Socialized Medicine Doesn't Work

red states rule

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May 30, 2006
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Another reason why government run health care does not work


A Canadian Doctor Describes How Socialized Medicine Doesn't Work
By DAVID GRATZER | Posted Thursday, July 26, 2007 4:30 PM PT

I was once a believer in socialized medicine. As a Canadian, I had soaked up the belief that government-run health care was truly compassionate. What I knew about American health care was unappealing: high expenses and lots of uninsured people.

My health care prejudices crumbled on the way to a medical school class. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute.

Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care.

I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic — with a three-year wait list; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.

Government researchers now note that more than 1.5 million Ontarians (or 12% of that province's population) can't find family physicians. Health officials in one Nova Scotia community actually resorted to a lottery to determine who'd get a doctor's appointment.

These problems are not unique to Canada — they characterize all government-run health care systems.

Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled — 48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave — when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity — 15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren't available. And so on.

Single-payer systems — confronting dirty hospitals, long waiting lists and substandard treatment — are starting to crack, however. Canadian newspapers are filled with stories of people frustrated by long delays for care. Many Canadians, determined to get the care they need, have begun looking not to lotteries — but to markets.

Dr. Jacques Chaoulli is at the center of this changing health care scene. In the 1990s, he organized a private Quebec practice — patients called him, he made house calls and then he directly billed his patients. The local health board cried foul and began fining him. The legal status of private practice in Canada remained murky, but billing patients, rather than the government, was certainly illegal, and so was private insurance.

for the complete article
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=270338135202343
 
These problems are not unique to Canada — they characterize all government-run health care systems.

Run! A sweeping generalisation! He's wrong by the way.

And his little anecdote about the French system focuses on a crisis rather than the system as it runs normally.

That was a pretty lightweight article but he's a free market pundit so I should have expected a partisan hack piece.
 
Run! A sweeping generalisation! He's wrong by the way.

And his little anecdote about the French system focuses on a crisis rather than the system as it runs normally.

That was a pretty lightweight article but he's a free market pundit so I should have expected a partisan hack piece.

The UK have been having their own problems with government run health care
 
Run! A sweeping generalisation! He's wrong by the way.

And his little anecdote about the French system focuses on a crisis rather than the system as it runs normally.

That was a pretty lightweight article but he's a free market pundit so I should have expected a partisan hack piece.

And you quoting that one sentence is takeing a statement entirely out of context. Quite clearly the article is not jus about the heat wave in France. They are simply the writer's observations of what he has seen in countries that have universal health care. I did not read this post before my last response in the other thread we were conversing in and yet this man is saying he is seeing right now exactley what I said he would see. A massive strain on resources.

He also isn't 'wrong' an you need to keep in mind what saying he is wrong implies. It implies that no other countries are experiencing waiting issues due to reduced cost or free healthcare. Are you prepared to make that claim?
By saying he is wrong it also implies that most if not all countries with socialzied medicien are not experienceing problems similar to Canada's. Are you prepared to make that claim?

According to the peice the author also is a doctor first. This being the first piece by him I've seen, I have no idea if he is a pundit or not. The claim that the article is partisan doesn't seem to be accurate either. there is no mention at all of poltical ideology one way or the other. They are one man's observations, nothing more, nothing less. What real reason do you have to write this off rather than seeing if there is a larger truth to his observations?
 
Run! A sweeping generalisation! He's wrong by the way.

And his little anecdote about the French system focuses on a crisis rather than the system as it runs normally.

That was a pretty lightweight article but he's a free market pundit so I should have expected a partisan hack piece.


It's no use trying to reason with them, Dee. They are too far gone for that.

Just have some fun lampooning them and hope that one ot two of the less brainwashed among them will finally, like the chronic alcoholic, decide through sheer last ditch desperation to investigate what we at Americans Anonymous have to offer.

Remember that, 'There but for the grace of a Christian hatin' convict ancestor go I!" :eusa_pray:

Remember also what we were taught in A.A. on how to deal with self-delusional Yanks -

RARELY HAVE we seen a Seppo fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.

Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. If you have decided that you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it - then you are ready to take certain steps.

At some of these we balked. We thought that we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not. With all earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.

