Canada Sending Mothers to US to Give Birth
I used to support a single payer plan for national health insurance. Now, I am very dubious. Here's one reason from Canada. From the story:
A problem in Canada's hospitals is sending scores of pregnant women south of the border to have their babies. Carri Ash of Chilliwack, B.C. was sent to the U.S. to have her baby after her water broke on Sunday, ten weeks ahead of schedule. "And they came in and said 'you're going to Seattle,'" she said. Ash's hospital couldn't handle the high-risk pregnancy. Doctors searched for another hospital bed, but even hospitals in Vancouver, B.C. didn't have a neo-natal bed. "So two provinces didn't have enough room, so I have to go to another country," said Ash.The next election will put health care on the table. Some point to Canada as the way to go. I think not. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people in Canada can't even obtain a primary care physician.
We'd better contemplate this crucial issue carefully. Once we go down a road as a country, it will be almost impossible to turn around.
Labels: Canadian Health Care
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:14 AM
9 Comments
9 Comments:
There are lots of people in Canada who can't get MRI's and other essential, life-saving treatment and attention because the system is too clogged up.
Don't forget that the entire world's pharmaceutical and medical technology industry is dependent on American markets because it is the only place where they can make money to cover their research costs.
Other countries with socialized medicine rely on the government to fix prices on medicine, making it unprofitable for investors.
We would have to rely on a schlerotic university sytem to do the research for new cures based on grant money assigned by government beurocracy, often motivated by politics and not real science.
Read my lips, No New Cures
I do not trust the free market, because people have different resources and some people do not have the means to afford quality insurance.
I do accept the universal health care does have some flaws, and the second half of SiCKO was extremely biased propaganda. However, I agreed with (mostly) the first half discussing the inegalitarian system of United States managed care.
Does anyone have a proposal of an efficacious egalitarian system?
Wesley, I never supported eugenics, and I prefer to call my version to transhumanism "egalitarian engineering" as it aims to rectify social and biological inequalities through technology.
HKR: I believe we need a mixed system, and plan to ponder it more. Competition is important to keep costs down and service more efficient. Along this line, I am impressed with the Medicare drug plan, e.g., gov't. subsidized private insurance, administered and sold through the free market--with legally required coverages.
Equality of opportunity we should push for. Equality of result, is not only beyond our capability, but is so utopian in mindset, it seems to me that it opens the door to potential tyranny.
Ordinarily I'm disgustingly optimistic, but honestly, all health care systems I've read up on suck. (Before anyone gets offended, think of a sucking chest wound - that's what I'm implying.)
In America you have to have an HMO or a PPO to afford anything - they have to take some of the cost onto themselve or you'll be in debt for the rest of your life paying for drugs or hospital bills.
But if you don't have a job that provides you with an HMO or PPO, you're doomed.
In Canada everybody pays taxes that get used for health care for everybody, meaning that a visitor from America that breaks her arm can go to the hospital and have it taken care of without wiping out her vacation fund to pay for it.
But they're shipping pregnant ladies over here to have babies because nobody the system is swamped.
Having outlined the problems, I challenge anyone to come up with some kind of system (that doesn't require killing off half the population in one form or another) that will provide the benes of both worlds without the hazards.
I think I hear the death knell of modern civilization.
"I think I hear the death knell of modern civilization."
Don't worry; the law of accelerating returns is the countervailing force.
"Don't forget that the entire world's pharmaceutical and medical technology industry is dependent on American markets because it is the only place where they can make money to cover their research costs.
Other countries with socialized medicine rely on the government to fix prices on medicine, making it unprofitable for investors.
We would have to rely on a schlerotic university sytem to do the research for new cures based on grant money assigned by government beurocracy, often motivated by politics and not real science."
If you want to keep the managed care system, you have to be prepared to address the problem of providing for those in relative poverty in a first world nation such as the United States. It is imperative we provide the means for a robust R&D program.
WJS:
Equality of opportunity will not work and it is unsatisfactory!
"[Arthur] Jensen (2003) proposed “two laws
of individual differences”: (a) Individual differences in learning and performance
increase as task complexity increases, and (b) individual differences in performance
increase with practice and experience (unless there is a low ceiling on
proficiency). Consequently, the more we remove environmental barriers and
improve everybody’s intellectual performance, the greater will be the relative
influence of genetic factors (because the environmental variance is being removed).
