What is it with people not caring enough to read the cites they post? There is not one mention of Canada in that article.
Yes. They buy American drugs from Canada. Because Canada forces pharma companies to sell drugs at low prices. Try that in the US and you will kill pharma companies.
What does that matter what the destination is? The fact is the US system is so poorly run and expensive that people are going all over the world to escape this system. Why does it matter how many go individually to Canada or Mexico or Belgium or the UK? Americans travel to a wide range of wealthy and middle income countries for health care.
How will it kill the pharma companies? If it killed them, they wouldn’t sell in Canada at all. They would pull out of that market if it was costing them money.
The guy I was responding to talked about the patient flow from US to Canada. I asked for a cite. You jump in with a cite that has no mention of Canada whatsoever. Why did you respond to me with that cite? Was that relevant to my question?
It probably makes them money but on the thinnest of margins. They make it up by jacking up prices in the US. If there was no US to jack up prices in, those prices in Canada would not be supportable.
The national median wait time was 18.2 weeks, about three days longer than last year, according to Waiting Your Turn, the 2013 edition of the Fraser Institute’s annual report. In 1993, the median wait time was 9.3 weeks.
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Manitoba’s wait time was 25.9 weeks, Nova Scotia’s was 25.8, Saskatchewan’s was 25.7, Newfoundland and Labrador’s was 23.7, Alberta’s was 23.1, and British Columbia’s was 19.9.
That’s wait time from the time you visit your GP to the time you get specialist’s treatment. How would you like, in the US, to wait 20 weeks for treatment from a specialist?
I needed something done recently here in the US. The “wait” time was about 10 days - and that’s because I had to psych myself up for it. Otherwise it could have been done in 5 days. In Canada, looking at that article and taking that specialty’s wait times, it would have taken 5 months until I could have that procedure done.
Not sure why calling it that does not make it a flow anyhow. The point IMHO stands, there is a lot of movement in the Canadian border with Americans abusing the Canadian system. Numbers are hard to come by, but they are large enough to not ignore them and it shows that many Americans close to Canada choose to vote with their feet.
The point certainly doesn’t “stand”. It’s not “patient flow”. It is Americans trying (and in a lot of cases succeeding) to obtain Canadian medical services for free through fraud. Since “free” (even when fraudulent) will always be cheaper than US medical care, it certainly cannot be taken as a legitimate “patient flow” indicating anything about the differences between Canadian and US health care other than the fact that Canadians are laughably lax about preventing fraud in their system.
In fact, I don’t think there can be any legal “patient flow” from US to Canada, since AFAIU Canadian doctors are not allowed to accept private patients or perform private services.
What’s your point? Yes, looking further in the cite some people dispute the proposed solution to the long wait times. Note that they are not disputing the long wait times themselves.
That is not the point, I’m just saying, the American system that does not cover all citizens is not a good one when it allows situations like that one to be possible.
What “situations”? Fraud? Since fraudulent stealing of Canadian health care by Americans is “free”, how do you propose the American system would prevent it, except making it “free” here too? With probably even longer wait times? That’s the ticket.
If the American System was the superior one then that situation would not take place. Neither paying more than double of our GDP and in turn get less care and less people covered.
It may be Canadians’ choice to have 5-month average wait times for any specialist procedures, but I bet you if you put the question of whether they wanted something like that here to most US health care consumers, they’d laugh at you. And yes, I know, you don’t have to tell me, you personally would be all for it.
It is even cooler when we looks at the polls of those days:
BTW, it would not surprise me that Americans traveling abroad are not so poor and if they had a medical condition, it would not be impossible then to have huge premiums.
If fraud were an actual problem, they’d do something about it. Instead, they weathered the recession way better than we did.
The fraud is only a problem for the pharmaceutical companies, not the health care system. And seeing how much they clearly overcharge for their medicine here in the U.S., I don’t really care about that. A leaner, more care-focused medical industry is something I very much want. I want to get rid of the people who become doctors only because it is a lucrative profession.
You seem to assume a priori that everyone will agree that things you think are bad are bad. It’d be one thing if you were on a board with people who generally think like you do, but you aren’t. Why are you always so surprised that so many of us are, well, liberal? Do you really think it’s because we haven’t thought about these things?
Well, I used to be surprised that posters do not read the threads to which they reply (or, if they read them, they display utter lack of reading comprehension). But now I am used to it.