Remember that we deal with Americanism - cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all power - that One is YOU. May you find you now.
 
These problems are not unique to Canada — they characterize all government-run health care systems.

No, I simply can't take the writer seriously when I read stuff like this. He's an ideologue and while he's entitled to write whatever he wishes from the perspective he feels most comfortable I also have the right to point out bias. I mean, that's what this is all about isn't it? Dialogue? So his claim that "all government-run health care systems" are like the one he saw in a winter in Winterpeg (and they don't nickname it that for nothing) should be taken seriously?

Now pile that on his reference to an extreme heat episode in France in August (when France just about shuts down and goes on les vacances) and the generalisations are just incredible and I mean incredible.

No, I am fine with a good discussion on the issues but this is just pure punditry, I can't take him seriously.

Chips, you do lampooning much better than me, you've got the wit and vocabulary for it - and better judgement too, I can be a bit too cutting and the rapier turns into a cutlass. Btw did you read Matt Price in The Australian today? I know, I know, Murdoch rag, but he took the piss out of the feds mercilessly.
 
No, I simply can't take the writer seriously when I read stuff like this. He's an ideologue and while he's entitled to write whatever he wishes from the perspective he feels most comfortable I also have the right to point out bias. I mean, that's what this is all about isn't it? Dialogue? So his claim that "all government-run health care systems" are like the one he saw in a winter in Winterpeg (and they don't nickname it that for nothing) should be taken seriously?

Now pile that on his reference to an extreme heat episode in France in August (when France just about shuts down and goes on les vacances) and the generalisations are just incredible and I mean incredible.

No, I am fine with a good discussion on the issues but this is just pure punditry, I can't take him seriously.

Chips, you do lampooning much better than me, you've got the wit and vocabulary for it - and better judgement too, I can be a bit too cutting and the rapier turns into a cutlass. Btw did you read Matt Price in The Australian today? I know, I know, Murdoch rag, but he took the piss out of the feds mercilessly.


I don't know if it's safe to assume this or not, but I will have to assume that you know who the author is better than I do because all it says in the article is that he's a doctor. Knowing little else about him I think I would take the word of a doctor in his critique of the healthcare industry. Can you post somethign that shows that his observations are meaningless.

So far me repoir from you has been good, but I have to call on a really, really bad assumption or leaps of logic you made. First the one about teh cold. Your criticizism rests on the assumption that what he saw was abnormal due to the cold. yet no such leap can be made. there is only one sentence that mentions cold whether there. And all it does is tell what month, what year, and what the weather was like when he entered the hospital. it doesn't say the patients were there because of the cold, which you have implicitly assumed otherwise your argument doesn't work. It doesn't say all the old people were there cause they got cold are all have frostbite. It doesn't say why theyre there at all. But look at how much you assumed simply because you don't like the author for a reason not yet readily clear. You have absolutely no basis for the assumption that somehow he on the one day he walked into the hospital he walked into just a flukey day where the patients were stacked like cord wood. The only other possiblity is you think he is lieing about what he say all together. Which I have no reason to beleive

But to paraphrase this is basically your argument: The authors words are meaningless because he happened upon a hospital when it was cold which was the reason so many people were being treated and why resources were spread thin. thus it can't be taken as a legitmate example of the flaws of universal healthcare.

Well for one you don't know whether that's an everyday occurrence at said hospital or not. You chose to atribute it to the cold yet no such attribution can be made because the reason for the amoung of people in the ER is never given. You assumed it based solely on the fact teh person said it was cold out.

Further you make it out to be that he is giveing just two one time occurance isolated incidence. 1) you really don't know if what happened is normal or not, especially in the canadien example and two just in what's posted alone he give 4 examples of the difficulties being faced by various countries that have universal healthcare. I have yet to even click on the link and see how many more examples there are.

EDIT:

okay the author is not a doctor i have found out, fotunately i still have no reason to beleive he's lieing about his observations. the rest of the article that is not posted on the board gives many more examples of how Canada's system is failing people. and get this there courts are trying to prosecute doctors who are willing to treat people who will pay to be seen sooner.
 
