June 28, 2007
Health Care in Canada: What a Great Model
A view of Michael Moore's new propaganda film from a Canadian perspective. From today's Wall Street Journal
TORONTO--"I haven't seen 'Sicko,' " says Avril Allen about the new Michael Moore documentary, which advocates socialized medicine for the United States. The film, which has been widely viewed on the Internet, and which will officially open in the U.S. and Canada on Friday, has been getting rave reviews. But Ms. Allen, a lawyer, has no plans to watch it. She's just too busy preparing to file suit against Ontario's provincial government about its health-care system next month.
Her client, Lindsay McCreith, would have had to wait for four months just to get an MRI, and then months more to see a neurologist for his malignant brain tumor. Instead, frustrated and ill, the retired auto-body shop owner traveled to Buffalo, N.Y., for a lifesaving surgery. Now he's suing for the right to opt out of Canada's government-run health care, which he considers dangerous.
Ms. Allen figures the lawsuit has a fighting chance: In 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that "access to wait lists is not access to health care," striking down key Quebec laws that prohibited private medicine and private health insurance.
Elsewhere, the AFL-CIO aligns itself with Michael Moore and socialism. (Yes, yes. We know it's considered bad manners and politically crude to refer to socialism in these debates. But what else do you call eliminating the private sector from health care? Universal coverage? That may describe the end, but it certainly doesn't describe the system.)
If Sicko helps to engage people in health care dialogue then so be it.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately there is a tendency to polarize the options for health care solutions into Public/good and Private/bad.
The general population and most of the media simply do not understand the hurdles that providing health care to an aging population with new possibilities for diagnoses and treatment and ongoing care will cost.
The argument that trends in increases in GDP will offset increase in health care costs is just baffling. This argument does not take into consideration the decreasing productivity of our nation.
With an aging population Canada's productivity is dropping and that is clear from the Bank of Canada's June report.
At the same time we need productivity to increase and GDP to continue increasing, there is a very good chance that this will not occur, at least not to the extent that we need it to.
Aging health care infrastructure is going to be a major drain as well as trying to implement some kind of IT system across the country.
Costs will be huge and many companies will prosper. Why not the health care industry?