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Canadian Heathcare system sucks!!

It may be worth noting that the slamming the Canadian health care system has been getting in the U.S. of late is becoming a news story here. Earlier tonight, the CBC News had a piece about it, with the gist of the report asking why the government, so far, hasn't come to the defence of our system while members of the Opposition have.

The news report in question can be viewed from this page of the CBC News web site.
 
Rolfe said:
There was a little segment on the C4 news about "Obamacare". They highlighted how cherrypicked NHS stories are being used to frighten Americans. However, they didn't show the one's we've been horrified by. All it was was a quick clip of someone who'd been "denied" a cervical smear. Goodness knows how, because I recall advertisements on buses even in the 1970s exhorting every female over the age of 18 to go and get one. (It took the girls' grapevine to spread the word that anyone who was a virgin should not respond to this!) It's positively an invasion of privacy, the amount of pressure they put on you to have these tests. Unfortunately only a few seconds were shown, so it was impossible to tell where the misunderstanding was.

Rolfe.
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A close family friend had been putting off her regular smear test for a couple of years, she ended up with phone calls from the nurse at her GPs surgery to try and get her in! (Oh and she has just had a full abdominal hysterectomy because the results came back abnormal, and she went through the entire system of results > consultation > biopsy > results > consultation > hysterectomy in just under 5 weeks, and that included not being able to get to the first appointment with her consultant for the results after the biopsy...)

I've just had a thought how do national screening schemes even work in the USA?

USA folk - what is the national cervical smears screening programme?
 
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Mutter, mutter, complain, how do you actually fight them off when you neither need nor want one of these damn smears....

I'm fed up binning the persistent call-up letters. They're like the bounty hunters in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They follow you wherever you go. Moan, sulk.

/derail

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
Zig, or whoever it was, why did you post the link to that? Do you really think that's an accurate, representative and reliable account of the standard of NHS treatment?

Do you really think the Brits on this forum are lying when they tell you about complex operations delivered with no fear or favour, about high quality care available to all, and "rationing" only affecting the absolute fringes of high-cost-low benefit procedures?

We know why Cushing's lady and pink blouse are lying. Why would we lie to you?

Rolfe.
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I don't think they think we're are lying, purely we are a lot more accepting of poor care, a touch of arrogance perhaps??

I was thinking of all this last night and what struck me was the willingness to call their own country totally incompetent, when one of the national traits the US is noted for is the love of all things American. I've got a feeling some of the opponents don't think the US is in particularly incompetent but face extraordinary and complex problems other countries simply do not face. Like I've said before the US isn't a special case, every Governmental problem it will face, that very problem will have been overcome somewhere. Again a touch of arrogance??

They have the benefit of being one of the last and knowing what works and what doesn't - a one off opportunity. Its a bit ironic that if they actually went for it they should by rights have the best health service in the world by miles, not thinking they have.

Its going to need strong leadership to get it through and more than likely a leader who doesn't or can't be re elected but whoever it is will be regarded as a national hero like Beven et al.

apologies for the generalisations :o
 
I think that may happen. I don't know who coined the "Obamacare" label, but I think it was intended as a sneer, from opponents. But if Obama can pull this off, and he's the first US president who looks even half-way capable of it, "Obamacare" could be a term of gratitude and blessing for the next century and beyond.

Rolfe.
 
Oh noes! Some Americans went to India to get healthcare they were denied under the evil Merikan system! That means India has the best healthcare in the world and the American system is unfit for purpose!

Well, if it works for Berlusconi, it's the same argument....

Rolfe.
 
parky76 said:
#2. The hospital treatment and x-ray was free. But..he told me that national insurance does NOT cover physical therapy!! He said he would have have to fork over at least $40 a session..and he would need like 6 weeks at least.
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Under my student healthcare the hospital would be at least $50, the x-ray $100, and it'd be $65 for each PT session and they wanted me in for more than 6 weeks for my kneecap.
 
Darat said:
Have you seen some of the rooms in some Thailand hospitals - they really are like a 5-star hotel room, medical area, sitting room, en suite bathroom, kitchen area.

ETA: Example hospital: [URL]http://www.bumrungrad.com/overseas-medical-care/about-us/factsheet.aspx[/URL]
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Before the break-up of Yugoslavia, I was in Croatia with our choir. One of our members took a bad fall getting on the bus on the way to the airport. She was rushed to hospital in Ljubljana, investigated for a suspected fractured skull, and still made it on to the next plane.

She was full of praise for the Yugoslav healthcare system, which had simply taken her in as if she was a local. No invoices, nothing to pay.

I suppose we were all a bit surprised that a communist country had such a system, and was prepared to treat a British visitor free too boot. But maybe that was our problem.

Rolfe.
 
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Delscottio said:
I assume this is under the US system?
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And how easy is it to afford, LA? Is it a nominal payment, or are students in general well enough off that they can pay this, or is it likely that some would go without because they haven't got the money?

Rolfe.
 
I haven't followed this thread closely for the last couple of days, so apologies if this was already posted.

A report on "Experiences with Primary Health Care in Canada" was released this week by the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Some highlights:

The largest survey on primary health care ever conducted in Canada found that most people have high praise for their family doctor, and a staggering 92 per cent would recommend their physician to a relative or friend.