No, I simply can't take the writer seriously when I read stuff like this. He's an ideologue and while he's entitled to write whatever he wishes from the perspective he feels most comfortable I also have the right to point out bias. I mean, that's what this is all about isn't it? Dialogue? So his claim that "all government-run health care systems" are like the one he saw in a winter in Winterpeg (and they don't nickname it that for nothing) should be taken seriously?

Now pile that on his reference to an extreme heat episode in France in August (when France just about shuts down and goes on les vacances) and the generalisations are just incredible and I mean incredible.

No, I am fine with a good discussion on the issues but this is just pure punditry, I can't take him seriously.

Chips, you do lampooning much better than me, you've got the wit and vocabulary for it - and better judgement too, I can be a bit too cutting and the rapier turns into a cutlass. Btw did you read Matt Price in The Australian today? I know, I know, Murdoch rag, but he took the piss out of the feds mercilessly.

Just read it. Matt is a bigger cynic than me! :rofl:
 
Free health care you get what you pay for just remember that.

Okay then. Hows about an estimate on how long it will take for the almost communistically equitable, capitalist "Trickle-Down System" in that worker's paradise of yours to give the 40% of Americans, that your religio-economic hero Calvin condemned as useless eaters because of their poverty, enough money to insure themselves?
 
I don't know if it's safe to assume this or not, but I will have to assume that you know who the author is better than I do because all it says in the article is that he's a doctor. Knowing little else about him I think I would take the word of a doctor in his critique of the healthcare industry. Can you post somethign that shows that his observations are meaningless.

So far me repoir from you has been good, but I have to call on a really, really bad assumption or leaps of logic you made. First the one about teh cold. Your criticizism rests on the assumption that what he saw was abnormal due to the cold. yet no such leap can be made. there is only one sentence that mentions cold whether there. And all it does is tell what month, what year, and what the weather was like when he entered the hospital. it doesn't say the patients were there because of the cold, which you have implicitly assumed otherwise your argument doesn't work. It doesn't say all the old people were there cause they got cold are all have frostbite. It doesn't say why theyre there at all. But look at how much you assumed simply because you don't like the author for a reason not yet readily clear. You have absolutely no basis for the assumption that somehow he on the one day he walked into the hospital he walked into just a flukey day where the patients were stacked like cord wood. The only other possiblity is you think he is lieing about what he say all together. Which I have no reason to beleive

But to paraphrase this is basically your argument: The authors words are meaningless because he happened upon a hospital when it was cold which was the reason so many people were being treated and why resources were spread thin. thus it can't be taken as a legitmate example of the flaws of universal healthcare.

Well for one you don't know whether that's an everyday occurrence at said hospital or not. You chose to atribute it to the cold yet no such attribution can be made because the reason for the amoung of people in the ER is never given. You assumed it based solely on the fact teh person said it was cold out.

Further you make it out to be that he is giveing just two one time occurance isolated incidence. 1) you really don't know if what happened is normal or not, especially in the canadien example and two just in what's posted alone he give 4 examples of the difficulties being faced by various countries that have universal healthcare. I have yet to even click on the link and see how many more examples there are.

EDIT:

okay the author is not a doctor i have found out, fotunately i still have no reason to beleive he's lieing about his observations. the rest of the article that is not posted on the board gives many more examples of how Canada's system is failing people. and get this there courts are trying to prosecute doctors who are willing to treat people who will pay to be seen sooner.

I merely analysed his piece of writing. I found out about him by using Google. I went back and re-read his piece closely and - damnit I used to get really cranky when my academic supervisor made me do the deconstruction stuff - but if you read it carefully you can see it's an opinion hit piece. It's just advocacy for shifting Canada from its current health care system to the one in use in the States. Now there might be a few things wrong with the Canadian system but this is lurid. I had to go and see a general practitioner in Toronto in the middle of winter once. Walk-in clinic. I sat and waited and it didn't take long for him to see me. Because I was not Canadian I couldn't use the Canadian health care system (because, I have no idea why, Canada and Australia don't have a reciprocal agreement on health care, yet if I get sick in the UK I will be treated under the NHS for nothing) but his consultation fee was reasonable. So there, the system in Canada must work because that was my experience :D
 
