Canada's Crumbling Medicare System

[Alec Bachlow]

My mother in law has two artificial knees...Recently had a by -pass done on her heart- with later talk about a pace maker..she gets hooked up to a blood filter regularly because she has no kidneys. Her medications are about 2000 a month...she is diabetic.

Both of her feet are about to rot off..She just spent a week at a big down town hospital- She was ready to have vascular surgery done to increase the blood flow to her feet....Then suddenly the young politically correct doctor kicked her out and is sending her home- He smelled cigarette smoke on the old lady...and said "You are not in the right frame of mind for the surgery" I guess they will just wait for the toes to go black and then cut off her legs at a later time....The system is real big on life extension - and the funding for experimentation is unlimited because of our system.


What bothers me is this old lady has been smoking for 50 years and this skinny little doctor saw fit to inflict his politically correct will on the old woman. If she stopped smoking- and they did the surgery...I don't think at this time it would make much difference- other than giving some satisfaction to the hate tobacco crowd- who's tax dollars help fund the system through their addiction.

[Faramir]

IF you keep saying that the Medicare system is crumbling - it will crumble! Stop projecting this negative notion..I was in a large and fine urban hospital last week and I did not see one sign of "crumbling"- If this defeatist mentality persists- our system will crumble------------THEN WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO? Any suggestions? The system may wain and weaken and stagger once in a while- but it is still walking and breathing- Don't euthanize something that has a survivable ailment.

Don't you think it is obvious that Universal Healthcare was set up to fail. It is a ponzi scheme. When it was set up we had 14 workers to one person over age 65. It was easily affordable then. Now we have something like 4 to 5 workers to one over age 65 and that is going to get worse. Explain to me then how we afford it when costs rise expodentially as people age? We already spend 50% of the budget on healthcare. From where will we get the money?

We have no choice but to reform. There are a myriad of options but none are politically acceptable. In the end something has to give. We already have a form of informal death panels. People for instance who have terminal cancer are denied treatment for other medical conditions. More and more things are exluded from coverage. Wait lists grow.

Allowing patients to get services from private health providers if they choose in one path we need to explore. Another is doctor office user fees. Another is a form of co-pay, where patients have to pay a portion of their surgery bills. None of these are pretty, but the only other choice is that all taxpayers will have to see their income taxes double.

[LAR]

She was ready to have vascular surgery done to increase the blood flow to her feet....Then suddenly the young politically correct doctor kicked her out and is sending her home- He smelled cigarette smoke on the old lady...and said "You are not in the right frame of mind for the surgery" I guess they will just wait for the toes to go black and then cut off her legs at a later time....The system is real big on life extension - and the funding for experimentation is unlimited because of our system.


What bothers me is this old lady has been smoking for 50 years and this skinny little doctor saw fit to inflict his politically correct will on the old woman. If she stopped smoking- and they did the surgery...I don't think at this time it would make much difference- other than giving some satisfaction to the hate tobacco crowd- who's tax dollars help fund the system through their addiction.

Marvelous. Tax cigarettes 500% to supposedly pay for increased health care and then deny the health care. What a scam.

[styky]

She was ready to have vascular surgery done to increase the blood flow to her feet....Then suddenly the young politically correct doctor kicked her out and is sending her home- He smelled cigarette smoke on the old lady...and said "You are not in the right frame of mind for the surgery" I guess they will just wait for the toes to go black and then cut off her legs at a later time....The system is real big on life extension - and the funding for experimentation is unlimited because of our system.


What bothers me is this old lady has been smoking for 50 years and this skinny little doctor saw fit to inflict his politically correct will on the old woman. If she stopped smoking- and they did the surgery...I don't think at this time it would make much difference- other than giving some satisfaction to the hate tobacco crowd- who's tax dollars help fund the system through their addiction.

Marvelous. Tax cigarettes 500% to supposedly pay for increased health care and then deny the health care. What a scam.

