World News Korner

Toronto physician schools arrogant U.S. Senator concerning the truth about Canada's health care system.

This took place Tuesday during a Senate hearing on single payer healthcare. Here is the pertinent exchange courtesy of the Chicago Tribune:

North Carolina Senator Richard Burr

BURR: Why are doctors exiting the public system in Canada?

MARTIN: Thank you for your question, Senator. If I didn’t express myself in a way to make myself understood, I apologize. There are no doctors exiting the public system in Canada, and in fact we see a net influx of physicians from the United States into the Canadian system over the last number of years.

What I did say was that the solution to the wait time challenge that we have in Canada -- we do have a difficult time with waits for elective medical procedures -- does not lie in moving away from our single-payer system toward a multipayer system. And that’s borne out by the experience of Australia. So Australia used to have a single-tier system and did in the 1990s move toward a multiple-payer system where private insurance was permitted. And a very well-known study by Duckett, et al., tracked what took place in terms of wait times in Australia as the multipayer system was put in place.

And what they found was in those areas of Australia where private insurance was being taken up and utilized, waits in the public system became longer.

BURR: What do you say to an elected official who goes to Florida and not the Canadian system to have a heart valve replacement? (This reference is to Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams, whose decision to have a heart valve procedure in Miami, near where he owns a condo, rather than Canada, is widely viewed in Canada as a rich man's failure to investigate the care available to him closer to home.)

MARTIN: It’s actually interesting, because in fact the people who are the pioneers of that particular surgery, which Premier Williams had, and have the best health outcomes in the world for that surgery, are in Toronto, at the Peter Munk Cardiac Center, just down the street from where I work.

So what I say is that sometimes people have a perception, and I believe that actually this is fueled in part by media discourse, that going to where you pay more for something, that that necessarily makes it better, but it’s not actually borne out by the evidence on outcomes from that cardiac surgery or any other.

(The ultimate zinger came at the end of the exchange, when Burr thought he had Martin down for the count about wait times in Canada, and she neatly put the difference between the Canadian and U.S. systems in perspective.)

BURR: On average, how many Canadian patients on a waiting list die each year? Do you know?

MARTIN: I don’t, sir, but I know that there are 45,000 in America who die waiting because they don’t have insurance at all.

Ouch! That's going to leave a mark.

I have to admit that I, like many Americans, believed the propaganda that America has the best health care system in the world. It was only after the whole health care debate started that I learned what a pile of steaming excrement that is. (In fact I should thank IM's Canadian visitors who quickly straightened my ass out about the price of care, the actual wait times, and the lies about their citizens coming here to meet their health care needs.

Now after reading this I am kind of on the side of the Teabaggers in that I want ACA repealed as well. Only I want it replaced with a single payer system, so that America can finally have the health care system it deserves.

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