if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803
Hosers In Hospitals
by Lee
What will save Canada’s “free” health care system? Could it be good old American-style capitalism?
The head of the Canadian Medical Association wants Ottawa to carefully examine the prospect of expanding private health care in this country.
“When it comes to health care in Canada, private health is not some bogey man to be trotted during an election campaign,’’ Dr. Albert Schumacher told a meeting Saturday of the B.C. Medical Association in Vancouver.
“We need a real debate on the role it has played, the role it continues to play and will play in our system to advance the health of all Canadians.’’ ...
Private care has been available in Canada, but doctors have to opt completely out of the publicly-funded system. There was also no option to purchase private health insurance for actual medical treatment, so people had to pay cash.
Advocates of private care say allowing people to purchase insurance would make private clinics more affordable.
Seems pretty reasonable so far, right? Then you get to this brilliant observation.
But in an interview with CTV’s Question Period, federal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh argued private care isn’t better—just more expensive.
“I don’t think that Canadians want private health care. What they want is the public system being more efficient, more timely,” he said in an interview to be broadcast Sunday.
In other words, they want a free health care system, which has no incentives for efficiency or service, to operate with the same level of efficiency and service as a for-profit system, which has every incentive for efficiency and service. In other words, they want the best service possible, and they want it to be free and universally available. This is the Great Socialist Lie™ in action.
But Dr. Chantal Ducasse, a doctor in private practice said: “In the public system, I had to see 50 patients in six hours. It’s not human. We don’t do that with animals. We shouldn’t be doing that with human beings.”
And now, under the public system, he gets to take longer with patients, but then those patients have to wait six weeks to get an MRI, or a year to get a hip replacement. So it’s all a big trade-off. But the idea that you can have a fully government-run system that will provide a fraction of the service and quality of a for-profit system is, in a word, ludicrous. It will never happen, not just in health care but in any field. The power of the market to reduce costs and promote efficiency is unparalleled in human history, and no amount of social engineering by do-gooding government types is ever going to change that.
Now, on the flip side, I think that allowing people who can afford it to supplement their government coverage with private insurance is probably a good thing. You get the base coverage from the government, but if you’ve got the extra cash you can get better treatment than the rabble. Of course, then you get into the argument about fairness and equality, “Why should he get a private room and faster service just because he’s got more money than I do?” In theory I’m not against some kind of government-run base health care coverage for the general public. But just like everything government does the list of entitlements will ever-so-slowly creep forward until taxpayers are footing the whole bill for people who just don’t feel like buying their own insurance.
Comments
LOL, Aaron, I’m stealing that line.
Lee, you need to reread that last section you quoted. He’s saying that under the private system, he can take more time with patients than before. He’s saying that the public system treats patients worse than animals, like medicine is an assembly line.
He’s saying that the public system treats patients worse than animals, like medicine is an assembly line.
Yep, the system is notoriously short on staff because the pay sucks, so few people want to become doctors, and those that do want to become American doctors. A number of Canadian-born American doctors return to Canada for a few weeks a year to do free private work, like a third world humanitarian mission.
This is how Socialism/Communism *works*: Friendly, cuddly fuzzy save-the-children leftism is economically unfeasible (due to the principle noted above), so it either must lean on a market economy (as Canada does with the US) to prop itself up, or else enslave the masses to force them to work without a fair market profit. It’s at that point that people start getting shot in the head for non-compliance. Five year plan! Great leap forward! Whooo!
By the way, my favorite conversation with a Canadian was about an impending nurse’s strike in British Columbia, they were getting a big vacation cut from something ridiculous like 8 weeks paid vacation.
“This is insane! They’re nurses!”
“Yes, I agree their benefits shouldn’t be cut...”
“WHAT? No! I mean they shouldn’t go on strike!”
You get the base coverage from the government, but if you’ve got the extra cash you can get better treatment than the rabble. Of course, then you get into the argument about fairness and equality, “Why should he get a private room and faster service just because he’s got more money than I do?”
The obvious answer to this is, “Well, because he’s willing to pay more for the service.”
It sucks that I can only afford to drive a used Honda, but that doesn’t mean that the guy who can afford to shell out the dough for a brand new Bentley ought to be forced to drive the same used Honda just because that’d fit someone’s definition of what’s “fair.”
That’s why I’ve always agreed with my dad’s definition (which he probably picked up from someone else) of socialized medicine: “Spreading the Misery.”
By the way, this piece by Fox News reporter David Asman does a good job of contrasting the differences between the UK’s National Health Service and private health care in the US, from a very personal perspective. It’s very even-handed in detailing the ups and downs of both systems, and it’s worth a read. One of the best paragraphs comes toward the end:
As for the quality of British health care, advocates of socialized medicine point out that while the British system may not be as rich as U.S. heath care, no patient is turned away. To which I would respond that my wife’s one roommate at Cornell University Hospital in New York was an uninsured homeless woman, who shared the same spectacular view of the East River and was receiving about the same quality of health care as my wife. Uninsured Americans are not left on the street to die.
