hypocritexposer
Well-known member
it's four pages long, so I won't post the whole thing.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/01/25/our-health-care-delusion/2/
Our health care delusion
One study ranked Canada dead last
in timeliness and quality care
by Ken MacQueen on Tuesday, January 25, 2011 11:00am - 188 Comments
The problems in ERs across the country are symptomatic of a wider malaise. Numerous international comparisons suggest our iconic universal health system is not the world leader of the national imagination. “Canadians are selling themselves short,” says a report card produced last June by the Wait Time Alliance, comprised of 14 national medical associations. “Unfortunately, Canada is one of the few developed countries with universal health care systems where patients face long waits for necessary care,” says the report, aptly titled “No Time for Complacency.”
snip
Canadian wait times—“widely regarded as the Achilles heel of the system”—are just one of many concerns raised in recent OECD studies. Making patients wait is really a means of rationing health care—a blunt, ineffective way of dealing with a looming health-driven fiscal crisis faced by Canada and other countries, say OECD economists. “In the absence of adaptations,” an analysis said in September, “costs are expected to mount relentlessly in coming decades because of population aging, technological progress and relative price developments, putting a potentially unsustainable burden on public budgets.”
Canada has the sixth highest rate of health expenditures as a share of the economy among 32 OECD countries. Nor is health care as “free” as some Canadians think. When public spending is combined with the 30 per cent spent privately on health (for such things as drugs, vision care, dental, long-term and home care), Canadians personally, and as taxpayers, face the fifth highest per-capita costs among the 32. For all that, Canada has fewer doctors, fewer hospital beds and fewer high-tech diagnostics (CT scanners and MRI units) than the OECD average. Canadian life expectancy, at 80.7 years, is more than a year higher than the OECD average, but the Japanese, Swiss, Italians and Australians outlive us. Our infant mortality rate, while better than the U.S., is slightly worse than the OECD average. All told, as a foundation for Canadian values, it needs work.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/01/25/our-health-care-delusion/2/