Makes you want to ask if he has smelled chocolate on her breath would he have refused to treat he diabetes. Same song different verse.

[styky]

Fraser Institute report claims thousands have left Canada for medical care
By Andy Radia | Canada Politics –
While the supreme court ruling on 'Obamacare' has quelled some of the debate about healthcare insurance in America, it seems the arguments in this country are just beginning.

The right-leaning Fraser Institute is stirring the pot with a new report that claims that 46,169 Canadians left the country to get medical treatment elsewhere in 2011.

"In some cases, these patients needed to leave Canada due to a lack of available resources or a lack of appropriate procedure [or] technology," Nadeem Esmail, the author notes in his report.

"In others, their departure will have been driven by a desire to return more quickly to their lives, to seek out superior quality care, or perhaps to save their own lives or avoid the risk of disability. Clearly, the number of Canadians who ultimately receive their medical care in other countries is not insignificant.".................http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-p ... 56748.html

[styky]

Andrew Coyne: It’s time the provinces were brought to account on health-care wait times

Andrew Coyne Jul 13, 2012 – 7:50 PM ET | Last Updated: Jul 13, 2012 8:09 PM ET
When the Supreme Court of Canada handed down its decision in the case of Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General) in 2005, everyone agreed this changed everything. The court’s ruling — that Quebec’s ban on private health insurance, so far as it condemned patients to wait for medically unsafe periods of time to be treated in the public system, was in violation of their rights — was cheered by the right and denounced by the left, each in the expectation that it meant profound changes to how health care was funded and delivered.

Seven years later, it’s not evident how much impact the ruling has really had. Of course, to some extent its implications were always overblown. The court did not strike down the public health monopoly altogether, or suggest that it was unconstitutional in principle. It was only to the extent that it threatened patients’ life and health that it could not be justified. The government was free to run health care as a public monopoly, if it chose. It just couldn’t kill people with it.

Moreover, it was never clear just how far the ruling’s shadow extended beyond Quebec. For starters, the law was not technically found in violation of the constitution. While three of the seven judges held the law was in violation of both the Quebec and Canadian Charters of Rights, a fourth confined herself to ruling only on the former. And in any case, it was only the law in Quebec that was at issue, not those of other provinces.

Still, it was widely understood that Chaoulli had put on notice, not only Quebec, but the six other provinces that maintain similar bans on private insurance: bring your wait times within medically acceptable limits, or face having the legal monopoly overturned. If you are going to deny people the right to buy their own insurance, you have an obligation to provide them with timely care.

Yet if wait times were unacceptable in 2005, they are no less so today. Across the country, according to the 2011 edition of the Fraser Institute’s annual survey of wait times, the average interval from the time a patient is referred to a specialist to treatment is now at a record 9.5 weeks, slightly longer than it was in 2005 and more than 40% longer than the 6.7 weeks the institute deems “reasonable.” In only two provinces, Ontario and B.C., are wait times shorter now than they were at the time of Chaoulli. (In Quebec, they are almost a week longer.) In every province, they are substantially longer than they were in the mid-1990s.

So it’s high time the provinces were brought to account. The principles the court held were valid in Quebec in 2005 are presumably no less valid now; the facts to which they were applied would seem no less present. It is time, in short, for Chaoulli II.

Enter Darcy Allen and Richard Cross, Alberta residents suffering from severe back pain who say they were obliged to seek care in the United States, at their own (considerable) expense, rather than wait the two years or more it would take to treat them in the provincial system. Backed by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, the two men have launched a legal challenge to the province’s ban on private insurance, similar to that in Chaoulli.

The situations are not directly analogous. Alberta does pay for patients to go out of province where it cannot provide care in a timely fashion itself: The dispute in this case would seem to turn in part on the province’s definition of timely. But there’s no doubting the seriousness of the challenge this represents to public health care, or the implications should it be upheld.
Insurance markets are tricky things, especially for something like health care where, if you will, the consumer is also the product

To be clear, between shortening wait times and abolishing the public insurance monopoly, the first is vastly preferable. Insurance markets are tricky things, especially for something like health care where, if you will, the consumer is also the product. Left to themselves, insurance providers would be tempted to refuse coverage to people they think are likely to need it. For their part, consumers might choose not to pay for insurance as long as they were well, only doing so when they get sick.

