It is socialized medicine at its’ best. I have used your for profit sytem also, and found nothing but greed, doctors only interested in running a factory to process patients like cattle.

I will take the VA solicized medicine system anytime, everytime. And if you are only concerned about money, it is very efficient financially. Costs much less than WAR.

Victoria is the Capital city of British Columbia, Not a large city by any measure, modern, educated, beautiful, with two major Hospitals.

While I was there it was report in the news that (at two separate incidents) a person died while waiting their turn at the ER to get medical attention…this is occuring all the time throughout Canada…Take a Number…no matter how sick you are?

I went to a local doctor in Victoria when I came down with a sore throat, he prescribed a generic antibiotic…my cost at a Canadian national discount drugstore in 1996…slightly over $55.00 cdn…at the time the exchange rate made it about $32.00 usd.
When I got back to Seattle I check with my local pharmacy as to what the same prescription would cost me…the Seattle price was $18.65 usd

There also an article in the Victoria newspaper during that year that A Duncan, B.C. man (about an 75 minute drive north of Victoria) who did very well in business and became extremely wealth wanted to give a gift of thanks to his old home town by buy a MRI machine for the local community hospital…he would pay for everything, the construction of a MRI room the supplies the wages and supplies to run the MRI for 5 years…Since it was about a 4 1/2 month wait to get a MRI done in Victoria…you could have a growing tumour…but you had to wait in line to get a MRI to get a full medical report.

Instead of the provincial government saying thank you and issuing a required liscence to build and operate the MRI unit, the goverment said no…NO LISCENCE!!! The reason why…the answer was the government said they did not know where they would get the funding to run the MRI unit after five years….can you imagine the Canadians were incapable of planning for funding 5 years out…so they said no thank you.

Another true Story, my reguarly medical provider in Seattle in the mid 1990′s was Virginia Mason Medical Clinic and Hospital.

One of the local TV news stations (I believe it was KING5 News a local NBC Affilate) they were doing a story on a woman from the Okanogan Region of British Columbia, she had a serious growing cancer in Canada she had to wait for about 6 MONTHS before she could begin treatment…by them the cancer might have progressed to far.

Lucky for them they had an additional insurance policy (non governmental) that allowed her to travel to the U.S. for treatment right away. The TV station showed the RV that her and her husband drove down to Seattle and he stayed in while she was in the hospital and then when she could leave the hospital but needed to stay locally for radition and chemo treatment they both stayed in the RV in a parking lot across from Virginia Mason.

The husband and wife were on TV thanking all the local people for helping them during the wife’s stay.

In B.C., they people have a saying that what really runs the country is the “5-P’s”…Corrupt Politians, Pot Growers, Pimps, Prostitutes and RCMP’s (Really Corrupt Mounted Police).

It’s a really beautifil country…but after doing business in Canada the last 23 years I have seen up close a government ran medical system that is totally broken.

A country rich in natural resources that the Federal and provincal governments sell to the outside interests for pennies on the dollars while at the same time destroying their natural environment.

Just look at the Tar Sand area of Northern Alberta the size of New York State and they are Strip Mining the entire area…it is fast becoming a huge enviromental diaster and the Canadian Government knows it. This is not a country whose example we want to follow in anything but Peace.

I could go on and on about the changes I think should be made. Here are a few:
1. We should have a single payer system. The private health insurances have taken advantage of physicians and patients. They are one reason why our health care system is in trouble. I have been a patient as well as a provider and know first hand how the insurances are wrecking their havoc. I would be happy to provide you with many examples, however this not the time.

2. Our medical profession has been divided and conquered by many forces. I was closely involved with the Mass Medical Society suit against Blue Cross Blue Shield in the 1980′s. As you know, we won in the courts and lost big time in the legislature. Since then, the health care profession at least as I know it in Mass. has changed from a fairly collegial caring profession that tried to answer the needs of the communities to one of competition with specialties jealously guarding their turf and physicians being trained to answer the needs of their specialties rather than the needs of their patients.

Physicians are not being trained to go to a community and do what they can do well. An article in the Harvard Medical Alumni Magazine spoke to this problem, when a cardiologist from Bangor [the head of cardiology] took a sabbatical and spent 6 months pushing a cardiac ultrasound machine incognito around one of the teaching hospitals.

In my solo practice, in Plymouth, I saw how the Boston hospitals were competing with each other and feeding all kinds of public relations to the public encouraging them to get the” best” care in the center. Consequently more and more patients were going into Boston for care that could be given just as well if not better in the community. The care in Boston is two to three times more expensive.

I was a member of the New England Surgical Society, as was my father before me. The relationships among the New England Surgeons were very different for my generation compared with my father’s. The relationships among the surgeons in Boston changed as well, as the Mass General Hospital paired up with Brigham and Woman’s and the New England Medical Center and other good hospitals were left out. Because buying health care is not like buying TV sets, this has led to tremendously increased costs of health care.

