Oh for gods’ sakes. There’s so much BS shilling in your post I don’t even know how to start parsing it. Healthcare in Canada is NOT ‘imploding’. Non-critical waits do happen. But, like most Canadians, I’m pretty happy to wait a bit longer if I’m being bumped so that someone else with a critical need can not die.
And as the recipient of some very specialized care requiring a neurologist and an optho-neurologist, along with several MRIs, and who lives in a remote, rural community, I can tell you that the critical need in my case resulted in waiting TWO WHOLE days (one day of which was to account for ferry times). And my $1800/month daily prescription, taken daily in a subcut shot, is completely covered. And included a nurse travelling to my home from a city two hours away to spend a couple of hours with me teaching me to do the injections properly.
As a single mum, any care my child needed was instantly accessible and cost free up front, when and where and from whom we needed it, regardless (obvs) of my financial staus. Do I pay through my taxes? Damn straight I do, and happy to do so, particularly as I’m in vastly better financial condition than I was through a lot of my kiddo’s childhood. I kinda like knowing that myself and my neighbours and/or their kids have the right to the care they need, whether preventative or mitigating.
So take your fucked-up ‘healthcare’ system, and whatever pharmaceutical company you’re shilling for, and shove it.
Here in the socialist hellscape of Oz, the “waiting time” to see my neurologist was a week. I’m currently waiting on an MRI, which is harder than usual because it’s the holiday season and I need one with an attached anaestheologist. So that might involve a delay of as long as a month.
If not for the anaesthesia requirement, I’d probably have got it done within a week or two.
Yup, young doctors, whilst most definitely involved in an absolute shitshow regarding pay & hours, are still pretty well-remunerated (source: I administer their pensions).
Canada had a problem with wait times in some provinces in the 90’s. Then people became unhappy. Then they fixed it and wait times are ordinary. There is a website where you can look up wait times for all physicians in BC.
The study on which this ‘wait times are terrible elsewhere’ claim is based explicitly called out the US number as being included because it is interesting, but warning that it is probably not comparable to the other countries. Essentially the common measure of ‘wait time’ is a statistic of convenience meaning that the thing that is actually measured is an easy-to-collect proxy. It is the time from when healthcare is scheduled to when it is delivered. For the rest of the wealthy world this is expected to capture almost all wait time, and to be similar across nations. As everyone is insured with low out of pocket costs when they have a health issue they go to a doctor and are diagnosed and then schedule treatment. In the US, however, is different. With many uninsured and vastly higher out of pocket costs it is much more common to delay diagnosis and then to delay or simply never get treatment. Thus this statistic is expected to function much more poorly for the US than other wealthy nations. It counts the ‘wait time’ of someone who spends 6 months saving or figuring out how to get better insurance for a non-emergency operation as 0 wait time. The three days someone waits before going to the doctor because it will cost them $100, not wait time. The weeks going back and forth with an insurance company before they agree they will cover something, not wait time unless the procedure was scheduled.
1 - That there are politicians that are willing to say, just let them die.
2 - That the news media didn’t hammer them about this again and again and again, but instead just let is slide. This story was from 2011.
3 - That it confirms how bad the democrat’s election machine is. If it was any good at all, they would have hammered this home in every debate and ads blanketing TV. “Vote for me, the other guy literally wants to let you DIE!”, followed by the sound bite of them saying it.
4 - That apparently, nothing has mattered for a lot longer than I thought.
Public funds spent on healthcare per person in Canada (2015): $4071
Public funds spent on healthcare per person in America (2015): $4692
Source: OECD
People in the United States pay about 15% more tax dollars to provide healthcare in the United States than people in Canada do. Then, on top of that, most people in the United States have to also pay private companies to get health coverage.
US citizens are on the hook for more tax dollars to fund other people’s healthcare than Canadian citizens are. If the public cost of healthcare is unsustainable, then you ought to switch to single payer because that lowers the public cost. If it’s unfair to ask people to pay their tax dollars to fund other people’s healthcare, then you ought to switch to single payer because it means fewer of your tax dollars going to help other people.
The debate about healthcare in the US is built on an outrageous lie that anyone can fact check. Every single time single payer comes up people say, “Sure, I’d like a free pony.” Ponies are not free, but right now your government is paying more than the cost of a pony to prevent you from getting a pony. How the fuck badly do Americans not want nice things?!?
There are already some great responses here, but I’ll add on anyways.
Um… okay. That’s not even remotely true.
Not true.
Corporations ration it now here in America and we pay more than pretty much all other developed countries. Our for profit health care system still costs the public more, because we have so many uncovered and undercovered people.
Yet many of these countries have far less poverty and far better health outcomes than we do.
Um… what?
They do have a 25% VAT, but this is one solution floated by some conservatives - a consumption tax. And they have lower levels of poverty and better health outcomes.
No one is saying that we should exactly replicate what other countries have, but to look at what they do have, figure out what works and what doesn’t and then employ solutions that makes sense in our context.
We have terrible health outcomes, people drowning in medical debt, and dying because they can’t get the care they need, because they are poor. You have to be incredibly blinkered not to see how our system isn’t working for the majority of Americans.
And as you’ll see, people who actually live in countries with single payer are pointing out how you’re clearly misinformed.
VAT is one of those things which superficially appears to be a good idea (Pay for what you consume!) but is in fact horribly regressive. It’s also often stupidly arcane, as any Australian can tell you (wait, is this chicken cooked, or raw?).
We have GST, and about the only good thing it has going for it is the flat rate - 15% on everything, so at least there’s very little gaming going on trying to move products into different categories. I would still prefer it go die in a fire though.
Did you bother reading the articles you linked? The gist of the HuffPost Canada piece is that Canadian Healthcare is better than the US, but that’s nothing to be proud of because the US sucks. It goes on to say that Canada is worse than other advanced nations.
To the extent NHS is underfunded, that wouldn’t have anything to do with 40 years of Tory/New Labor/Tory governments would it?
I have heard almost this exact same phrasing with the word ‘gay’ replacing ‘feminist’.
It’s fine if you want to say that you’re personally not a feminist (really!) but that’s not what you’ve said. Rather, you’re asserting that it’s definitively impossible for us other penis-havers to be feminists.
This is news to us penis-having feminists, especially those penis-havers who identify as female (since you’re also asserting that having a penis necessarily confers a male gender identity).
