Anyone In Canada Recognize the Utopia Michael Moore Sees There?

Great Debates
41

I’m a Canadian and even I know this is a silly thing to say, because I’ve walked around the middle of the largest city oin the United States and wasn’t the slightest bit concerned for my safety. Manhattan is actually quite a lot nicer than downtown Toronto, in my humble opinion. Toronto’s nice enough but it’s not the prettiest or cleanest city around, as its residents seem to believe.

Of course Canada isn’t a paradise, but the distribution of misery is different. Our underclass is made up of aboriginals, who are disproportionately found in rural areas and the more rural they are the worse off they are; the USA has a larger urban underclass, which makes it more visible. The USA does have more murder overall, for whatever reason, and it’s not always easy to put a finger on why (why does BC have more murder than Quebec?)

As for the relative merits of the health care system, my parents live in a city of 125,000 people and they can’t find a family doctor. How does the Canada Health Act do you any good if you can’t find a family doctor? Let’s stop pretending our system’s all that great. The USA’s is probably worse, but Canada’s is, by the standards of industrialized nations, not very good.

Having said all that, Michael Moore has never said Canada is a paradise. He’s chosen to live in New York, not Toronto. He just uses it as a convenient comparison for things he thinks are wrong with his country that he wants changed, because (a) it’s a convenient comparison to make, since Canada’s right next door, and (b) the countries are so similar in many ways.

There are things I’d like to see Canada do that I could use the USA as an example of - their far superior highway system, for example. I dream of a Toronto that has a public transit system anywhere near as good as New York’s. Our handling of aboriginal issues has probably been quite a bit worse, at least in modern history. Shit, I’d love to take a page from the USA in terms of economic aid to the provinces - look at the “Atlantic Accord” mess, where we now have a system whereby some provinces want to be given free money in perpetuity, and people are actually considering this seriously. I’d naturally turn to the USA as an example of possible improvements because that’s the most similar country I know about, granting Australia is probably a better comp in some respects. That doesn’t mean I think the USA is a paradise.

42

Why? If you decouple healthcare insurance from work, you’d pay for it just like you pay for everything else-- with your own money. There is no reason to think that insurance companies would need to be more regulated than they are now, or that insurance companies would treat things like pre-existing conditions any differently.

Maybe it would encourage people to form cooperatives to bargain for better insurance rates and/or coverage instead of leaving that up to each individual employer to do. Americans have been conditioned to think that employers should provide health insurance only because of the historical accident of how that practice came about in this country.

43

I’d have to see a lot more specifics in this area before I conclude that personal freedoms are under assault in a truly significant way.

44

I’ve posted numerous threads in Great Debates describing the waiting lists in Canada, the differences in cancer survival rates between the U.S. and Canada, and other key metrics.

There’s a key thing everyone needs to understand: We can’t afford all the health care we want. Period. And by ‘we’ I mean every industrialized country. So, you need to limit access to health care in some way. There’s no magic government solution that will give everyone all the coverage they want.

In a free-market system where a product is scarce, prices maintain the balance between supply and demand. This is why Americans pay more for health care. But I think you’ll find if you dig deep enough is that they pay more because the rich pay a lot, not because the average middle-class person pays more than the average Canadian.

If you can’t control demand with prices, you have only one tool left - controlling supply. And then you get waiting list, inflexible treatment schedules, rules governming who can have certain treatments, and all the rest. In the British NHS, doctors have scorecards they use to decide whether people can have certain medical treatments at all.

The first things to be rationed are the ‘quality of life’ surgeries - hip replacements, cataract surgery, knee replacements, corrective surgeries for mild deformities, that sort of thing. And for those kinds of surgeries, the waiting list can be brutal. And since the bulk of these surgeries are carried out on the elderly, they’re the main target of supply restrictions (they’re also the least likely to make a political fuss about it, which matters to a government bureaucrat deciding who gets treatment and who doesn’t). My grandmother spent years on a waiting list for a joint replacement - years spent in absolute agony having to be helped up and down staiirs and being unable to travel. My mother has macular degeneration, and needs multiple operations to correct it. She’s about halfway through what she needs, and it’s been going on for almost three years now. Each surgery puts her on a new waiting list, and I think the shortest one she’s had so far was just under six months.

I have a friend who had a suspicious lump found on her neck, and her doctor recommended a specialist look at it and is trying to make her an appointment. This was well over a month ago, and she hasn’t even got a date yet for her appointment.

