A sure-fire way for a columnist to find out if anybody’s paying attention out there is to pen a column on the deteriorating U.S. health care delivery process that’s so heavily dependent financially on employers and employees.
And to be sure you are rewarded with a raft of passionate reactions, make sure you throw in a suggestion that a universal delivery system, such as the one in Canada, might better solve our many health care delivery ills (namely 45 million uninsured, paying twice per capita than most other nations, enduring out-of-control cost increases while achieving statistically mediocre medical outcomes).
Meticulously do your homework – like researching actual facts – in hopes of blunting the inevitable critical onslaught that races through cyberspace and plops into your e-mail box.
Such was the reaction after I pointed out in this column last week that – using new official government statistics and independent studies – the 60 percent of American health care that stems from employer-employee financing continues its path to eventual demise.
Readers who have flooded my e-mail after each of four health care-related columns in the past year apparently have little beef with that basic theme, but they get plenty riled when Canada’s single-payer system is touted as a model replacement.
“Before you jump up and down and point to Canada with breathless wonderment, you might do a little more research,” suggested e-mailer “evigop.”
Start by cruising the parking lot of St. Joseph Hospital in Bellingham and notice all the Canadian license plates, evigop said. “They aren’t visiting the sick, they are the sick,” a real testimony to the shortcomings of the Canadian system, the message continued.
Just about everybody who rips the Canadian system (the same one, incidentally, that’s become so popular with Americans seeking lower prescription prices), has one or more “actual experiences,” to prove their point.
Like Mark Byrnes of Baring who lived in British Columbia for two years. “I can tell you your rosy, utopian vision of socialized medicine is a joke,” he wrote. (For the record, Canada’s system is not socialized. Hospitals are mostly owned by nonprofit groups, and physicians own and operate their own practices, as they do in the United States.)
Like most, Byrnes had his list of prolonged waits or lack of convenient care stories from Canada. He and his pregnant wife “had to drive three hours each way just to get an ultrasound;” a friend requiring a hip replacement was “placed on a waiting list for over a year;” his father-in-law, a U.S. citizen, was forced to wait nine months for major heart surgery, which he got by going to the States and applying for Medicare.
While Brynes has his stories, I’ve got mine. My wife’s aunt and uncle, after 20 years living in northern B.C., had to wait six months before qualifying for Medicare when they returned stateside. Incidentally, they loved Canadian health care.
I personally will have waited six years for my knee replacement surgery in 2007, not because it wasn’t available but because of the onerous out-of-pocket cost, which Medicare will mostly absorb when I turn 65. Meanwhile, my expatriate in-laws have received excellent treatment from the Mexican health care system, where their personal physician is Harvard trained.
However, Charles Wikman, whose wife is a physician, told of Canadian doctors they have met who must endure the “inefficiency, lack of choice and endless lines of patients and technological backwardness,” in a March e-mail. “Many patients are referred to the States to get proper care.”
But Thomas Smith said those who denigrate Canada’s system, citing supposed widespread waits, have been brainwashed by “special interests that do not want a cheaper system, which would reduce or eliminate their profits.”
The largely temporary wait problem in Canada, he said, was caused by severe financial cutbacks to the system by the Jean Chretien government in the mid-1990s. (Funding is steadily being restored.) Several readers pointed to similar cutbacks of Medicare and Medicaid as wreaking havoc on physicians and patients in the United States.
To Betty Eggers, drug companies have “hijacked our health care system” by substituting expensive manufactured pharmaceuticals that require a patent to replace those that stem from natural resources. Testosterone ($170 a month for patented doses compared to $26 monthly for naturally occurring) is just one example.
Dr. Steve Jacobson pointed to rising medical malpractice premiums in states such as Washington compared to lower rates in states that limit tort rewards, in an e-mail last year.
While “there is drastic room for improvement” in health care insurance transactions, no one who has dealt with Medicare “would want a government-sponsored agency running another bureaucratic nightmare.”
And so goes the debate. Has anybody considered the Australian system?
Write Eric Zoeckler at The Herald, P.O. Box 930, Everett, WA 98206 or e-mail mrscribe@aol.com.
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