These well-known dilemmas, known respectively as “adverse selection” and “moral hazard,” are not insoluble. They are addressed, for example, by the Obama health care plan’s twin mandates, obliging insurers to take all customers and all consumers to take out insurance. The Swiss, further, force insurers to pool their profits: thus any gains a firm might achieve by shunting costly patients onto its rivals are ultimately given back. But these are simply attempts to replicate what is already achieved by the “single payer” model.

Our system has its own dilemmas, of course. Without competition or prices, there’s little incentive to control costs. And so far as rising costs outstrip the taxpayers’ willingness to pay for them, the result is longer and longer waiting lists — a problem that is only likely to get worse as the population ages.
Whatever reforms come to medicare, surely everyone would prefer these arose from the political process, rather than judicial fiat

But the solution to that is to make room for competition within the single-payer system — allowing private clinics, for example, so long as they are paid for out of public funds — before we start looking at parallel private insurance systems, with all the potential for gaming they entail. And whatever reforms come to medicare, surely everyone would prefer these arose from the political process, rather than judicial fiat.

Still, just the threat might well prove useful, as a means of concentrating governments’ minds. Waiting lists are too long in Canada, and have been for far too long, at the cost of much needless suffering. If politicians won’t fix the problem, the courts will.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... ait-times/

[styky]

A 6 month study and this is all they could come up with

Premiers aim to save with health-care teams, generic drugs
Premiers to bulk buy generic drugs, use health-care teams to save money, improve care
By Laura Payton, CBC News
Posted: Jul 26, 2012 7:41 AM ET
Last Updated: Jul 26, 2012 2:56 PM ET
Premiers meeting in Halifax today say they want to use health-care teams to better care for patients and start buying a few generic drugs in the next year in a bid to save money.

The two ideas are some of the recommendations coming out of a six-month study led by the premiers of Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island. CBC News obtained a draft copy of the study's report, titled "From Innovation to Action."

The premiers were forced to look at new options when the federal government stepped back from the process, Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter said.......................http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/s ... rsday.html

[styky]

Ontario stepping up phase-out of old red-and-white health cards

Angela Mulholland, CTVNews.ca
Published Thursday, Jul. 26, 2012 1:52PM EDT
Last Updated Thursday, Jul. 26, 2012 2:22PM EDT

If you live in Ontario and you’re one of the 3.5 million residents who still has one of the old red-and-white health cards, you might want to call the Ministry of Health to be sure the card is still valid.

The health ministry says it has been stepping up efforts to phase out the old Ontario Health Insurance Plan cards in favour of the newer and more secure green photo cards.

But some residents are not realizing their cards have been cancelled until they arrive at a doctor’s office or clinic seeking medical care.

More secure photo-based health cards were introduced in Ontario in 1995, and residents were told that the old red and white cards would be phased out by 2000. But more than 15 years after the photo cards were introduced, millions of Ontarians still have the old cards.

The ministry of health says it sends out 3,000 notices per month asking residents to visit a ServiceOntario office to trade in their red-and-white OHIP cards for a photo health card.

Residents who miss the notices or who fail to respond could find themselves without coverage.

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/ontario-st ... z21lP3CHSJ

[styky]

I guess this ought to cut down on the medical care Ontario has been providing to the world with the old cards being handed around for visitors to us. In Manitoba we are still back in the dark ages of a piece of paper with no identifying factors on it that anyone could use.

[styky]

Stephen Skyvington
Thu Jul 26 2012
Some health-care myths debunked
It’s not a system, it’s not free, it’s not one tier and leaving it alone is the worst thing we can do

I’ve been intimately involved in health care since the spring of 1995, when I first came to work for the Ontario Medical Association.

