Comments on Secondhand Smoke: Your 24/7 Seminar on Bioethics and the Importance of Being Human: Canada Moving Toward "Mixed" Health Care System?

We all have a putative right not to die at all... ...

2007-07-23T18:11:00.000-07:00

We all have a putative right not to die at all... if there are some legitimate anti-aging therapies available, everyone should have access to them. If not, this violates our right to life.

Despite an engineered proliferation of supportive ...

2007-07-23T17:26:00.000-07:00

Despite an engineered proliferation of supportive stories for privatization and a great deal of intensive propaganda pushing for it, there is in fact no groundswell of support for privatization in Canada.

Canadians do want improvements to the healthcare system, but despite all the pressure for private 'experiments' from business and media elites the public repeatedly and firmly rejects anything but public solutions. Read the many polls on the subject if you don't believe me.

We don't want two tier healthcare for many reasons - losing doctors from the public system to a more lucrative private practice in effect drastically increasing wait times, the dangerous position it would put us in with NAFTA which acknowledges our national sovereignty over healthcare policy only so far and so long as it stays public and opens the door wider for American Health insurance corporations to control our healthcare choices with every private 'experiment', and most importantly, a nationally held belief that the profit motive has no place in healthcare decisions.

Then there's the negative experiences with 2tier healthcare in Sweden and Australia where the numbers showed a 'perverse incentive' for doctors to concentrate on the easiest most lucrative medical procedures - to the detriment of the more difficult and publicly funded -and therefore less lucrative- cases. There's also ample evidence that the more private profit is allowed into the system the more expensive and bureaucracy ridden it becomes.

Trust your original judgment about a fully public system being the best way to go - and particularly examine the funding and motivations behind those groups impugning it and promoting a two tier intrusion of the profit motive. The Fraser Institute for instance, takes millions from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries to promote their interests.

Here's some more info if you're interested:
http://rustyidols.blogspot.com/search/label/Healthcare

http://rustyidols.blogspot.com/search/label/Fraser%20Institute

The trouble in Canada is not the system itself, wh...

2007-07-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

The trouble in Canada is not the system itself, which works more or less like it is supposed to. The trouble is a shortage of doctors, caused, not by the system, but by some very ill advised tinkering in the medical schools some time back when the gov. thought that it was going to have too many doctors for the system to support. So medical programs were limited in how many students they could take, causing an artificial shortage of doctors. That's stupidity, not the system. And time should remedy that, now that those restrictions have been removed.

Once again, remember that despite having very different systems, outcomes are little different between Canada and the US, and Canada's system is cheaper. Even comparing the taxes Canadians pay to the amount typically withheld from an American employees paycheck for insurance that may or may not let him receive needed treatment.

For profit medicine has it's heart in the wrong place - in the pocketbook, rather than with the patient.

That said, I'm sure there are ways to improve on what Canada has, adn there must certainly be ways to improve on what the US has. In your opinion, what is the most effective health system in the world? I've heard tell France, though I'm not sure how theirs is run...

One hears w.r.t. the British system, "Of _course_ ...

2007-07-23T12:19:00.000-07:00

One hears w.r.t. the British system, "Of _course_ you're allowed to use your own money to buy things you can't get on the national system." But the small amount of research I've put into this about Britain indicates that it's not as simple as that. Apparently the private and public systems are kept strictly separate so that a doctor must maintain his practice on all private-money patients and a given individual cannot combine NHS and private money for the same service. This obviously isn't just a matter of the public purse paying up to X number of dollars and you paying more if you want more or better treatment.

I'd be interested to know what the situation was in Canada about this strict separationism before this court decision, and what it's like now.

I do know that when Hillary was proposing her plan for the U.S., the claim was made that you would be legally treated as trying to "bribe" a doctor if you offered to pay your own money for some treatment not otherwise provided by the National Health Care system.