Two Views On Universal Health Care

Which view is closer to the truth? Dr. Doom (aka Dr. Day) or defenders of the public system?

I'm gonna go ahead and focus on the second video because it made some glaring claims that can be verified with facts from Stats Canada.

First off, let's get the philosophical mumbo-jumbo out of the way, the overall point seems to focus that "profit seeking" will equal to "not caring." You don't need to be "profit seeking" to lack compassion. The public system provides plenty of it on its own. Ironically, the system tends to view patients as cost -centric as opposed to patient-centric. On the private side, it's the opposite.

Moving along.

Next, the woman in this here clip talks about democratic principles, or lack thereof, in the medical system. I think the operative word here is "transparency." As in do you think I can see through you, please?

She's right. One problem are the layers and layers and layers of bureaucracy preventing efficient use of resources. A substantial amount of the funds (if memory serves me right up to 73%) goes into labour costs.

From the Conference Board of Canada: 

"Canada’s middle-of-the-road ranking overall—a solid “B”—would surprise most Canadians who are immensely proud of their health care system. Canadians have universal access to health care services, highly skilled and committed health care professionals, and internationally recognized health care and research institutions. But the Canadian health care system also has challenges. These include limited availability of comprehensive health information systems, wait times for some health care diagnostics and treatments, and management systems that don’t focus enough on the quality of health outcomes."\

Health care spending, for countries in the OECD, continues to outpace economic growth.

She's underplaying the severity of access and wait times to major surgeries a little. In fact, let's challenge Congressman Dennis Kucinic's obscene and obtuse that the average wait time in Canada is "three weeks."

Wait times vary from province to province depending on the surgery. It's hard, if impossible to determine any real figure. In order to make sense of things, the Canadian came up with this initiative.

I invite you yo check out each province. See if the facts measure up to "three weeks."

I did a bit of poking around and began with my home province:

"...The Québec government is committed to ensuring that all total hip and knee replacement operations and cataract operations take place within six months for patients whose data have been entered into SIMASS since June 1, 2007.."

By all accounts, they don't seem to have hit their objections.

If you can make sense of this table be my guest.

I then waltzed into neighboring Ontario. Looks like you can't even get information on wait times in Ontario because, well, it doesn't seem you can get any type of surgery. I punched in postal codes for Guelph and Toronto and couldn't get any meaningful information. And this is a site linked by Statistics Canada.

How about big, beautiful British Columbia? Check these beauties out. The average wait for ACL surgery for 90% of patients is...36 weeks. According to the table, the best case scenario is 10.6 weeks for 50% of the population. Ok, that's the knee. What about major issues like open heart? Wait times here are better, thankfully. 90% wait about 10 weeks (still a long wait times) and 4 weeks for 50%. It's even better for cranial surgery but things get worse again for back surgery - up to 28 weeks - and hip replacement - 31 weeks.

MRI scans in Manitboa? See for yourself. Far from three weeks.

This trend  table for urgent heart valve surgery in Alberta shows how difficult it is to get a firm handle on wait times. Still, it's pretty clear, again, you're more likely to wait well over three weeks. Wait times for non-urgent procedures, however, rise substantially - averaging well over 20 weeks.

In fact, if you were to add up all the surgeries and services offered across the land they're closer to what them inept dude from the Manhattan Institute was asserting in the clip to which Kucinic proceeded to rip apart with his own pathetic statistics that were far more off the mark.

It's one thing, speaking of the "reporter" in the clip, to try and freeze out a neo-conservative think tanker and quite another to lead people into believing a politician's interpretation of the facts as accurate and valid. It's also one thing to brag about a health care system while remaining oblivious to the actual quality of the services provided.

At roughly the 8:33 minute mark, she speaks of how family doctors will work with patients in helping them guide to see a specialist. This is true. However, and this is something I've said over and over, it's been well documented over the years that millions of Canadians don't have a family physician.

These here are the bloody facts. Excuse the pun.

Everyone (from public representatives, citizens all the way to private practioners) are in agreement reform is necessary. Where and how do we go from here? I don't have answers but I'm pragmatic enough to understand we must accept the reality of private services being part of the solution moving forward. Demonizing it makes little sense.