It turns out that Canadian emergency care is no better than their cancer care. Check out this story from the CBC:
Man dead 'for some time' in Winnipeg ER before staff alerted: officials
Health officials say a man who died in the waiting area of a major Winnipeg hospital's emergency department may have been dead "for some time" before medical staff was alerted – 34 hours after he arrived.
Yes, I know bad things sometimes happen in US emergency rooms, too. But 34 hours??? Good Lord, even if the nurses on duty somehow missed him, you'd think at least the janitor would have noticed a dead man in the waiting room when he came around to mop the floor.
Such horror stories as these are to be expected under a single-payer health care system. Of course, the primary problem with any such system is the unavoidable truth that while demand is infinite, resources are limited.
While in theory, Canadian patients are entitled to "free" health care, in practice, economic realities have forced their system to institute stringent cost-cutting measures in order not to bankrupt the entire country.
Chief among these is the rationing of treatment in the form of long waiting lists for routine procedures. A Canadian patient in need of a knee replacement will first be placed on a waiting list for his initial consultation with an orthopedic surgeon. He'll then go on another waiting list for the necessary radiology procedures. Finally, he'll make it to the surgery waiting list. Total elapsed time until the surgery is actually performed? Five to seven years! Is it any wonder that Canadians who have the money opt to cross the border and come to the U.S. for their medical procedures?
Senior Canadians who are unlucky enough to develop conditions which are expensive to treat may find it impossible to receive anything beyond palliative care. Constrained by strict budgetary guidelines, their health care providers may well decide that those patients' life expectancy is not likely to be long enough to justify the cost of effective treatment. Those patients' only realistic option may be to do whatever it takes to come up with the money to pay for U.S. medical care, because they're unable to obtain it in Canada at any price, since there are no longer any private health care providers in Canada. Of course, they were outlawed when the present single-payer system was instituted.
Some would say that regardless of its undeniable disadvantages, single-payer health care would still be worthwhile because it's free. In truth, though, it's anything but. When you consider the crushing additional tax burden which Canadians must bear in order to pay for their "free" health care, it turns out that they're paying about the same amount that we are. Plus, because of the overhead imposed in any system run by inefficient and unaccountable government bureaucrats, the net result is that with all of its imperfections, our health care system is far superior to theirs by any objective measure. (How often have you ever heard of a U.S. resident heading north to obtain some of that "free" Canadian health care?)
If you happen to be one of those who's been agitating for us to institute single-payer health care (a/k/a HillaryCare) here, you might just want to reconsider your position. If such a disaster were actually to come to pass, you probably would not like the results – particularly if you or one of your loved ones were at the mercy of a health care system as warm and sympathetic as the IRS.
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