Time from diagnosis of appendicitis to surgery: almost 1 1/2 days. Health care horror in Canada.
Related posts:
- A burst appendix and insurance
- Medicare and single-payer
- Beware single-payer
- Single payer = physician shortages
- Single-payer already exists in the US
- Single-payer in Sweden: A cautionary tale
- Single-payer: Forcing health care down people’s throats?
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While it is easy and proper to criticize the endless horror show of Canadian “healthcare,” the United States is about 5-10 years away from this very same type of systemic malpractice.
Our own single payer system (ERISA, Medicare, Medicaid, plus the corrupt courts) are far along in the annihilation of emergency medicine. Trauma and emergent care is in free-fall decline in real time.
Ed Sodaro MD
Throw in the looming 10% medicare cut and I have first hand knowledge of physicians in my community, primary care doctors, who currently don’t accept new medicare patients, and who are on the verge of dropping out all together.
You want to talk about an access problem, we are already here. I HOPE the medicare cuts go through. Only then will the massive efflux come to fruition. Everything for free is collapsing on its own weight. There must be a national priority to save primary care and the access crises already here. For those who say it doesn’t exist, consider yourself lucky. It’s coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
http://thehappyhospitalist.blogspot.com/
Aylmer, where the patient was, is a stone’s throw from Ottawa. They couldn’t find a surgeon in a city that size? So they had to ship all the way to Montreal?
That reminds me of the story of David Rosenbaum the NYT journalist who was mugged in his Washington DC neighborhood and ended up being taken across town to a very busy far away ER where they thought he was a drunk, ignored signs of his head wound and he died. Had he gone to the hospital in his neighborhood he might still have died from his beating, but he probably wouldn’t have laid around in the hallway for hours.
The ambulance getting lost probably wasn’t the sole cause of this complication, he needed a local surgeon, but it does point out that a system is only as good as the weakest link.
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