Canadian health care

Er, well, apparently the tide of folks heading north for "free" health care is about to be stemmed. Or, more properly, it looks like the Canadian Supreme Court has decided that in addition to the wealthy, who could always afford to go elsewhere rather than wait in line, now any Canadian will be able to buy private insurance (like they can even in France) and get out of line (either that or the gov't has the option of improving its system so much that people will not want/need to get out of line). What is the most appropriate headline?

Alarm! Alarm! The end of the world is nigh!

This just in: government services are inefficient!

Here are some quotes taken from the list of reactions by our Northern Neighbors in the Globe and Mail:

Canadians (especially doctors) who think private insurance is the answer may well want to consider the American experience: private physicians with more staff handling never-ending insurance paperwork than actually attending to patients. As Canadian [sic] probably know (most of my Americans don't), we spend a staggeringly larger fraction of our health care costs simply on administrative overhead than you do, making our privatized system more, not less, inefficient than yours....Economist Paul Krugman has astutely characterized the U.S. health care system as a Byzantine exercise in passing the costs to someone else.

Ooops, sorry, that was from an American quoting He Whose Name Has Lost Its Luster. Please note that at least she (he? Tressy) was accurate in one account: the American experience in the last 80 years has been with a private health care system, not a free market in health care. Even more preceisely, it has been mostly private, but with a growing public sector influence.

We know that Canadians did not need the Supreme Court to tell them that their governments had failed to deliver on the promise of universal and timely health care.

And another ...

I don't see how increasing access to private practice will increase the amount of health care resources available, which is the real issue with waiting lists....how about addressing the issues that result in many good Canadian doctors heading down to the United States[?]

You just can't make this stuff up, folks. Gee, preventing doctors from making money in Canada has nothing to do with them going elsewhere; let's build a wall, like they did in East Germany. The same idiot goes on to say,

I would rather pay a bit more tax for a system that works than end up with a system like the United States where the cost of health care insurance is a major burden on employers and individuals...

... as opposed to now, where it is a burden on ... um, taxpayers who are not individuals? How does that work? One commenter calls private health care, "immoral". One of the sinners has this to say:

I work in a private medical facility and patients thank me every year for the service we provide. About half of the patients we see don't even have a family physician so we are the only annual medical care they receive. For about 20 per cent of them, a medical condition they weren't aware of, was caught just in time.

Another says, "If I require an MRI or a CAT scan, chances are my doctor will tell me that the waiting list is close to 12 months in Ottawa." Yikes - when I needed an MRI earlier this year, it was scheduled to my convenience. I think there are something like 3 times more MRI scanners per capita in the US than in Canada, so at worst they should be delayed 3 x my delay, which was about 2 days from the time I requested it. For those of you in the cheap seats, that's a week, so why does it take a year?