And although you could have fit my knowledge about health care into a small syringe when I first started at the OMA, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on our health-care system thanks to the ringside seat I’ve occupied during the past 15-plus years — first with the OMA and since 2001, working with a number of health-care organizations and businesses as owner of my own public relations firm.

So let’s take a look at — and hopefully debunk — what I consider to be some of the biggest myths surrounding our health-care system.

Myth 1 — Canada has a health-care system.

Perhaps the biggest myth of all is the first one, namely that Canada has a health-care “system.”

We, in fact, do not have a health-care system.

We have an insurance scheme — and a badly run insurance scheme at that.

Canadians have been led to believe — mostly by politicians, sometimes by bureaucrats, and occasionally by the media — that we have the best health-care system in the world, a system that will always be there for us when we need it, that we can access anytime, day or night, for free — all without having to worry about going into debt or declaring bankruptcy to pay for it.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, not a word of it is true.

Because our health-care system is in reality an insurance scheme, the care we receive is severely rationed — not by the size of your bank account or credit card like in the U.S., but by the length of time you and your loved ones will have to wait to see a doctor and then receive the appropriate treatment.

Don’t believe me?

I just spent 14 months waiting for heart surgery.

Had I died while on the waiting list (which almost happened, by the way), government bureaucrats would’ve seen that as a good thing because the waiting list would naturally have grown shorter for someone else.

The fact that I’d died would’ve been irrelevant because in our health-care “system” we don’t consider outcomes (i.e. did I live or die or get better?) we only care about the cost.

Myth 2 — Health-care in Canada is free.

Ask just about anyone and they’ll tell you that one of the best things about living in Canada is that health care is free.

If only that were true.

In fact, health care in Canada is not only not free, it’s actually pretty damned expensive.

Sadly, politicians at every level of government, all across our land, have perpetrated the myth that our health-care system is free simply because we don’t have to pay anything for it — we just have to show our health card.

So it’s not surprising that most Canadians simply shrug their shoulders and say, “If it’s free, it’s for me” when it comes to health care.

The reality, of course, is far different.

Our taxes pay for our health-care system — although only 70 per cent of it.

A full 30 per cent of our health-care costs — things such as dental care, physiotherapy and prescriptions — are either covered by private insurers or out of our own pockets.

Which is kind of ironic when you stop to think about the rhetoric and outrage generated whenever someone suggests that the solution to our health-care problems is to allow for the private sector to become more involved.

Myth 3 — We only have one tier of health care in Canada.

There are, in reality, several tiers of health care available in Canada — some above board, paid for by the government, and still others operating below the radar.

In addition to the tier most of us use on either a regular or irregular basis — the so-called “free” tier — there are other separate tiers for injured workers (in Ontario, the WSIB), military personnel, high-ranking executives with private health plans, professional athletes, doctors, friends of doctors, and, yes, even politicians.

In fact, there are so many different tiers of health care floating around out there — both legal and illegal — you’d need a prescription to help you keep them all straight.

Not to mention the tier that few people, if any, know about — the tier where pets and other animals get MRIs at hospitals during off hours, mostly nights and weekends (and no, I’m not making this up).

And, of course, the “medical tourism” tier — where people come from other countries and pay for health-care treatments and procedures they receive right here in Canada.

Or the “doctors’ dirty little secret” tier — where Canadian physicians are recruited by rich, wealthy businessmen in foreign countries (typically Saudi Arabia or other Middle Eastern countries) to travel overseas and provide their highly-sought-after services — usually for cash — all while supposedly enjoying a vacation.

So I guess it’s lucky for us we only have one tier of health care in Canada.

I’d hate to think how many tiers we’d have if we opened things up a bit.

Myth 4 — If you’re in favour of private health care, you’re not a true, patriotic Canadian.

Haven’t we all had just about enough of politicians of every political stripe claiming they are the only defenders of our health-care system?

