What Hillarycare Would Mean to Americans

One of the things I really like about wintering on the Gulf coast of Florida is the number of Canadian and British friends I have been able to make. For some reason they seem often to enjoy Florida and both ballroom dancing and bridge, and through those activities I have met several couples from both countries. Although my sample size is not very large, it hits me hard that both a Canadian man I know and a British woman I also know have had nightmarish experiences with their respective Canadian and British socialized health-care systems.

The man had a high PSA reading, which often signifies prostate cancer, and must be followed up immediately by a biopsy. Time is critical in diagnosing and treating this horrendous disease. The man had to wait several months before he could have the biopsy; fortunately it was negative, but what he doesn’t know, and I didn’t want to tell him, was that the Canadian doctors were using a biopsy procedure that is outdated and often misses the tumor. I know this because I am a survivor of prostate cancer and know more about it than I care to. See the highlighted section in the article below that deals with prostate cancer survival rates.

The British woman suffered a stroke while vacationing here in Florida and was treated by local doctors in a local hospital. They saved her life and her future quality of life with a rapid and appropriate response followed by a regimen of physical therapy. This happened in the fall of 2006, after which she returned to Great Britain where she found no services available to monitor her condition or her therapy. She and her husband returned this fall, and she told me that she is absolutely convinced that, if the stroke had occurred in England, she would be dead.

"A Canadian Doctor Describes How Socialized Medicine Doesn't Work"

By DAVID GRATZER, IBD Editorials, July 26, 2007

I was once a believer in socialized medicine. As a Canadian, I had soaked up the belief that government-run health care was truly compassionate. What I knew about American health care was unappealing: high expenses and lots of uninsured people.

My health care prejudices crumbled on the way to a medical school class. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute.

Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care.

Dr. Jacques Chaoulli faces the media in Montreal in June 2005, after he got Canada's Supreme Court to strike down a Quebec law banning private insurance for services covered under Medicare — a decision the rocked the country's universal health care system.

I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic — with a three-year wait list; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.

Government researchers now note that more than 1.5 million Ontarians (or 12% of that province's population) can't find family physicians. Health officials in one Nova Scotia community actually resorted to a lottery to determine who'd get a doctor's appointment.

Excerpt: See Rest At From Sea to Shining Sea