First rule of the marketplace: Faster, better, cheaper. Pick two.
Great line, although I’ve always been taught that it’s “there no such thing as a ‘free’ lunch”
8 weeks paid vacation
Try three, and thats only if you schedule the time off. My wife is a nurse in BC.
Canadian-born American doctors return to Canada for a few weeks a year to do free private work, like a third world humanitarian mission.
Most Canadian doctors like working in the US but they do often return, but only because of the lawsuits. My wife has many friends who have worked in the US, loved it, but wont stay for fear of being sued.
I agree with Lee. In Canada for some reason it is political suicide to advocate any kind of private medical system. Even if the government pays. During the hospital workers union strike in BC one of the private clinics offered to do hip replacements for people on the wait list if the government paid. The difference between them and the public run hospital: the cost for the private clinic was 60% the cost of the public run hospital. This hardly even made the news. What is worse: the government never took them up on the offer. Some how in Canada if you are in a health related field and you turn a profit you are EVIL. There is even a substantial portion of the population who think that any company that makes money is EVIL. I don’t get it. I am a Canadian and I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that Canadians are a bunch of left wing idiots.
France has universal healthcare and no significant wait times.
Try three, and thats only if you schedule the time off. My wife is a nurse in BC.
You’re right: I looked it up, and apparently it’s something to the effect of 8 weeks being standard in some other place, or that the union was demanding it as a counter-offer, but I can’t seem to find what I originally read. It was a long time ago, alas, but it came out of the same incident where the BC government was demanding a 15% pay cut. (Out of curiosity, what exactly are patients supposed to do if nurses strike?)
Most Canadian doctors like working in the US but they do often return, but only because of the lawsuits. My wife has many friends who have worked in the US, loved it, but wont stay for fear of being sued.
This depends *wildly* on the state in which you work. For the sake of example, here in Illinois, malpractice insurance can cost a “risky” specialist as much as $100,000 per year. In South Carolina, that same guy can pull a policy out of his ass for about $8,000.
There is even a substantial portion of the population who think that any company that makes money is EVIL. I don’t get it.
This is a central tenet of Marxism: All profit is theft from the worker. Now it makes sense!
France has universal healthcare and no significant wait times.
Yeah, it worked so well during the heat wave. Faster, better, or cheaper. You do *not* want to be in a French hospital. There may be low wait times, but the facilities are, uh, widely considered to be substandard.
It’s hard for non-Canadians to understand our health care system, because it’s not just about health and medicine, it’s part of our national identity, and not in a good way either. Example: after the Supreme Court decision last week, Lorne Calvert, the premier of Saskatchewan, and a doctrinaire socialist (the NDP governs that province), was quoted as saying “this decision changes nothing. There’s no way we are going with an American-style health care system.” The court of course had not mentioned anything about American-style, but to people like Calvert (and there are a LOT of them in this country, probably a majority), “American-style” is a code word for bad, evil, selfish, etc., and is designed to shut down debate, the way the word “communist” was in the US forty years ago. Nevertheless, our health care system is going to change dramatically because the doctors want it, and so do many people, and the Supreme Court has (to my great surprise) opened the door for change. Stay tuned for events....
ALOT of people I know up here want a private component to healthcare. The judgement made this past week may be the start of something good because if more people step up and demand choices, sooner or later, the gang in control in Ottawa may need to listen if they want to stay on. The system DOES NOT WORK and if people here in canada think their taxes are high now, wait until the baby boomers start hitting the system in droves.
A lot of people on the outside looking in wonder why the American free-market health care system is so expensive. There are two main reasons. First, the doctor’s portion of any health care costs has to incorporate the ridiculously high malpractice insurance premiums he must pay thanks to our overly litigious society.
Second, what the rest of the world doesn’t seem to understand is that we Americans are footing the bill for everybody else! From the company that makes the equipment to the company that makes the aspirin or smallest bandage and everything in between; if they can’t recoup their costs (R&D;, personel, manufacturing, overhead, etc.) in poor countries or socialist ones with artificial limits on what they’ll pay for these items, they pass the costs onto the American healthcare consumer. This is what pisses me off!
I went a Pirate game on Friday night, and ran into six Canadians, hoo boy, these guys were the most immature, loud, and sexist group of guy’s I’ve ever come across. Of course they’ve probably been drinking since noon.
