# CanaDopers: What does your single-payer health system cost you? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 3, 2007, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/canadopers-what-does-your-single-payer-health-system-cost-you/394444 "2007-03-03T18:36:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2007, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/canadopers-what-does-your-single-payer-health-system-cost-you/394444/21 "2007-03-05T19:20:50Z")
[QUOTE=KarlGauss] Another way of looking at - the effect on an individual tax-payer: I pay about 40% of my gross income in income tax (yes, **40%** of my gross). About half of that, 20% of my gross, goes for the Provincial (Ontario) income tax. [/QUOTE] I live in Ontario and I don’t understand how this is possible. Ontario tax rates are lower than federal tax rates in every bracket and in virtually every circumstance I can imagine. Your own cite simply does not support your claim of 20%; even with surcharges that doesn’t add up, and after all the feds have surcharges too. There’s no level (well, aside from making no money at all) where you would pay as much to Ontario as you would to the federal government. At 40%, you make a pretty fair amount of dough, though. Good for you! I just think more of it than you realize is going to the feds. [QUOTE=Sam Stone] If you actually want to compare the two health care systems, you’re much better off actually comparing the life expectancy of people AFTER they have been admitted to the health care system with serious problems. [/QUOTE] But this, too, is an extremely problematic measurement. A system which subsidizes primary care could reduce the incidence of serious, hospital-admission level injuries and diseases. How do you measure the extent to which subsidizing family doctor visits and such results in early detection of problems that would be more severe, more likely to result in death or serious disability, and more expensive down the line? Comparisons between two different systems just aren’t that easy to make because it’s so hard to come up with controls. > [@](#): > > It’s not unusual in Canada for people with broken fingers and arms to wait days in an emergency room before getting treatment Oh, come on now, Sam. It’s unusual for a person in Canada to wait in an emergency room for days for ANYTHING. I’ve never in my life heard of such a thing. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2007, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/canadopers-what-does-your-single-payer-health-system-cost-you/394444/22 "2007-03-06T03:06:25Z")
[QUOTE=RickJay] Oh, come on now, Sam. It’s unusual for a person in Canada to wait in an emergency room for days for ANYTHING. I’ve never in my life heard of such a thing. [/QUOTE] From [this cite:](http://www.thestar.com/News/article/175394) > [@](#): > > “Out of the 30 patient beds in my ER, 22 of them have patients who need to be admitted to hospital and are waiting for a bed to open up in the hospital,” he says. **These patients may have to wait days.** > > The main reason hospital ERs across Canada are overcrowded is not that people use them as walk-in clinics. Numerous studies have shown there are too few hospital beds for patients coming through the ER who desperately need them. So, patients wait in emergency room beds and the whole system gets backed up. > … > Lying in one of Cwinn’s beds is **a retired man with a broken hip who has waited in the emergency room with extraordinary patience for two days for a surgeon, surgery time and a hospital bed.** The first day he spent parked in an equipment closet. Now, he is gracious but concerned: “I have had great care from the doctors and nurses but I am awfully sore.” Then a touch of anger breaks through: “This is not the system I paid for.” In countries with socialized medicine, people with acute problems are treated pretty well. If you go into the ER with a serious problem that needs immediate treatment, you’ll get it fairly quickly. The average wait for serious ER visits is around an hour. But when you move down the list in severity, you find the resources vanish pretty quickly. Without a profit motive, and with finite health care dollars, governments tend to cut back in areas that are not life-threatening but which contribute greatly to our overall quality of life. Thus, you can get surgery after a heart attack fairly quickly if necessary, but if you need a hip replacement, be prepared to wait for a long, long time. Years, in many cases. As for the vaunted efficiency of our system: > [@](#): > > The OECD shows we spend almost one percentage point more on health care than all 30 countries on average, or 9.9 per cent of GDP in 2003. > > For the extra money we spend, we get very few resources. Canada has fewer hospital beds, physicians, MRIs and CTs than the average OECD country. The rest of the article is interesting. Shortages and gluts due to bad government management, red tape, politicization, a brain drain, and all the other hallmarks of socialized services plague the Canadian health care system. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2007, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/canadopers-what-does-your-single-payer-health-system-cost-you/394444/23 "2007-03-06T03:43:35Z")
