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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.