America’s health care system needs some work, no doubt about it. But so does Canada’s. Niether are perfect - they just fail in different ways. Canadians are more satisfied with theirs because Canada’s system probably needs the basic needs of the majority of the population better than does the U.S. system. But the U.S. system is far superior when it comes to critical, high quality care. When rich Canadians and high-powered politicians get seriously ill, they go to the U.S. for treatment. That should tell you something.

There’s another thing socialized systems are terrible at: Innovation. With all the complaining Americans are doing about the cost of drugs being cheaper in Canada, they don’t tend to notice that most of those drugs were designed by American companies. When it comes to drugs, medical devices like shunts, artificial heart valves, and mechanical limbs, America leads the way. And why? Because a free-market system has wealthy ‘early adopters’ to fund that activity. Early adopters are critically important. Imagine where technology would be without them. The first VCRs and DVD players were $2,000. But they could be marketed because wealthy peoople would buy them, and eventually quantities of scale and improved manufacturing processes drove the price down for the masses. Most of the exotic safety systems in cars today, such as ABS brakes, stability control, rear obstacle sensors, side curtain airbags, etc. Were first developed for expensive luxury cars for the wealthy, and the technology trickled down.

In a single-payer system, we have no early adopters. We have no incentive for a company to make a device that will sell for $100,000 and be used by 500 people. The government won’t accept it or allocate the resources to patients to allow them to buy it. So we rely on the innovation of the U.S. free market system, and we’re the recipients of the trickle-down. That’s another reason why Canadians pay slightly less on average for our health care. But if you guys go down the same path, where’s the innovation going to come from?

45

I wonder if that’s actually true. Got any data that says it is?

This is something that I find worrisome as well. Is there any way of knowing that it’s a real issue? I understand the hypothesis… I wonder if we can check it empirically.

46

The tour bus driver did warn us to stay away from a certain area of downtown Vancouver, FWIW. Neither would I assert that every district or neighborhood of NYC or L.A. is as safe as milk. But it’s ridiculous to picture Americans cowering indoors to avoid being mugged, and that goes for big cities as well as small towns and rural areas.

47

Me, too. I’m suspicious that this would com about, but we have enough countries with government run healtcare systems to see if it actually happens or not.

48

It may be that the U.S. is frantically removing freedoms from people for different reasons. But here in Canada, you hear this argument a lot: “You don’t have a right to smoke, because I have to pay for it if you develop cancer or emphysema”.

We have very high sin taxes. Cigarettes cost about $10/pack, with most of that cost being taxed. And guess who bears the bulk of that burden? The poor and blue-collar workers, who make up the bulk of smokers. So it’s a regressive tax that seriously hurts poor people. We have friends who are poor - they live together in a basement suite, and work in unskilled labor jobs for low pay. Both of them smoke about a pack a day. That’s about $600/mo for cigarettes. The tax is lower on bulk tobacco, so to afford to smoke, they have to spend an hour a day rolling cigarettes, and it still costs them $300-$400/mo.

But smoking is being outright banned in many places. I believe there’s a poster on this board who is fighting for a ‘smoke free Ontario’. First, smoking was banned in restaraunts and other public indoor places. Then it was banned outdoors near public facilities and within X feet of the entrance to a building. Then it was banned outdoors in public spaces period. Now the anti-smoking zealots are trying to make rules that people who have children cannot smoke in their own homes - they want to make it a form of child abuse. I have no doubt that they won’t stop until we have a new prohibition against cigarettes entirely. And they always come back with the, ‘we’re paying for your health care’ argument when you attempt to stop them.

We’ve added all kinds of safety regulations. You can’t legally ride a bicycle without a helmet, for example. Again, if you ask, “why is this any of your damned business?”, the stock answer is, “Because if you wind up in the emergency room, I’m going to have to pay for your brain surgery.”

Now we’re seeing increased efforts to tax ‘junk food’, to ban trans-fats, and in other ways to attempt to control the health of the population. And there is added danger when the government has a vested interest in this. If the government has a health care cost crisis, are they really going to be the impartial protectors of our freedoms if someone calls for cigarettes to be banned?

49

Well, you can’t credit the U.S. as a whole with that–rather you should blame us for your transit woes. Americans pretty much invented the car-dependent lifestyle which is why most cities here have such terrible public transit. New York City is anything but typical in this regard; however, due to its cultural and financial preeminence, foreigners are apt to equate NYC with the U.S.

Oddly, though, come to think of it, in any movie or TV show set in NYC that I’ve ever seen, the characters almost never take the bus or train. They usually take a taxi or drive their own car. But I imagine that’s done because it’s so much easier to film two actors in a car-set than to do a subway scene.