[QUOTE=Sam Stone] The rest of the article is interesting. Shortages and gluts due to bad government management, red tape, politicization, a brain drain, and all the other hallmarks of socialized services plague the Canadian health care system. [/QUOTE] Oh, you’ll get no argument from me that the system needs fixing and that private health care should be part of the fix. Regrettably, each province then has its own unique problems, which adds to the fun. But now, Sam, you said it wasn’t unusual for people in ERs to wait days **before receiving treatment,** not before getting an operation. You deliberately made it sound as if it’s commonplace for people with broken limbs to sit in the waiting room for days. Your cite doesn’t support that, wouldn’t support the “not unusual” bit even if it did, and you know full well it’s unusual for something like that to happen. I agree we have serious problems but hysteria isn’t a solution. In Ontario, of course, the #1 problem is a moving window of a lack of doctors because of a decision by the government during the Rae NDP administration that a great way to cut down on health costs would be to prevent medical schools from graduating doctors. The theory was that if there weren’t as many doctors around you wouldn’t have to pay them all that money. Really. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2007, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/canadopers-what-does-your-single-payer-health-system-cost-you/394444/24 "2007-03-06T04:35:59Z")
Well, I considered ‘treatment’ of a broken bone to be actually setting the bone, not just having someone come out, triage you, slap you on a gurney, and tell you to wait. Here’s another example: [Two-day wait to treat broken leg](http://www.canada.com/topics/bodyandhealth/story.html?id=d10d03d1-7b5f-48ba-99c7-a6fe4b85ef20): > [@](#): > > A 23-year-old single mom claims she was made to wait nearly two days at Surrey Memorial Hospital before doctors repaired her broken leg. > > Sandy Southwell says she broke her fibula in a fall on an icy sidewalk just before midnight Sunday. She was admitted to Surrey Memorial shortly after. > > “They said my surgery would be in the morning [Monday],” Southwell said. But the hours dragged on and the operation to put a plate on the damaged bone was delayed. > > “I was getting scared,” she said. “I felt like going to a different hospital, but what can I do. I was scared and shaking.” > > Southwell said doctors finally operated about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday. > > Lisa Thibault of the Fraser Health Authority insists Southwell was treated for her injuries within 24 hours of being admitted. But Southwell’s mother (also named Sandy) disagrees. > > “She called me at 9 o’clock Tuesday night and they told her she had to get off the phone because she was going into surgery,” the elder Southwell said. > > **Earlier, Thibault had said a wait of two days for surgery to repair a broken leg is not abnormal.** > … > **Sandy Southwell’s ordeal came just days after another patient, Susy Horna, described an excruciating four-day wait for broken-leg surgery at Surrey Memorial.** > > Southwell says she was hooked up to morphine and given painkillers but was fed only once – a measly meal of soggy noodles, Jell-O and tiny sandwiches after her surgery. > > “I asked for more and they said that’s it, there’s nothing more for you,” she said. > > A friend who tried to bring in a more substantial meal was blocked at the door because visiting hours were over, Southwell said in a tearful interview. Here’s what the [Alberta Liberals](http://www.liberalopposition.com/index.php/news/more/taft_calls_for_public_inquiry_into_calgary_health_region_emergency_room_cri/) have to say about ER wait times: > [@](#): > > There’s a serious problem with wait times in Calgary’s emergency rooms, and we need to tackle that problem now,” said Taft. “People sometimes wait for days in Calgary ERs. Those waits have resulted in avoidable deaths and who knows how much needless human suffering. In an emergency, you need care as quickly as possible.” > > Just days ago Rose Lundy experienced a miscarriage in front of 40 other patients as she waited for medical treatment at Peter Lougheed Centre. **People routinely spend hours and even days waiting for treatment in Calgary emergency rooms** – too often with similarly tragic, and in some cases even fatal, consequences. Granted, the Liberals could be spinning to make the Alberta government look bad. [This article](http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=c62aabf2-86b8-4782-8498-60c0169ab99c) should scare the crap out of anyone hoping to have their own Canadian system: > [@](#): > > We warned of ER deaths > MDs: Doctors complaining of sub-par care for 3 years, reports show > > Internal hospital documents released Wednesday show doctors have been warning B.C. politicians for at least three years about patients dying in emergency department hallways. > > They’ve also been ringing alarm bells about the unacceptable standard of emergency care available to people in Vancouver’s outlying areas. > > Over and over, politicians and government officials were advised that patients were suffering, and dying, because all the demands on the health system were being permitted to back up into emergency departments. > > … > > The agenda for that meeting, on Jan. 26, 2004, prepared by the physicians, set forth discussion points: “It is [our] unanimous opinion . . . that patients are sustaining morbidity and mortality as a result of poor access to care (ie. very long waits). **This is happening on a regular basis.** ” ---
**Author:** ![Gorsnak](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gorsnak/32/7587_2.png) [@Gorsnak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gorsnak)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2007, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/canadopers-what-does-your-single-payer-health-system-cost-you/394444/25 "2007-03-06T05:08:01Z")
What does any of this have to do with the cost of health care in Canada? This is GQ, gentlemen. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/canadopers-what-does-your-single-payer-health-system-cost-you/394444.md?page=1)