A side note

[blamebrampton]

Dear Americans,
Outside of your strange, strange country, most of the developed world has this marvellous thing which we like to call health care for all. I'm reading an interesting mpreg (that will teach me not to read the warnings!*) story from hd_hols and the poverty-stricken pregnant one is in despair as his health insurance will not cover it. On the off-chance it was written by someone on my flist, the good for society news is that in the UK, this is not the problem you might think it is! And I have my fingers crossed that in the US, it won't be for much longer, either.

(And if anyone is planning to respond telling me that socialised healthcare is evil, I will LAUGH AT YOU, and then I will QUOTE REAMS OF STATISTICS until you FLEE.)

XXX
BB

* And yes, my dislike of mpreg is not supported by the excellent writing that occurs within that genre and the imaginative plots that many superior writers bring to bear on the concept. But I still don't like it!

Comments

[annafugazzi.livejournal.com]

Both my husband and I have had cancer in the past five years: had either of us lived in Canada or the U.K., given their treatment modalities/wait times, we'd both be dead by now.
Eeeeep... as a Canadian who has seen ::counting up:: four people deal with cancer, is married to a doctor, and has been following this in the news for lo these many years, this kind of statement doesn't sit terribly well with me. We do have wait times, it's true; one of my kids had to wait six months to get tubes put in his ears, and my mom had to wait for months to see a back specialist for her back pain. But for life and death situations? The stats don't bear out the claims, but few people bother to check them out.

Eg, Paul Tsongas, who ran for President in the eighties, apparently had a standard comeback to queries as to whether he supported universal healthcare or not: he said that he didn't, because he was a cancer survivor, and was only alive because the US had no socialized health care. In a system like Canada's, he claimed, he not only would've had to wait way too long to get the treatment he needed; the treatment itself would've come courtesy of the States, since Canadian doctors, being mere civil servants, didn't do the kind of groundbreaking research in Canada that they did in the States.

Americans heard and believed, and repeated his words all over the place. The irony of it was, not only would Tsongas have been just fine if he'd been sick in Canada; he would've been given the same treatment whether he was a Senator or a garbageman, and - and this was the part that made me see red - he would've been treated with the same treatment he received in the States, which was developed at a hospital in Toronto.

I know our health care system isn't perfect; I hear all about it from my partner. But a lot of the time what I read about its supposed ills from Americans bears little or no resemblance to the system I know. Wait times for non-essentials and scarcity of doctors and nurses up north? Yeah, guilty, absolutely. But... the government dictating which family doctor you get? Um... what? Doctors forced to describe your medical secrets to the government in order to get paid? Uh, no. No medical research of any note? Sorry, wrong there too.

I'd love to read your post, above, but can't see it. Here's a random post re. the other side of Canadian health care (woefully out of date, but still relevant in some areas, and certainly less inflammatory and innacurate than Sicko ;))

http://www.newrules.org/journal/nrwin01health.html

[joanwilder.livejournal.com]

I've friended you so you can read it, if you like. It was written not too long ago.

The point is that I'm not against universal health care, but like many others, our President-elect included, believe that we need to merge what's good about our current system with one that provides especially preventative/maintenance care for the uninsured, who currently have little hope of affording it, unless they're wealthy. And in the U.S., chances are the garbageman or autoworker has better healthcare coverage than the senator--all depends on the employer group.

There's no doubt in my mind that both systems have their weak and strong points, but so far as equality of care here? It's fairly even for essentials, but Americans in general have come to expect that waiting is unforgivable, and don't understand well the term 'elective.' They're hoping a universal plan will solve the latter, but looking at statistics worldwide, there'll be a rude awakening.

[drgaellon]

don't understand well the term 'elective.'

Neither do many surgeons. I've been fighting all weekend with my surgeons who keep writing that my patient needs "elective" gall bladder surgery. No, she doesn't. It's not elective, it's obligatory. It's not emergent, which is the only distinction surgeons seem to make anymore. As soon as they can wait a few days, it becomes "elective," regardless of how life-preserving it is. And that just confuses laypeople further.