I merely analysed his piece of writing. I found out about him by using Google. I went back and re-read his piece closely and - damnit I used to get really cranky when my academic supervisor made me do the deconstruction stuff - but if you read it carefully you can see it's an opinion hit piece. It's just advocacy for shifting Canada from its current health care system to the one in use in the States. Now there might be a few things wrong with the Canadian system but this is lurid. I had to go and see a general practitioner in Toronto in the middle of winter once. Walk-in clinic. I sat and waited and it didn't take long for him to see me. Because I was not Canadian I couldn't use the Canadian health care system (because, I have no idea why, Canada and Australia don't have a reciprocal agreement on health care, yet if I get sick in the UK I will be treated under the NHS for nothing) but his consultation fee was reasonable. So there, the system in Canada must work because that was my experience :D

But how is the isolated incident you experiened any more of a validation that the system works than the one's the author experiences showing that it doesn't?

Secondly I still fail to see even if it is an opinion piece why the in of itself makes it invalid as a critique of the system. From that perspective isn't what you and I are doing right now writing opinion pieces? And yet you don't seem to immediately dismiss what I'm saying. And if you read it again will also find there are no 'opinions' in it. The vast majority of what is written are his observations.
 
Another reason why government run health care does not work


A Canadian Doctor Describes How Socialized Medicine Doesn't Work
By DAVID GRATZER | Posted Thursday, July 26, 2007 4:30 PM PT

I was once a believer in socialized medicine. As a Canadian, I had soaked up the belief that government-run health care was truly compassionate. What I knew about American health care was unappealing: high expenses and lots of uninsured people.

My health care prejudices crumbled on the way to a medical school class. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute.

Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care.

I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic — with a three-year wait list; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.

Government researchers now note that more than 1.5 million Ontarians (or 12% of that province's population) can't find family physicians. Health officials in one Nova Scotia community actually resorted to a lottery to determine who'd get a doctor's appointment.

These problems are not unique to Canada — they characterize all government-run health care systems.

Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled — 48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave — when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity — 15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren't available. And so on.

Single-payer systems — confronting dirty hospitals, long waiting lists and substandard treatment — are starting to crack, however. Canadian newspapers are filled with stories of people frustrated by long delays for care. Many Canadians, determined to get the care they need, have begun looking not to lotteries — but to markets.

Dr. Jacques Chaoulli is at the center of this changing health care scene. In the 1990s, he organized a private Quebec practice — patients called him, he made house calls and then he directly billed his patients. The local health board cried foul and began fining him. The legal status of private practice in Canada remained murky, but billing patients, rather than the government, was certainly illegal, and so was private insurance.

for the complete article
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=270338135202343







Wow, how convincing. The article was written by a member of a right wing think tank and published in Investor's Business Daily, I'm sure we can trust it.
 
Wow, how convincing. The article was written by a member of a right wing think tank and published in Investor's Business Daily, I'm sure we can trust it.

Dismissing information because you think you have some deep insight into the author is becomeing a more and more common trait around here. How convenient to able to attack the author instead of the ideas.
 
Dismissing information because you think you have some deep insight into the author is becomeing a more and more common trait around here. How convenient to able to attack the author instead of the ideas.



OK, then why don't you link me to some of the left leaning ideas that have come out of the Manhattan Institute lately? Or perhaps a pro-union article in Investor's Business Daily?

Do you not understand that right wing think tanks produces right wing ideas and magazines for investors are never going to promote socialized anything?

What if I posted an article that was found in the Worker's World Weekly, with a first hand account of how wonderful the health care system is in Cuba, written by someone with lots of academic credentials but who works at a left wing think tank? Would you seriously believe such an article would not be tainted with extreme bias and conflict of interest?
 
OK, then why don't you link me to some of the left leaning ideas that have come out of the Manhattan Institute lately? Or perhaps a pro-union article in Investor's Business Daily?

Do you not understand that right wing think tanks produces right wing ideas and magazines for investors are never going to promote socialized anything?

What if I posted an article that was found in the Worker's World Weekly, with a first hand account of how wonderful the health care system is in Cuba, written by someone with lots of academic credentials but who works at a left wing think tank? Would you seriously believe such an article would not be tainted with extreme bias and conflict of interest?

