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Tam, a MacLean's article on Canadian Healthcare

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
it's four pages long, so I won't post the whole thing.


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/
 

Tam

Well-known member
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.
All told, as a foundation for Canadian values, it needs work.


It Needs Work WOW who knew??? :shock: :wave:
 

Tam

Well-known member
It’s a Canadian conceit that ours is one of the best public health care systems in the world, a defining characteristic of nationhood; something that separates us from the Americans. In a poll by Angus Reid Public Opinion in June, 69 per cent of Canadians said they’re proud of the health care system, edging out the state of Canadian democracy, multiculturalism and bilingualism.

Yet the reality, based on any number of international comparisons, shows that pride in a supposedly world-beating standard of care is often misplaced, an “illusion,” as Liberal MP and medical doctor Keith Martin puts it. The sorry state of the nation’s emergency wards is just one indicator of trouble today and trouble to come. ERs are just “the canary in the coal mine,” says Dr. John Ross, Nova Scotia’s adviser on emergency care.

Canadian CONCEIT over our system is misplaced pride. :shock:
 

Tam

Well-known member
Another interesting snip from the article

More and more voices are calling for health care to be put on the agenda. Former Tory prime minister Brian Mulroney and former Liberal senator Michael Kirby alluded recently to the challenge of a badly needed “national adult conversation” on health reform. “Unfortunately, intelligent debate about what should be done has basically ground to a halt by incendiary claims that any attempt to update the system amounts to treason—a repudiation of sacred Canadian values.”

Intelligent conversation is ground to a halt in Canada by those that refuse to see reality even when it is staring them in the freaking face. :roll:
 
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