Second, what the rest of the world doesn’t seem to understand is that we Americans are footing the bill for everybody else! From the company that makes the equipment to the company that makes the aspirin or smallest bandage and everything in between; if they can’t recoup their costs (R&D;, personel, manufacturing, overhead, etc.) in poor countries or socialist ones with artificial limits on what they’ll pay for these items, they pass the costs onto the American healthcare consumer. This is what pisses me off!
This is absolutely true and unfortunately no one from a socialist country (ie Canada) will ever believe it. They still think that somehow life saving drugs are magically a product of government research spending, and that evil KKKapitalist drug companies make HUGE profits off other peoples misery with the peoples money. As for drugs that are not immediately life saving they think that they are EVIL poisons because they don’t come from nature. You remember nature, right, who brought you botulinus toxin the most deadly toxin known to man, or Black Widow spider toxin, or sea snake venom. See nature is full of goodness. EVIL Big Bad Pharma is trying to make you a drug whore for their KKKapitalist takeover of the workers health. Eventually Big Bad Pharma will cover 9/10 of the earth’s surface and they will lubricate their enormous tablet presses with the fresh blood of newborn babies.
In other words, they want a free health care system, which has no incentives for efficiency or service, to operate with the same level of efficiency and service as a for-profit system, which has every incentive for efficiency and service.
This is the fundamental fallacy people opposed to government provided hospitals have. Hospitals can still be 100% for profit if the government gets out of actually providing the health care, but instead pays for it. Hospitals then compete for public patients (and public contracts) in exactly the same way they compete for private patients. This is what happens in some cases in the UK, some parts of it have worked, some have not; but thats the idea. There are two parts to providing a service, paying for it and running it. There is no reason government needs to run it in a national insurance funded health care system, thus the benefits of capitalism can still be accrued without having people unable to get treated because they are too poor.
drug companies make HUGE profits off other peoples misery with the peoples money.
While your point is fair that the US subsidises drug research, drug companies are still one of the most profitable industries out there; check out the figures. The cost side of this system is that drugs companies research into drugs that help the US; hence the lack of drug research for African diseases. You make it sound like some sort of US charity, which its not; and its hardly other countries fault that in the US healthcare system buyer power is very much weaker than elsewhere.
While your point is fair that the US subsidises drug research, drug companies are still one of the most profitable industries out there; check out the figures.
And they should be - this is one of the few industries where a company can pay out billions upon billions of dollars and not know if it will ever come to anything. There has to be enough money in the bank to keep the company afloat even though there are countless drugs that never materialize. How many trillions of dollars do you think have gone into researching a cure for breast cancer that does not, and may *never*, exist?
Moxie, some interesting counter claims to what you are suggesting. I am not arguing that drugs companies shouldn’t make a profit at all, clearly they should if they make a good product for which there is a demand. What they are not, however is a hard up industry - they made the highest profit of any industry, every year, since 1982. Normally this wouldn’t matter at all, if an industry is doing well its a sign it makes good things that people want; but given that the government has buyer power here that it could use, like the governments of the UK, Canada etc do; its somewhat surprising that they don’t. It is possible the $500 million the drugs industry spends on lobbying every year has a little to do with it.
Ha, 12% of R&D;and 30% on marketing; thats certainly an interesting stat. It would be good to see what % they pay on lawsuits.
Padders: LOL - check this out:
During this time, the drug industry’s returns on revenue (profit as a percent of sales) have averaged about three times the average for all other industries represented in the Fortune 500. It defies logic that R&D;investments are highly risky if the industry is consistently so profitable and returns on investments are so high. (See Section V)
Is there some reason they’ll quote the ROR number, but *not* the ROI??? Their whole argument would be backed up by providing the ROI, but they don’t. You don’t find that to be at all odd?? And when I try to check out the full report to see section V, it’s not there for some reason.
Ha, 12% of R&D;and 30% on marketing; thats certainly an interesting stat. It would be good to see what % they pay on lawsuits.
It’s also a false stat. People who don’t know what they’re talking about automatically assume “marketing” means “advertising.” It also includes a wide, wide array of office and infrastructure expenses.
Actually, no, I just found the full report (apparently you can’t use the big freaking link that says “Click here for the full report"). And I am SHOCKED to find that the valuable section V has JACK SQUAT about ROI.
You don’t think that’s weird??
Ha, 12% of R&D;and 30% on marketing; thats certainly an interesting stat. It would be good to see what % they pay on lawsuits.
Let’s break down the numbers:
R&D;: 12%
Marketing: 30%
Killing puppies: 43%
Payoffs to Satan: 11%
Overhead: 4%
That’s really a very well-run industry if they can get by on 4% for overhead ...
Next entry: Brain On Fire
Previous entry: You'll Put Your Eye Out
First rule of the marketplace: Faster, better, cheaper. Pick two.
Commies can’t change that, no matter how hard they try.