stories are legitimately terrifying. But the American picture isn’t much better. Instead of utilizing government-run programs to provide health-care, we rely on businesses that care more about the almighty dollar and cutting insurance overhead than they do about making sure the patients on their rolls don’t die or go bankrupt.
What’s the good doctor’s solution?
America is right to seek a model for delivering good health care at good prices, but we should be looking not to Canada, but close to home—in the other four–fifths or so of our economy. From telecommunications to retail, deregulation and market competition have driven prices down and quality and productivity up. Health care is long overdue for the same prescription.
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