Another example of trends that are increasing health care costs can be seen in my efforts to answer the health care needs in my community. When I first came to Plymouth in 1972, there was no surgeon interested in caring for patients with hand trauma. I had been trained in my residency in treating hand trauma. So I made a big effort to take more training and be available for our emergency room. After about 25 years of treating hand trauma as well as common office hand and upper extremity problems, I called the American Board of Surgery and asked them if I could take the Hand Certificate examination. HMO’s were not willing to list my name as a hand surgeon. The ABS refused to let me take the exam because I wasn’t doing rheumatoid hand surgery, pediatric hand surgery, replantation, etc. With Boston 40 miles from Plymouth my community didn’t need me to do those kinds of hand surgery. Consequently, although I had been taking care of hand injuries for 25 plus years, I couldn’t be recognized.

Several years before I retired, a young woman trained as a hand surgeon came to our community; however she didn’t want to cover the emergency room more than three days a month. Now that I am gone, most of these patients are going to Boston, and in some cases are being admitted to the hospital for one to two days for problems that I would usually handle in our minor surgery dept. in one to two hours and then send them home.

These are just some of the issues that really need to be handled by the medical profession as a whole. Perhaps a political figure such as an American President should formally charge our large umbrella medical organizations like the AMA or the ACS to create a more affordable health care system. As you probably know, the IOM’s Crossing the Quality Chasm doesn’t even mention the word affordability. If you have read this far, thank you. I know there is no easy solution.

When is somebody going to truly expose this guy? He gets all the attention because the left love him so much.

Here was another article that I thought was well-written:

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=45d10bdf-a2ee-4f0a-ac53-580c9864c16d

Thanks for your work – let’s avoid the fool’s gold of socialized medicine and also free up our system from the government controls and sue-happy public that drive up the prices.

In my experience Medicare is sufficient for even major health problems, the drug portion could be picked up by one governmental entity and not hundreds. Why are insurance companies involved in Medicare anyway? Nevermind, I know the answer.

At the end of the movie, the audience all applauded, something I last experienced when the female lead in “As Good As it Gets” delivered a diatribe on the difficulties she encountered with her insurance company in trying to get her son’s asthma care needs met. These reactions reflect a level of antipathy on the part of the public toward their current experience with healthcare that should not go unrecognized.

As I read your piece in this morning’s DMN, the thought occurs to me that there is a difference between how you (and most economists and policy makers) look at the health care mess, which I would call “the macro view of things” and how patients and families look at their situation, which I would call “the micro view”.

As a follow-on to “Sicko”, when I was in Canada last week I did a little micro survey of my own. Denny, the waiter at Hy’s Steakhouse in Winnipeg, married, father of two (both in college) and care giver to his elderly mother, rates his experience with the Canadian system as a “9″. My Cree Indian fishing Guide at Hatchet Lake, in Saskatchewan, Norman, a single man with a daughter and a girlfriend, who live in LaRonge, Sask., except during the fishing season, rates his experience as a “8-9″. I didn’t drill down to find out the basis for their rating their experience as they did. On the other hand, the owner of Hatchet Lake Lodge, George Flemming was having a lot of trouble with his knees, at age 65 or so, a few years ago. After a delay of many months to get an appointment to see his orthopedic surgeon in Prince Albert, Sask., he was told he would need joint replacements. The reply to his question regarding when he could have those procedures done, was “2 1/2 years”, so he came down to Rockford, IL, and an orthopedic surgeon friend who had been a guest at the lodge “did” both knees the following week, and George has done fine ever since.

Here is the problem, in my view. People experience life in the micro, and then vote that way, while policy makers must make decisions in the macro, and then vote that way. The two views are sometimes light years apart.

My entry into the practice of medicine occurred the year Medicare started, and, by and large, I have had no major complaints about the way the system has worked with respect to my practice as a radiation oncologist. Medicaid has had its problems, but wasn’t all that bad either.

My fishing friend (a lawyer) and I were seated last week with two ob-Gyn docs from Utica, NY, and got an earful about their negative experience, mainly with managed care and hmo’s. Administrative bureaucracy and reimbursement levels that have failed to rise to meet their rising costs were at the core of what they had to say. However, when I asked if they knew any docs on food stamps, they had to agree that they did not. The practice of medicine, in my view, remains a privilege, and a very rewarding calling, despite the fact that the Utica docs would not counsel their kids to enter the field. None of my kids went into the “family business” either, but it was not because I made any effort to dissuade them.

My biggest concern is not that we will get to a single payer system. It is that the insurance industry would be put in charge of it, and that it will not be even as effective as Medicare has been. The outrageous compensation of senior management at organizations like United Healthcare are in their way as large a tax on the consumers as is the tax bill paid by citizens in nations with single payer systems. Likewise, the business of cost shifting to meet the expense imposed on the system by uncompensated care, much of it a result of federal mandates under “EMTALA”, is a tax, and so is the higher cost of dealing with sicker people in the absence of appropriate attention to timely prevention and screening for conditions treatable at an earlier stage at a much lower cost. And, for Part D to pay for pharmaceuticals “at the market”, rather than at a negotiated purchase price reflects the power that industry has in the shaping and influencing of public policy.