UNITING PHYSICIANS & PATIENTS AS A VOICE IN HEALTH CARE
page: 1 | 2
I am Dr. Lee Kurisko, a radiologist with Consulting Radiologists Ltd. based in Minneapolis. I am a Canadian physician having lived and worked in Canada until four years ago. I have 14 years of experience working in Canada's system of universal health care. I was Medical Director of Diagnostic Imaging for Thunder Bay Regional Hospital in Thunder Bay Canada before I left. As a medical student, I recall defending Canadian universal health care as morally superior to U.S. health care. As I came to assume higher and higher levels of responsibility in within the health care system, I saw the impossibility of delivering care under such a system and became fully cognizant of its limitations.
When I was working in Canada, I had a waiting list 13 months long for MRI and 7 months long for CT. I had the nightmarish task of triaging hundreds of patients awaiting these tests. There were patients that I had triaged too far out in the waiting list that had unknown rampant infections or tumors that could have benefited from earlier treatment. But if I new what their tests would show, they would not have needed the test. Much of our x-ray equipment was old and decrepit. Our angiography equipment was so old that it had a habit of breaking down; sometimes in the middle of the delicate medical procedure of cerebral angiography during which I would thread a catheter from a person's femoral artery in their groin up into the blood vessels to their brain. I knew orthopedic surgeons and a gastroenterologist with two-year waiting lists. The waiting list for an MRI in Newfoundland is presently two and a half years long.
What is being proposed today is a major intrusion into the health care economy and therefore is subject to the same basic economic and political factors that cause poor health care in Canada.
There are three practical reasons why Canadian universal health care is a failure. Firstly, neither physicians nor patients have any accountability for costs. If a commodity has no direct cost attached to it, the demand becomes infinite. Hence the bankruptcy of the Canadian system. With the third-party payer system here in the U.S., the situation is similar. Physicians and patients alike are not accountable for costs hence true costs are exorbitant.
Secondly, rather than being an economy-stimulating, employment-generating, resource-creating business, health care is a government run monopoly which parasitizes the Canadian economy and whose primary purpose is to save money while maintaining the façade of providing care.
In Canada, with health care being delivered from governmentally derived budgets rather than from profit, a Zero Sum Game is created in which doctors and patients alike must clamor for their fair share from a limited resource pool. As government in the U.S. foots the bill for more and more of health care, the same dynamic unfolds. In Canada, such a strategy does not actually control costs. As of about two years ago, 46 cents of every provincial tax dollar in Ontario was being spent on health care with massive federal assistance on top of that. That is money that is not available for other services like infrastructure and education.
Thirdly, health care is a major segment of the economy which government attempts to centrally plan just as the Soviet economy was centrally planned with disastrous consequences. As a payer for health care, government, whether American or Canadian, has an enormous incentive to direct and control how dollars are spent. Imagine if the government declared itself the sole provider of bread. The government alone would determine how much wheat would be grown, how many bakeries there would be, how many loaves of bread could be baked, where and when the bread could be sold. The number of loaves of bread baked would be far below public demand. People would be squabbling over those few loaves of bread. Chaos would reign. Such is the state of Canadian health care just as it was for food production was in the Soviet Union. If both the Soviet Union and Canada have failed with socialism, there is no reason to believe that the United States or Minnesota, for that matter, will be successful.
Americans, just like Canadians, incorrectly believe that the shortcomings of American health care are due to the market nature of U.S. health care. The truth is very different.
page: 1 | 2