Why Canada’s health care is cheaper:
America spends significantly more on medical care than Canada. Socialized medicine advocates frequently claim that this shows we are getting a bad deal: less care for more money. But the fact is that illegal alien mothers walk into hospital emergency rooms and give birth to babies requiring intensive neonatal care costing hundreds of thousands of dollars on a regular basis, and it makes no headlines. We do not send them over the border to Canada or Mexico and use their medical systems as a back-up, even when the mother might be a citizen of that country. We treat them, and pick-up the bill, too, without so much as a citizenship check or a call to immigration officials.
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{ 7 comments }
Interesting how the “American Thinker” website does not allow users to post comments. I’m sure this idiot would be deluged by several million Canadians pointing out that the US did not pick up the tab. Alberta’s health system will pick up the cost of the quads… it was technically a referral due to lack of beds.
Also the “precious gift of American citizenship” is hard for “American Thinker” to argue since a Canadian passport gets you into more countries than an American one. Just a side effect of being belligerent on a geopolitical scale, I guess.
So when will our blindered federal government act as the empowered representative of its citizens and sue the government of Mexico for the costs of caring for its citizens who come to our country without permission and land in our hospitals?
“United States functions as Canada’s back-up medical system”
(And Mexico’s!)
This is a big point, and absolutely correct. It is cheaper for the Canadian government to use excess capacity in the US than to build more capacity in Canada. In reality this is a win-win for all, except for the patient who has to travel. What amazed me is that the patient was not referred to another hospital in Canada, say in Edmonton. Now what if the US didn’t have this capacity, or we were bogged down in government red-tape?
I have read reporting elsewhere that stated that there was no hospital in Canada with the capacity to take the refereral.
The federal government will never sue Mexico for the costs of the violation of our immigration laws by her citizens, which the government of Mexico actively encourages. The reason is because, as should be obvious to all by now, it is also the serruptitious policy of our government to encourage this. They have deliberately undermanned the border while pretending to protect it for decades now. Both political parties, the entire establishment as it is seen as being in the interest of major power holders in both parties. The loser is the ordinary American worker who either doesn’t vote or never wakes up to see how he is being used.
Given Mexico’s complicity in the border crossing, I think the states would have a real case if the constitution let them sue a foreign power. The first time an illegal with one of those id cards issued by the Mexican consulate comes into your hospital, and can’t pay his bill, sue them for payment. When working in a state hospital, I had a patient come in sent here by her family from Mexico specifically for medical care–illegally.
Just as Canada’s socialized system works only because of the US backup, our own socialized system, Medicare, works only because of the infrastructure provided by the free market sector.
Britain’s NHS depends on the private sector. Even the soviet union, and agricultural nation, depended on the industrial west to feed it’s people. It is always the same. The full extent of the failure of socialism is masked by being propped up by captialism.
Gee, silly me, I thought this was going to be an article about Canadians coming to US hospitals to get operations we can’t get in Canada, and then paying 100% of their bill. That happened to my mother – about 20 years ago she would have gone blind in both eyes if not for two operations. Fortunately, Buffalo was one of the only five places that operation was (then) done in the world. But she paid the $20,000 US per eye. If anyone was wondering – no, the Canadian gov’t didn’t reimburse her a single penny.
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