Curious "Canadian or U.K." question on health care?

[Industrial Toys]

I have a neighbor and very good friend who is a nurse, pretty much retired now, but was involved with hyperbaric (sp?) treatment and intensive care. He used to make 100K a year working lots of holiday and getting OT.

Nicest guy in the world, but I have to say, I have met few people who work and move slower than he does. It drives me nuts! I have other self employed friends who rarely walk but practically run when working.

 

[Relic]

As a canadian who lives through this system I can tell you that it works beautifully IF administered properly. I remember when I could call the hospital or a specialist and get an appointment for the next day, same for surgeries (well not next day but within a very reasonable time). Then arrived Pierre Elliot Trudeau who sent immigration on its ear and allowed hordes of people, who never contributed a penny, to use the system, this was called Family Reunification whereby one immigrant could call in 6 people who will use the system to its fullest (due to age) those 6 still not contributing financially. Multiply this by hundreds of thousand and you have the problem. The system whether canadian UK of European IMO is the only system that works fairly for all. I would not want to have an insurance company decided whether the surgery is worthwhile due to profit, my age etc. The problem today is that all of those non contributors have caused the system to collapse as there is little money to spend on hospital doctors etc

And this is what truly happened to our system. There is no question,it is slow,,but if your injured on the job,WC is involved,you get fixed up right away.

 

[KennyG]

I don't think anyone will be happy with their medical system if they expect low cost but state of the art health care. There is a lot of room for improvement in the U.S. system. But when I worked in Toronto I saw TV ads saying "If your doctor says you need an MRI but you can't get it, come to Buffalo and get scanned tomorrow. "

 

[gwstang]

"Canadian government indexed pension "

Hate to be stupid....what is this?

 

[Dadnatron]

I know the Canadian system is responsible for approximately 10% of my patient population. I do high end spinal pain management, but still, I get a significant # of Canadian patients who pay cash at the door.

The New Newfoundland Premier came to the US for cardiac surgery in 2010.

And don't forget the 'cost' of 'free' healthcare... in hours NOT worked and enjoyed as well as delayed treatment often resulting in worsened outcome.

Long wait times costing Canadians time and money.

"A new study by the Fraser Institute estimates that the 894,449 Canadians who (on average) waited 9.8 weeks for treatment after seeing a specialist, experienced a personal cost of $1,304 in lost productivity and income. This adds up to an almost $1.2 billion loss for the Canadian economy.

And this is surely a conservative figure, since it does not place any intrinsic value on the time Canadians spend waiting in a reduced capacity outside of the typical work week. (Valuing all hours of the week—including evenings and weekends, but excluding eight hours of sleep—the cost estimate increases to $3.5 billion or $3,951 per patient.) Nor does it factor in the 8.5 week wait to see a specialist in the first place, the cost of care provided by family members and friends, or the risk of disability, adverse medical consequences, and in the worst cases, death."

I realize I have a big dog in this hunt, being a physician, however, I could do much better if the Government would get out of my way and allow me to work to my best. I could treat more patients, more inexpensively, with better results, without .gov telling me I have to renew my CPR card every 2 years... even though I do the work for it... every day.

 

[goeduck]

Here's a good article on why the costs in the US are so high.

Very good article, we should have this discussed more often. Discussion is too often on who pays how much and what policy is in place. Almost never on why the costs are so high. Big pharma and big insurance does not want this discussed.

 

[Agvg]

There are no problem to involve private health care in a single payer system. Here in Norway a lot of things run by private firms, mye girlfriend had a CT yesterday, zero waiting and payment. Of course there are things that could be better but it works.

A lot of people have health insurance here, it quite cheap because the private hospitals don't get involved in the more heavy and very complicated problems. And yes there are long wait on some operations but things are getting better with more private specialist care.

 

[ch47dpilot]

Just saw this post so this may already have been said. two major problems with US insurance #1 mandated coverage, can you imagine how much car insurance would be if the government mandated insurance pay for "safety" issues like tire, brakes and other normal maintenance, like they do with health insurance. Over the years US citizens have grow accustom to having insurance pay for everything. If it only covered catastrophic problems(like car insurance) competition would drive down cost. #2 malpractice lawsuits, Dr now days do every single test they can to cover their A**. Since insurance cover most of the cost patients don't ask why or how much a test cost. There is also the problem that the US is almost 10 times more populated than Canada.

 

[dmccarty]

For the last few years, I have been reading several "newspapers" that cover the island of Ireland. One paper is in Northern Ireland and covers NI, the Irish republic and the UK. Several other papers mostly cover the republic but they seem to have reports from Northern Ireland as well.

The papers have fairly constant coverage of health care issues. A big issue that is not going away is a shortage of rooms across the republic. There are constant reports were they list the number of people in beds kept in the hallways. From the reports and photos of the beds lined up in the hallways this is something that has been going on for years.

Another problem is a shortage of doctors and nurses as well as low pay for the staff. They just had a man who went to the ER and died waiting to be seen. He apparently was dead for hours before it was noticed that there was a corpse in the waiting room.

One solution that was proposed to deal with the shortage of staff was to close some smaller rural hospitals which of course would make the room shortage much worse. Brilliant idea.

Elective procedures take many months. I have never seen a list of what they consider elective but from the stories I have read, their list is different than mine. One girl had a spinal problem that had been going on for YEARS. She was bent over so severely that one lung was compressed to a point of being unusable so she was short of breath. Furthermore, she was so bent over that her stomach was compressed so she could not eat and she was of low weight for her age. Her family eventually took her to Turkey for spinal surgery. :shocked: This kid was in suffering horribly, could no breath and was starving to death but the Irish health care system would not operate on her. Shameful.

An administrator of one of the hospital systems, stated that the wait time is now six months for elective surgeries and they have improved because it used to be a year. :shocked: Last Christmas the administrator wanted to shutdown surgeries for three weeks. This was obviously to save money but he said it was to make sure there were facilities in case there was a need for emergency procedures over the holidays. The staff pushed back and the only shut down for two week. That hospital had thousands of people waiting for surgery, I think it was 2,000-3,000 people on the wait lists.

They seem to have private health insurance but I don't know details. There was a report where the government was going after doctors who saw too many patients with private insurance vs the government insurance.

Later,
Dan

 

[Agvg]

Underfunding and badly organized health sector doesn't work well, had much of the same here until they let private firms run more specialist private practice witch of course did a more efficient job. But you can always wish for more of everything but some one have to take the bill at the end.