However, this means that equal opportunity will result in unequal
outcomes, within families, between families, and between population groups. The
fact that we have learned to live with the first, and to a lesser degree the second,
offers some hope we can learn to do so for the third."
http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL2.pdf
I cannot live most of the aforementioned inequalities and some of its unpleasant consequences include relative poverty.
I do not consider Hughes a eugenicist, nor does he consider himself a "eugenicist". Hughes seems to advocate "egalitarian engineering" to ameliorate possible inequalities caused by genetics and social deficiencies. Egalitarian engineering does not need to invoke germinal choice technologies, and other possible means include cybernetic implants and nootropics. Hughes and I do not advocate tyranny to pursue this agenda: we rely on using a welfare state to distribute the fructuous products of future innovation equitably. This approach to public policy acknowledges that some people have certain traits that grant them immense advantages in life and we have an obligation to endow EVERYONE with these advantageous traits. However, as Hughes pointed out, we should focus on traits that are inherently advantageous, not merely positional traits such as height (not everyone can be tall by definition and some people have to be short). Unfortunately, we cannot take recourse in egalitarian engineering today because efficacious means are not currently available.
HRK:Those technologies never will be available.
Hughes explicitly promotes personhood theory, and moreover, denigrates some human beings as either "sentient property" (a good term for animals, now that I think of it), or "property." That is eugenics in the extreme, for it says some of us are "fit" and some "unfit," some of us have greater worth and some of us lesser worth--regardless of what J. says about himself.
I'd still rather be that Canadian woman. (As my family cannot afford health care, and the US. pres just vetoed the SCHIP expansion that would have ensured funds to cover my children next year). She may have had to receive care in the US, but she didn't pay for it - that's a success story in system flexibility, in my book.
In any case, Canada is on the upswing...the most recent stats show that in the last 5 years more doctors are moving back into Canada and setting up practice than are leaving. Something to do with lower malpractice suit and malpractice insurance rates, perhaps? Or quality of living? It will take some years for the effect of previous mismanagement of the system to wear off, but I'm confident that, if the two systems continue in the direction they are now, 10 years time will see quality of care only improve in Canada as access to care continues to decrease in the US. I don't trust any medical system that is run and managed (with remarkably little regulation) by private businesses whose best business practice is to avoid paying out as much as possible, push catastrophic plans for people who can't afford well-care in the first place, and in every way look no further than the profit margin at the next financial quarter. Bleahh. What interest do they have in keeping people healthy or making sick people well, when it is easier to deny coverage or find excuses not to pay (or simply make the claim process so difficult and complicated that the people who most need coverage are unable to navigate the system to get it). Combine a system like that with legalized euthanasia, and you have a system practically designed to push people to premature graves (end of life care is so expensive, you know).
My only hope (since I married an American and live in the US now) is that at some time someone will have the guts and political independence to take on the insurance companies and restore some measure of competitiveness to health care costs. I'd like to be able to afford to get check ups, shots, and routine dental and prenatal care without breaking the bank some day. Oh, and health coverage needs to be separated from employment, or the need for health insurance will continue to squash innovativeness and entrepreneurship.
Of course, all these things are opposed by such powerful interests, and the US political system really does seem most responsive to lobbies and large corporate interests...paint me not so optimistic. If I could vote, I'd be tempted to vote for the most radical universal health care candidate I could find, in the obscure hope that such a President, while unable, I believe, to actually implement such a system, could at least spark some real thinking on the topic amongst the hidebound priveligied elite that run this country and who do not know what it is to have to choose between insuring your children and insuring your home's primary wage-earner.
The 6.5 million children currently covered by SCHIP will not be deprived by the President's veto, since Congress passed a bill to extend SCHIP at present levels through November.
Perhaps Congress will now take the time to write a Bill that does not offend social as well as fiscal conservative voters:
1) The vetoed bill more than doubled funding, from $25 Billion to $60 Billion.
2) At least half of the children that would have been added are currently privately insured.
3) Taxpayers in States that prohibit using Medicaid and SCHIP for abortions except in cases of rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother, would have been forced to pay for abortions and
4) Those States with a lower cost of living, would have subsidized families making up to $83,000 in States like New Jersey and New York.
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