” . . . we are not spending our health-care dollars on hospitals, better front-line services, doctors and equipment. Instead, we spend too much money on bureaucracy and the flavor-of-the-moment programs with catchy names, all of which are burgeoning at a scandalous rate.”
Single-payer Canada is clearly having their own problems.
Related posts:
- "Health-care system near collapse"
- Rumble in the health reform jungle
- Obama invokes single-payer
- Single-payer and the Indian Health Service
- With Medicaid cuts looming, guess who’s supporting doctors?
- Single-payer: "The flaws are unacceptable"
- Michael Tanner is on the money
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{ 6 comments }
A good article, Kevin, but can you honestly say this isn’t happening in the US?
Of course it is.
But isn’t a single-payer system supposed to solve these issues?
Why cause upheaval and switch to a system that has many of the same problems, and invite a whole host of new ones?
I’ll stick with the devil I know for now.
Kevin
So instaed of scrapping the single-payer system, we just need to return to the previous levels of funding and make sure that it’s being invested in the right places.
Unfortunately this isn’t something new but is the culmination of years of bureaucratic interference by the provincial governments.
In 1994 I phoned every one of the 100 hospitals in British Columbia and did a survey of their bed census since 1991. In that time there was a net loss of 1248 beds throughout the province. Eleven Greater Vancouver and Lower Mainland hospitals as well as the Kelowna hospital had an increase of 389 beds while the hospitals in the rural areas of BC lost 1637 beds. This was done largely by not funding nursing staff to provide care and thereby making the beds themselves redundant.
This was carried out under the NDP’s ‘New Directions’ which focused on it’s catchphrase ‘Wellness’. Afterall if one focuses on wellness one will not need emergency rooms or hospital beds will one?
That seems to have worked out well hasn’t it?
In 1995 I gave up and moved to the U.S.
Now your example is going to be taken as the norm for the entire system.
Here’s a recent statistic that shows just the opposite: http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/dispPage.jsp?cw_page=media_24aug2005_e
And some interesting evidence over at good ‘ol wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_and_American_health_care_systems_compared#Quality_of_health_care
Wikipedia? Wikipedia?
They sell reality there and should never be quoted as an authority.
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