...our healthcare system?
Already there is a big money in healthcare. If corporations run our healthcare system, they can charge whatever they want. Seriously what good is having state of the art healthcare if poor people can't afford the most basic of cancer treatment?
Why would it not be better to create a system that insures proper treatment for everyone? Sure it wouldn't be perfect, but if you take away profit as an incentive you are less likely to have corruption. Let's stop wasting billions a year on useless defense expenses and focus that money on socialized medicine.
Here's a fun fact: polls show 92% of Canadians prefer the Canadian healthcare system over the US system.
My state borders Canada. We don't have Canadians coming down here for health care.
In fact all the Canadians I know who live down here, they're married to Americans, keep their citizenship just for that health care. They get duel citizenship for their kids just for that health care.
I've talked to countless Canadians, they would NEVER change to our health care system and don't understand why we tolerate the system we have.
It's a good thing that we don't base policy on your circle of
acquaintances (May 5, 2008):
More than 100 Canadian women with high-risk pregnancies have been sent to United States hospitals over the past year – in what a doctors' group attributes to the lack of a national birthing plan.
The problem has peaked, with British Columbia and Ontario each sending a record number of women to U.S. neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Specifically, 80 B.C. women have been sent to U.S. hospitals since April 1, 2007; in Ontario, 28 have been sent since January of 2007, according to figures from the respective health ministries.
André Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, said the problem is due to bed closings that took place almost a decade ago, the absence of a national birthing initiative and too few staff.
“Neonatologists are very stretched right now,” Dr. Lalonde said in a telephone interview from Ottawa. “We're so stretched, it's kind of dangerous.”. . . .
The inability for Canada to care for all of its sick and premature babies has caught the attention of renowned pediatrics professor Shoo Lee, who is studying the health outcomes of infants sent abroad, in addition to those who remain here, often under stretched staffing conditions.
“If you have insufficient resources in the province, what does that mean for those kept in the system?” Dr. Lee, director of the Canadian Neonatal Network, said from Edmonton. “Are they being admitted to the NICU only when they are very sick? Are they being pushed out too early to make room for others?”
Philippe Chessex, division head of neonatology for B.C. Women's Hospital & Health Centre, said every effort is made to avoid out-of-province transfers. Even sick babies who aren't sent to the U.S. can still face several moves while at home.
“We're transferring babies across the province, in all directions, to try to find an extra bed for the next potential birth or for any baby already born,” Dr. Chessex said in a telephone interview from Vancouver. “We now have babies who have been transferred up to six times after leaving here before reaching home.”
For parents, the devastating news that their baby is sick due to a malformation, illness or being born prematurely is compounded by the reality that there simply is not a bed available for their infant close to home.
“Whenever a sick baby is born, it's really a disaster for these families because it was unexpected. And it just puts a terrible stress on them,” Dr. Chessex said. “If they are sent out of country at that moment, it is just unbelievable the kind of pressure that they must go under.”
No one knows that better than Jade Pascoe, of Cranbrook, B.C., who went into labour 15 weeks earlier than her due date. She gave birth on March 29, to Nevin James William Moore, who came into this world weighing 1 pound 10 ounces. “They tried to get me somewhere in Canada,” said Ms. Pascoe, 19. “But there was nowhere to send me.” The hospital where she gave birth does not have a NICU. And when no NICU bed could be located in B.C. or Alberta, her son was sent to a hospital in Spokane, located in eastern Washington.
A mid-sized city in WA has the spare neonatal capacity that can't be found anywhere in Canada.
Now keep in mind that whatever medical outcomes Canada is reporting exist in a situation where Canada can use spare capacity in the US. What would happen to these babies if there were no spare capacity in the the US?
Also note how they're pushing babies through neonatal units in order to open up room for the next preemie. Discharging the babies is done for administrative reasons rather than because babies are medically cleared.
