Robert Goldberg: “Of course, with his wealth and power, Kennedy would get good treatment anywhere. But the same care is available to every American.
Not so – if we make the health ‘reforms’ called for by Kennedy and other liberals.
Filmmaker Michael Moore gives their standard line when he says: ‘There are problems in all health-care systems, but at least Europeans and Canadians have a health-care system that covers everyone.’
Problem is, governments that promise to ‘cover everyone’ always wind up cutting corners simply to save money. People with Kennedy’s condition are dying or dead as a result.”
Related posts:
- Ted Kennedy has a malignant glioma
- The Liberal who believes that health care is not a right
- A breast cancer survivor on health care reform
- My take: Ted Kennedy, media appearances, organ donation
- IBD on health care reform: "Don’t believe a word of it"
- Canada deporting a cancer patient to save money?
- The irony of Ted Kennedy and universal healthcare
KevinMD.com on Facebook
{ 6 comments }
I wonder in Kennedy’s problem had happened in Canada how it would be handled. Would there have been the helicopter? The rapid ct and MRI, the transfer to Duke for surgery?
Rich people always find a way to get good health care. Even in Canada.
Frontline has dealt with this issue:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/countries/models.html
(I like the Bismarck model.)
Throckmorton-
I lived in small-town Ontario at the time, and when we found my daughter’s germ cell tumour through an ultrasound at the ER she was in a pediatric oncology ward in a different city 4 hours later. She had her MRI about 15 hours later after she was admitted and stabilized. (They could have taken her by helicopter, I guess, but it made sense to me to use an ambulance). When it was discovered that my mother’s melanoma had spread to her brain after a 3 year remission she had a CT scan within 2 hours of being admitted to a different regional hospital, where she started her radiation treatment a few days later.
There definitely are wait time horror stories, but a great number of those seem to be related to geographical area. I’m not saying that Canada’s system is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but after spending much too much time in oncology wards over the past 10 years I haven’t yet personally met anyone that had to wait for treatment for a serious cancer.
There are huge problems with the Canadian health care system, but one thing that it does seem to do well (at least in our area) is treatment for serious cancers.
Well, it’s not like Kennedy isn’t going to die of this too (unless he dies of something else first); he’s just going to waste a lot of money on the way down, something that explicit rationing in a government run system would avoid.
Kennedy is a powerful government figure. In a Canadian system, I suspect he would do exactly like Jean Chrétien did. Use the Canadian Air Force to very quietly bring him to Mayo. Would have worked except that King Hussein of Jordan died and everyone wondered where he was when he missed the state funeral.
And geez, no one would fault him for wanting the best for himself or his family. Why did he have to sneak around? Of course, we know why.
Robert Bourassa, the former premier of Quebec, also sought cancer treatment in the US. The experimental treatment he received wasn’t available in Canada, likely due to the expense. If Kennedy were Canadian, and the surgery that he received wasn’t available in Canada, he likely would have gotten it in the same hospital the surgery was actually performed in. In the US.
Comments on this entry are closed.