Time and time again — especially during election campaigns — we hear them attacking and vilifying those brave enough and visionary enough to suggest that our current system is unsustainable unless we come up with a made-in-Canada solution that embraces some form of private health care.

I swear some of them are even starting to believe their own B.S.

The fact is patriotism and health care have nothing to do with one another.

Nor is private health care the “third rail” of Canadian politics — another myth politicians and their handlers like to perpetuate.

They just want you to believe that because it saves them from having to talk about health care in a mature, adult manner and offering up real, viable solutions to a serious social problem.

Instead of wrapping themselves in the flag every time an election rolls around, perhaps our political leaders might actually try being honest with the Canadian people for a change and admit the truth — namely that our current patchwork health-care system doesn’t work, hasn’t worked for a long, long time, and is in need of some serious, radical surgery.

Now that would be refreshing.

Myth 5 — The status quo is just fine.

The best way to ensure Canada ends up with a U.S.-style two-tier health-care system?

Do nothing.

That’s right, the best way to end up with what we all say we don’t want is to simply embrace the status quo.

By making no substantive changes to the way government funds and runs health care in this country — and by not allowing some form of private health care as a safety valve — the sad truth is that we are doomed as Canadians to see our beloved health-care system collapse under its own weight.

Why?

Simply because by 2025, provincial governments will be spending 100 per cent of their budgets on health care.

Don’t want to have private health care in Canada?

No problem.

We’ll just privatize everything else.

Imagine, if you will, every school a private school, every road a toll road, every service you rely on government to deliver either axed or heavily subsidized — in all likelihood to the tune of 100 per cent — by you.

That’s what the future holds if we continue to keep our collective heads buried in the sand.

Clearly, the time has come to get real about health care and the role the private sector can play in its delivery.

We owe it to Tommy Douglas, Emmett Hall and Monique Bégin.

We also owe it to ourselves and all those future generations of Canadians who will someday inherit this mess if we don’t do something about it now.

Stephen Skyvington is the president of PoliTrain Inc., and the former manager of government relations for the Ontario Medical Association. Email: politrain@sympatico.ca
http://www.thespec.com/opinion/columns/ ... s-debunked

[styky]

Premiers embrace status quo on health care: Brodbeck

Why aren't leaders looking at health alternatives?
By Tom Brodbeck ,Winnipeg Sun

First posted: Thursday, July 26, 2012 08:52 PM CDT
A report penned by Canada’s premiers released Thursday acknowledges this country’s government-monopoly health-care system is at best mediocre compared to other industrialized countries.

But the premiers’ cure for what ails Canada’s troubled health care system is — you guessed it — to keep doing what we’ve been doing.

Go figure.

The Council of the Federation — that’s what the premiers like to call themselves these days — released “From Innovation to Action,” a so-called visionary report on how to improve the country’s health-care system.

Not surprisingly, there’s not much vision in the 26-page report. Instead, it’s filled with the usual bureaucratic platitudes about adopting “best practices” and seeking more collaboration between jurisdictions.

It’s largely a call to tinker.

The only tangible recommendation in the report — to bulk-buy some generic prescription drugs among the provinces — probably makes good business sense. But it’s hardly the kind of innovation or “visionary change” provincial premiers pretend to be interested in.

They may as well have called the report “The Status Quo: Why we need to embrace it.”

I’ll give them credit for one thing. The premiers at least now admit Canada is falling behind other countries when it comes to health care. It’s a refreshing change from past summits which typically opened with proclamations about how Canada’s health care system is the “envy of the world,” but just needs more federal funding.

Our health care system is anything but the envy of the world. And Canadian politicians are now starting to admit that publicly.

“International performance comparisons indicate that Canada lags many other industrialized countries on the quality of health services we receive for the price we pay,” says the premiers’ report. “The Conference Board of Canada gives Canada’s health system a ‘B’ grade and places it 10th out of 17 peer countries.” Not much to brag about.

