I say "Amen" to Pete's
posting below. Yet I have to admit there is a downside to publicly
provided universal health care. There may not always be as much capacity
as people would like. My older daughter, along with her eight year old
daughter, is visiting from Washington State, where she works as a nutritionist
in a hospital. Young granddaughter fell ill, so daughter took her to a
local walk-in clinic. The clinic kept them for about an hour and then sent
them off to the children's hospital for tests. It took the whole day to
get those tests. It's probable that they would have been done more quickly
had the situation been critical, but sitting around all day waiting for tests
and their interpretation was not a pleasant experience when compared to what
daughter was used to under the US system. She said the whole procedure
would have taken a couple of hours in Washington State.
Nevertheless, it got done and both parent and child
survived. In the US where, under private health care, affordability would
have been a major question. So, we may be slower in Canada, but everybody
has equal access, at least in theory.
A major problem in Canada is the scarcity of health
professionals. According to the papers, ever so many doctors who have been
trained abroad and immigrated to Canada are driving taxis. They want to
work as doctors, but must meet residency requirements at hospitals in order to
be certified. The bottleneck is not enough residency spaces.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: "pete" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 8:33 PM
Subject: [Futurework] Private health care (was
E.European...)
> On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Harry Pollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> >Why do you see the private sector is terrible at healthcare? I've
> >already described the Kaiser-Permanente system, which I would say
> >was the equal of any other in the world - private or government.
>
> Is that perhaps because they can cherry pick their clientele among
> those who qualify? How would they fare if they weren't allowed to
> reject any applicant due to preexisting conditions, or charge them
> impossibly high premiums? Say if the only allowable cause for a
> targeted premium rate hike was willful indulgence in high risk
> activity like smoking? Don't you think under those circumstances
> they would either close up shop or degrade their service to
> levels much worse than public systems? What are the numbers like
> for these issues? And then of course there's the "auto-selection"
> provided by the private premium system: only those who can afford
> the premiums enroll, so the client base is pre-sorted for more
> affluent people who will generally be in better health, having
> had better nutrition and better self-image (I'm sure you've seen
> the stats correlating health with _relative_ income), and had
> more prompt attention to any health issues they may have confronted.
> A real health care system must look after the whole population, not
> just the upper sixty percent who can manage the premiums.
>
> -Pete
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Futurework mailing list
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