What is typical is that you instead of refuting what he said as unfactual or incrorrect (because you can't). You dismiss the information due to the source without even a cursory examination as to whether there is any truth to it. You do it because it's the most convenient thing for you to do.

Of course right wing think tanks produce right wing ideas. What else woudl they produce. The fact that they have an opinion on something doesn't inherently make them wrong however. And that in a nutshell is what your saying You looked at the source and basically said; "Even though I haven't read any of it or tested it's validity in any way it is incorrect because of where it came from." Whether you choose to admit it or not that's what you did. Why don't you post a left leaning opinion peice and see how one is really critiqued. I won't critique the author I will critique what was actually written. Something you are obviously incappable of doing.

You go ahead and post somehting from a right wing tank that praises Cuba's health system. the truth rests within the validity of the claims themselves not the source. If someone says Cuba's system is great but I beleive that statement to be incorrect I woudl actually ahve to show that. it would the easy way to say well he's obviously wrong simply because of the source.
 
But how is the isolated incident you experiened any more of a validation that the system works than the one's the author experiences showing that it doesn't?

That was my point. For me to really get a good understanding of how it works in Ontario I should have gone to a couple of hospitals and half a dozen general practices. Sampling error I think the statisticians might call it. So the writer describes one event in Winnipeg and refers to one event in France. Sampling error.


Bern80: said:
Secondly I still fail to see even if it is an opinion piece why the in of itself makes it invalid as a critique of the system. From that perspective isn't what you and I are doing right now writing opinion pieces? And yet you don't seem to immediately dismiss what I'm saying. And if you read it again will also find there are no 'opinions' in it. The vast majority of what is written are his observations.

No I won't dismiss what you're saying because - inter alia - you're rational. And I don't claim to be right. For example, I'm aware of the opposition to a two-tier system of health care that is abroad in Canada. Now it might upset the ideologues but I've seen a two-tier system at work and I took advantage of it because I had private insurance on top of the Medicare system here. As long as those who haven't got private insurance are still entitled to decent care then I have no problem with a two-tier system.

Yes, the writing are his observations and that's fair enough. But they're not proof of anything, that was what I was getting at. The proper weight should be given to his observations and knowing he has an agenda is important.
 
No I won't dismiss what you're saying because - inter alia - you're rational. And I don't claim to be right. For example, I'm aware of the opposition to a two-tier system of health care that is abroad in Canada. Now it might upset the ideologues but I've seen a two-tier system at work and I took advantage of it because I had private insurance on top of the Medicare system here. As long as those who haven't got private insurance are still entitled to decent care then I have no problem with a two-tier system.

Yes, the writing are his observations and that's fair enough. But they're not proof of anything, that was what I was getting at. The proper weight should be given to his observations and knowing he has an agenda is important.

Sure he has an agenda. I certainly don't blame him for pursuing it either. In that sense he is like me. I have an agenda in that I want to make as reasoned an argument as I can that free healthcare is a really bad idea. Especially considering that our country may be on the verge of it if a dem is elected in the next presidential race a little over a year away.

I just don't read opinion peices the way other people do. It isn't in my nature to immediatley jump to discrediting the author weather right wing or left wing. To me the best way to combat an argument regardless of the author is to determine the truth of the statements. You can say someone has bias or is from a think tank or whatever and hell they may even be very biased which this author very well may be, but none of that makes any of what he said any less true. he saw what he saw and and hilights about a half dozen catastrophies (not just 2) that he believe are the result of free or very inexpensive healthcare. So forgetting the authoer entirely and his leanings, if we are truth seekers there are plenty of questions we can ask and ascertain the validity of. Mainly are his observations a direct result of socialzied medicine? Would still he have seen what he saw in France if they had a system like ours? Was what he saw in Ontario just a fluke and unpreventable by any system of healthcare?
 
I didn't call him a liar, just someone with an agenda. Rather than seek to understand the problems - such as they might be - in the Canadian health system (and no system is without its problems) - he is pushing the free market agenda from his free market institution. Of course he's free to do so, but I'm free to point out his bias.
 

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