I’ve noticed that no one here is making the claim that health care service delivered in Canada is substantially better than the health care service provided here in the USA. Every Canadian has access to their health care system, but that’s true in the USA. Hospital emergency rooms have to accept every person who walks, or is carried, in through their doors.
When I read that Japanese hospitals are, under law, prohibited from profit, I was stunned. Inconceivable and profoundly unamerican, that just doesn’t happen in the USA … for any business or any industry. The individual is entitled to profit, government cannot abridge that.
Walk this though, the American tax-payer buying every last share of stock in every single hospital corporation in the entire land … not going to happen …
The fear that the National Health Service is under threat from privatisation and exploitation by evil capitalists is never far from the political debate here, which sadly discourages many much needed reforms. Despite the current national deficit, the NHS is ring fenced from budget reductions. Politicians tinker with it at their peril.
They can’t. They will patch you up and stabilize you, then send you a bill that costs 10x more than what it actually cost to take care of you. After that you are on your own. Since most serious conditions are chronic the ER is not going to be much help. I don’t understand people who don’t see anything wrong with our system. More and more people get ground up and spit out by our health system, it is becoming impossible to ignore.
Good point, though I don’t think this effects my point about quality of care … having access to the care is much better under the Canadian system. This is one thing the ACA was supposed to fix, and it has to some degree. For those actually receiving cancer treatment, the quality is about the same.
Does the UK fear their own “evil capitalists”, or do they fear “evil capitalists” from another country? Painfully slow implimentation of reforms is the price the UK pays to keep Wall Street investment bankers from making their health care decisions. I understand why the UK doesn’t want to see Americans getting filthy rich on the back of your health care system. I guess I’ll never understand why the UK doesn’t want to see Englishmen getting filthy rich on the back of your health care system. It’s a full crop of plums to be picked !!!
I agree 100% … this looks like a market bubble to me … either we change the system ourselves or it will change itself … but change will come.
How so? If some wealthy guys are becoming more wealthy, they will resist change, and they own senators and representatives.
The father of a friend is an anesthesiology nurse. His home costs two million. How many guys who make that much money and more are involved in each and every surgery?
The reality is most people don’t need expensive medical care most of their lives. So health care being unaffordable isn’t going to be a huge deal to most people most of the time. There isn’t too much incentive to make things affordable across the board.
We will probably revert to 1980s level of health care before we make 2015 level health care affordable. Even in liberal states they barely fight to make health more affordable.
I’m guessing the solution will involve finding a tier of medicine that provides 80-90% of medical care for 50% of the cost, the other 10-20% require expensive private plans.
The UK public tend to regard the NHS in emotional and moral terms.
This documentary tells the story of the struggle between the Nye Bevan the socialist politician who drove through the founding of the NHS in the face of fierce opposition from the medical profession and the Tories led by Churchill. It paints a grim picture of the UK in 1948 and how cathartic the foundation of socialised healthcare was for the public. It was pay back time for fighting WW2. The sense of entitlement to free healthcare paid for out of general taxation is pretty much embedded in the DNA.
The evil capitalists at that time was the medical profession itself which seemed to care little for the health of the nation while anxious to preserve their income. Bevan did an admirable job of out manoeuvring them. We don’t get many principled politicians like that these days.
Big profits are made out of the NHS, it is a huge organisation, with a big budget and a none too efficient procurement system. It buys lots of clinical health systems from US suppliers and a big hospital building programme used some very innovative financial contracts - PFI which made many lawyers and financiers people very rich indeed.
However despite this, the NHS is a cheap deal amongst comparable universal health care systems at around 7% GDP.
I don’t understand too much of this. Slow reforms? The NHS is constantly reforming, it never stops. If ideas work they are widely implemented because it means the budget goes further elsewhere.
How could it be otherwise when it consumes so little GDP.
Are you telling me that the sixth largest organisation in the world employing 1.6 million people has streamlined internal processes that keep it lean and efficient? :dubious:
Maybe costs are kept down because the UK government alone has responsibility for its financing through general taxation and has centralised control of the national budget for healthcare. It has been that way since it was formed in 1948.
Whether it delivers what it should fairly and efficiently is an issue that will always be contended.
A possible trigger I see for that second point is that, if a doctor directly benefits from ordering more tests and is in it for the money, then hell yeah he will order more tests. Salaried doctors don’t benefit from ordering more tests - not even if the also-salaried people involved include their spouse.
I’m sure it’s not as lean and efficient as some people would like, but even greyhounds can only be so thin before they have to slow down.
Are there efforts to add pharmacy to the health care system, or are there any programs to help people who have to buy medicine? In the US we added a pharmacy program to medicare about a decade ago.
Most jobs include drug and dental benefits. Some provinces have different drug plans. New Brunswick is in the process of crafting a drug plan. Right now it is voluntary (was supposed to go mandatory April 1st but the Health Minister put that off as perception was that the premiums would be too expensive for low income households). Manitoba has a plan where you pay a deductible based on your income. I’m not sure what, if anything, is in place for other provinces.
Ontario has had full prescription drug coverage for seniors for longer than that, though it varies by province, as noted. Likewise the poor get coverage. For others it tends to be a standard part of employment benefits. And of course there are no costs for any medication or procedure administered in a hospital or clinic. There might also be special provisions for rare super-expensive drugs as I sometimes read about such drugs being added to the formulary which makes them available at no cost.
It is difficult to make a comparison between the health care results in two different countries, because differences between two countries in factors such as ethnic origin, obesity, smoking rates, and so on, can make it difficult to do direct comparisons.
That said, two of the most commonly used statistics to compare health care systems in different countries are the rates for infant mortality, and life expectancy, because these are fairly objective and are generally believed to be tied to the quality of health care.
According to this Wikipedia article: Comparison of the health care systems in Canada and the United States, Canada ranks ahead of the United States in both these factors. For instance, life expectancy in Canada is 80.34 years, compared with 78.6 years for residents of the US. A WHO study ranked Canada 30th in the world, and the US 37th.
Yes, it’s difficult to do exact comparisons, though as you point out specific metrics like life expectancy and infant mortality score significantly better in Canada.
I did see at least one peer-reviewed study comparing cancer outcomes between Canada and the US, and I’m sure there have been many comparing the outcomes of various diseases. The one I recall concluded that outcomes for certain cancers were somewhat better in the US, and for others, somewhat better in Canada. Overall outcomes were about the same, with no clear reason for such differences as there were. IIRC, it also concluded that US patients tended to get more screening tests, but that this didn’t correlate with any improvement in outcome. It’s also possible (I don’t recall if this was a documented conclusion) that Canadian patients may have the benefit of earlier detection of serious diseases, because there is no financial disincentive to seeing a doctor, or to a precautionary hospital admission. I also recall (possibly from a different study) that on average Canadian hospital stays are longer than US ones, providing an opportunity for fuller recovery and minimizing potential complications.