And who are these nation-states that rank ahead of us? Bastions of social health care that tax people at monstrously higher rates than Canada does, who dump even larger buckets of taxpayer dough into government-monopoly systems?

Nope.

It’s countries such as Japan, Switzerland, and France, all of whom have universal health care systems but who have rejected the government-monopoly approach we cling to, where health care is operated by politicians, government departments and state-controlled regional health authorities.

Countries like Japan and Switzerland deliver universal health care in a much different way than we do and they get better results. They make buying private health insurance mandatory for all residents. And for those who can’t afford it, government kicks in to help. But government doesn’t run hospitals, home care and personal care homes like they do in Canada.

That’s left largely to private, non-government groups, including not-for-profit organizations.

It’s highly regulated, including the insurance part.

But they don’t have politicians and their bureaucratic hacks micro-managing hospitals and personal care homes like provincial governments do here.

The question is, why aren’t our political leaders at least talking about these alternatives, which seem to work very well in other countries?

It doesn’t mean they have to implement them right away. But there should at least be a dialogue on what other countries are doing when it comes to delivering health care, including what might work here.

Now that would be visionary.
http://www.winnipegsun.com/2012/07/26/p ... e-brodbeck

[LAR]

The question is, why aren’t our political leaders at least talking about these alternatives, which seem to work very well in other countries?

Of course it's obvious there are better alternatives. There's many reasons they aren't considered. They don't want to upset the unions, They don't want to lose votes from the misinformed. The better health care solutions are in non English speaking countries making it more difficult to compare.
In other words it will take elected officials with vision and dedication to the greater good. I haven't seen any lately.

[T.G.]

Removed - already posted above.

[styky]

Kelly McParland: Alberta expenses uproar shows how governments vaporize health budgets

Kelly McParland | Aug 3, 2012 12:56 PM ET
There’s something more than just a little weird about the tale of Allaudin Merali, who was executive vice president and chief financial officer with Alberta Health Services until this week, when he left amid an expenses uproar.

Mr. Merali departed after it came to light he’d run up $346,208 in expenses during a previous stint in the province, when he served as chief financial officer for Capital Health, a precursor of AHS. The CBC revealed that between January 2005 and August 2008, Merali billed for everything from lavish dining (which seems to be standard fare in these expense account boondoggles) to repairs for his Mercedes, $2,300 to have a car phone installed, $900 at a wine store, $1,800 at a golf club, plus mileage, gas, insurance, car repairs, even car washes and snacks.

In 2008, Alberta consolidated its health boards into the centralized AHS, purportedly to cut costs. Merali was given a $1 million payout and generous retirement packages and moved on to Ontario, where he was hired as a consultant for eHealth Ontario, the much-troubled effort by Ontario’s government to computerize patient health records. In 2009 he was among consultants criticized for the lavish deals they’d been accorded: Merali reportedly earned $2,750 a day, plus a $75 per diem. His apartment was paid for, the province paid $21,000 for 31 flights home to Edmonton over five months, yet media reports indicated he also expensed tea, muffins and minor parking fees......................http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... h-budgets/

[styky]

Sick health care system made Canadians lose more than $3-billion in economic activity in 2011: Fraser Institute


By Dan Ovsey, Financial Post August 1, 2012

The key to boosting productivity in Canada may come from an often overlooked but seemingly logical source – health care.

So says a study released this morning by the Fraser Institute, which estimated that last year Canada lost $1.08-billion in business-day economic activity due to excessive wait times at hospitals and time gaps between visits to specialists and receipt of treatment.

Long waits in emergency rooms and forcing Canadians to take time out their work days to visit multiple doctors has a cumulative effect not only on the quality of their care but on the overall productivity of the workforce, says the report.

The study estimates that when factoring non-work time, the Canadian economy loses out on an about $3.29-billion in productivity – a number that does not take into account the residual productivity losses associated with the energy and time family members may need to provide to loved ones who are not receiving efficient care.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/pr ... z22b1HV9Km