50

I think regulations on smoking aren’t a good example, because the US is probably the most heavily regulated of all countries in this respect. We’ve banned smoking in bars in CA back in 1998.

But I do remember that a common argument for requiring motorcycle helmets was that we all have to bear the cost of emergency room care for bikers who crash.

Americans are kinda funny in that way. We’re often the first to cry for the government to ban “unsafe stuff”, and yet we’re supposed the population most fearful of nanny governance. Go figure.

51

You can find nearly all those regulations in the USA. Down here in Houston, Texas, we’re getting progressively more smoke-free.

Between rising insurance costs & taxes to treat the uninsured, we, too, tend to pay for the health care of our fellow citizens. (And some who are not citizens.)

52

Ignore this post.

53

As for the relative safety of Canada vs the US: Here in Edmonton, we lock our doors. I know many people who have had their homes burgled. I’ve had vehicles broken into several times. A co-worker had his car stolen out of our parkade last year, and several more had their windows broken and their contents stolen. In fact, our offices were burgled for computers twice in the last three years. Home burglaries are reasonably common. But I think you’ll find the same thing you find in the U.S.: If you live in a middle-class neighborhood in the ‘burbs’, you’re reasonably safe. If you live in the inner-city, you’re not. It’s just that the U.S. has huge cities with large inner-city areas that drive crime rates up.

If you want to compare crime rates on an apples-to-apples basis, let’s try comparing Saskatchewan to Montana. Both midwest populations, both regions are roughly the same in population size. Saskatchewan has a couple of cities that are larger than the largest in Montana, but no huge metropolises with inner city problems.

In 2004, Saskatchewan had 15,159 criminal incidents for every 100,000 population. In Montana, the number in 2005 was 3,424. Saskatchewan had almost five times the crime rate of Montana. But how about all those gun-related murders? In Montana, where handguns are widely and easily obtainable, there were 18 murders. In Saskatchewan, where they are heavily controlled, there were 39. Over twice the murder rate, too.

The other thing we could do to examine apples to apples would be to take two cities of comparable size and demographic layout, and compare crime statistics. Let’s start with Edmonton.

Edmonton Crime per 100,000 population

Murder: 2.2
Robbery: 162
Break-ins: 1,020
Motor Vehicle Theft: 951

cite.

Now let’s pick a similar U.S. city, with a population around 800,000, with a strong economy and large middle class. How about San Jose, California:

2003 Crime rates for San Jose per 100,000 population:

Murder: 3.1
Robbery: 88.1
Burglary: 358.3
Vehicle Theft: 396.1

cite.

Well, what do you know - in a ‘safe’ Canadian city with a population just under 1 million, you’re far more likely to have your vehicle stolen, your house burgled, or to be robbed than you are in the dangerous American city of San Jose. The only stat that is worse in the U.S. is the murder rate, but that’s such a small number that annual differences can swing the ‘winner’ in either direction. In fact, if I had chosen 2005 for my stats, Edmonton would have ‘won’ that stat too, as we had 37 murders for a murder rate just over 4 per 100,000.

Now, let’s look at Detroit, Mi. Another city of roughly the same size as Edmonton and San Jose. But the numbers are horrid:

Crimes per 100,000 population:

Murder: 39.3
Robbery: 757
Burglary: 1698
Vehicle Theft: 2362

There’s your outlier. The difference isn’t between Canada and the U.S. The difference is between cities like Detroit and cities like San Jose or Missoula Montana. It’s not gun control. It’s not the nature of the Canadian people. It’s not a difference between the two countries at all. The answer is much more complex. But complexity isn’t a word in Michael Moore’s vocabulary. He’s rather play the demogogue and reach for simplistic solutions that happen to align with his political philosophy.

In Edmonton, the crime rate has been skyrocketing primarily because of the increase in gang activity and the deterioration of the inner-city areas. If we could take just the inner-city area of Edmonton and work out the crime rates, I’ll bet it would look a lot like Detroit. For example, the bulk of our murders happen in the inner city, even though it probably makes up 10% of the population or less.

I think you’ll find that if you map crime across the U.S., the pattern does not even remotely follow something as simple as gun control laws. It’s more about poverty, gang-related activity, local criminal enterprises, and other complex factors.

54

I think its a ‘grass is always greener’ kind of thingy. For my part I like Canada quite a bit. I lived in Ottawa for a few years when I worked for a Canadian IT company called CNG. It was a great place, with great people (and bloody nasty winters…IMHO, being from the South West :)).