Canadians – except those living in Nunavut – have excellent access to primary health care: 85 per cent of people aged 12 and older have a regular doctor, and two thirds have been seeing the same doctor for five years or more, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) study, released yesterday.


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life...rimary-health-care-study-says/article1229169/
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Report here (pdf): http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/products/cse_phc_aib_en.pdf
Summary here: http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/dispPage.jsp?cw_page=media_20090723_e
 
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Rolfe said:
The news is that a Scottish girl suffering from a very severe reaction to Mexican flu has just been airlifted to Sweden.
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My favorite anecdote on "socialized health care" is similar. Last year (or possibly late 2007, the article doesn't give an exact date) , a woman in Stavanger was hospitalised with a severe blood poisoning with following lung failure. She is stabilized and it's arranged to have her flown from Stavanger Universitetssykehus to the larger Rikshospitalet in Oslo for ECMO treatment.

On the way into the airplane, her condition detoriates to the point where she would not survive the flight. So instead, over night the ECMO machine is flown in from Oslo and an intensive care ambulance drives the 600 kilometers from Oslo to Stavanger with additional equipment. The patient is put on ECMO and loaded into the ambulance, then the ambulance is loaded onto a C-130 Hercules requesitioned from the Air Force and flown to Oslo.

The point of the story? The decision to put all these resources on the line for the patient was made by the anesthetist who accompanied the patient, on his own authority. What a terrible government burauecracy nationalised health care causes.
 
ponderingturtle said:
But in ambulance services there is a big difference.
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The VA hospital system is an example of the public sector paying nurses the same as in the private sector. The claim was made the public sector has a competitive advantage because they pay people less than people earn in the private sector.

Your answer here is nothing more than a non sequitur.
 
skeptigirl said:
The VA hospital system is an example of the public sector paying nurses the same as in the private sector. The claim was made the public sector has a competitive advantage because they pay people less than people earn in the private sector.

Your answer here is nothing more than a non sequitur.
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It depends on the supply and demand for the people. There are many people who want to be EMT's and want to work as EMT's. This means that you can pay an EMT remarkably little and find plenty of people to do the job.

Why does this not being true of nurses make it untrue of EMT's?

You can earn $10 a hour to save lives as an EMT, and that is in the NYC suburbs. Private ambulance companies really do pay their employees a lot less than a city or county department would.

It is not a non sequitur but an observation of reality.
 
Rolfe said:
Without going back I can't say the exact misunderstanding here, but his wife would most certainly be covered by the NHS if she was legally resident in Britain. I saw no suggestion in his post that she wasn't eligible for NHS care.

I think some people have misconstrued the story a bit. His wife was found collapsed in a public place. Concerned people called the emergency services. She might have been having a stroke, or a heart attack, after all. When the ambulance arrived, it was established that she was drunk and incapable. So what is the ambulance crew supposed to do?

If she'd been completely out of it, they'd have had no option but to take her to hospital, one more A&E admission to clutter up the system and consume staff time and resources there. However, she wasn't. She was compos mentis enough to take care of herself if she was in a safe place, that is home. The ambulance crew couldn't just leave her where they found her. They'd much rather not take her to hospital where the staff have better things to do than sober up a woman who's simply had too much to drink. So they took her home.

And no, that's not "billable". It's part of what the ambulance service is funded to do. It's not all blue-light dashes to hospital with barely-breathing RTA victims. Sometimes it's dealing with low-level concerns that turn out not to be anything too worrying. But they deal with it anyway.

And as an aside, for something as trivial as this, nobody would care if the "patient" was eligible for NHS care or not. If the victim turned out to be a foreign holidaymaker, so what? It's not worth stressing about. Job done.

Rolfe.
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Of course the aid needed to be called. The issue was never about the drunk not needing to be assessed.

My issue was twofold. One, the behavior of the wife deserved criticism for its irresponsibility. The poster (husband) seemed to think it was just good fun.

And, two, the claim that an ambulance crew is paid whether they have calls or not therefore the irresponsible drunk didn't really cost the system any more was a false claim. You also seem to think that because the ambulance is there anyway, that a needless call costs no more than no call.

The crew risk traffic accidents every time they are on the road. Vehicle accidents are the second leading cause of on the job fatalities for fire fighters after heart attacks (in this country and I'm sure that's relevant in the UK as well). When an aid call is made, that crew and vehicle may be further away from a true need. If the crew are on 24 hour shifts, that could have been a needed rest time they missed. And there is also a matter of cleaning and restocking their vehicle after a call.
 
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ponderingturtle said:
It depends on the supply and demand for the people. There are many people who want to be EMT's and want to work as EMT's. This means that you can pay an EMT remarkably little and find plenty of people to do the job.

Why does this not being true of nurses make it untrue of EMT's?

You can earn $10 a hour to save lives as an EMT, and that is in the NYC suburbs. Private ambulance companies really do pay their employees a lot less than a city or county department would.

It is not a non sequitur but an observation of reality.
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What does this have to do with the discussion?

Discussion: "The claim was made the public sector has a competitive advantage because they pay people less than people earn in the private sector."
 
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