It was far from Utopia. There were plenty of problems (one being the, er, tension between those folks who identified with their French heritage, and, well, everyone else ;)). Which country is ‘better’? I suppose that depends on what you mean and what metrics you are looking at. Personally I think its comparing apples to oranges…while also trying to decide if the Corvette is better than the Porsche (or whatever comparable sports car). Compared to, say, Mexico…well, lets just say I’d rather live in the US OR Canada than most other countries in the world and leave it at that.
As for the background discussion about how the US is starting to get nanny creep-age wrt various laws banning smoking and transfats and such just like Canada (with the implication that we have the same kinds of things without the nice state sponsored insurance systems)…well, does anyone else find it ironic that the folks saying that are the ones who most probable not only approve of such nanny laws but probably push for them?? :slight_smile: Yeah, we are starting to ramp up the nanny laws…and the same folks who think thats great are also those who are probably wetting themselves in a desire for universal health care.

-XT

55

Well, the problem is that insurance companies don’t want to insure people who are going to get sick. They want to insure people who won’t get sick. And, of course, the exact opposite is true of who most wants insurance…There is a fundamental lack of alignment in this marketplace between the desires of the consumers and the desires of the suppliers.

That is why insurance companies either exclude certain people or have group policies with employers (which spreads the risk both because of numbers and because employment doesn’t tend to self-select for the sicker parts of the population, in fact, it tends to self-select somewhat for the healthier parts).

56

That’s a pretty vague argument to support your original claim. I have no reason to believe that things would be worse if you decoupled health insurance for your job, since most people would end up sticking with the same company they signed on with when they were young and healthy. If I switch jobs, I have to start from scratch on my insurance, and I generally won’t be covered for any pre-existing conditions no matter how generous the company’s health plan is. That’s the big problem.

Sam: I live near San Jose, and I know you didn’t pick that city at random-- it routinely gets cited as the safest large city in the US. It doesn’t help your argument when you stack the deck like that.

57

Can we drop the stawman about Canada being a Utopia? I know the OP introduced it, but let’s be serious. If we can stick to actual claims MM has made and see if they stand up to reality, that would be better. No place is a Utopia.

58

Sam Stone, I don’t know where you live, but my husband’s cataract surgery was scheduled less than one week after seeing the doctor.

Personally, I’ve never had to wait for medical services, and the care has always been outstanding. I’m not saying that there aren’t shortages and problems, but in my opinion, the media make a big deal about what isn’t working and never mention what’s doing really well.

I don’t like the thought of an insurance company having to ok whether I’m entitled to a certain test or treatment-- or not.

We pay a lot in Canada for our services, but the actual cost of each medical act is much lower than in the US. I know I should find a cite for that, but I’ll just give you a cite for comparative health administration costs (in 1999), an article from the New England Journal of Medicine: Cost of Health Care Administration- US/Canada

Just a brief excerpt:

59

Actually, I picked it by googling “U.S. cities by size”, then going down this list, which was the first hit in the search, until I found the first city under 1,000,000 in population, which happened to be San Jose. I had no idea what it’s crime rate was. That’s the honest truth. I wasn’t stacking the deck in any way.

In fact, I saw Detroit right below it, and I knew that Detroit was a a high-crime city, so I decided to include it as a third data point to be fair. If I really wanted to be misleading, I would have left it out.

If you’d like, we can also look at the next city after Detroit, which is Indianapolis:

Crime per 100,000 population for Indianapolis:

Murder: 13.5
Robbery: 409
Burglary: 1443
vehicle thefts: 1123

Those numbers are closer to Edmonton’s, albeit higher across the board. Robbery and murder are significantly higher, vehicle thefts are close to the same (probably one city beats the other in various years due to fluctuations). Indianapolis is, by the way, significantly higher in all crime statistics than the U.S. average.

I just did some quick googling to see what makes Indianapolis crime so high - and it supports what I said - gangsta culture in the inner city, poverty, and gang activity. Most of the killings appear to be prostitutes and young men associated with gangs (plus collateral damage from drive-bys), just as they are here in Edmonton. Our numbers are smaller not because we’re Canadian, but because we don’t have as large an inner city or as large a gang population.

BTW, Canada’s average rate per 100,000 population for burglaries and vehicle thefts is higher than the U.S. average rate. The rate for homicide is about 1/3 of the U.S. rate, and the rate for robbery is about half. So the notion that we don’t have to lock our doors and live in total safety is ridiculous. We’re more likely to have our cars stolen and our houses broken into than you are.

60

Okay, I’ll take San Francisco’s transit system, too. It’s better than Toronto’s. I’ll also take Chicago’s.

Toronto has a BAD transit system.