Catastrophe - Dick Morris [49]
But under Obama’s plan, as in Canada, the central government will decide what the insurance can and cannot cover. The all-important utilization controls will reside in Washington or, as in Canada, in the various state capitals.
The reason the systems are parallel is that the problems are the same. Each country’s government is trying to cover everybody without enough medical personnel to go around. So the resulting rationing (aka “efficiency”) puts patients at the mercy of their local bureaucrats.
And here’s the key point: in Canada, you can’t spend your own money to get good health care. It’s illegal. In a recent article, Brett Skinner, the director of health and pharmaceutical policy research at the Fraser Institute, notes that “Canadian patients…are worse off than uninsured Americans, the latter of whom are at least legally allowed to use their own money or credit to buy health care. Canadian patients who want to escape the delays in the public system are also barred from paying privately for health care services. In practical terms, Canadian patients are unable to buy quicker access or better care than the government health program provides.”161
When the bureaucracy says no, it means no. It doesn’t mean you need a second opinion. Or that you can pay for the procedure yourself. It means you can’t get a CT scan or MRI—not if the government says no.
Skinner’s recent article on the Canadian health care system, published in The American, found that “while Americans spend 55 percent more than Canadians for health care as a percentage of their national economy,”162
The United States has 327 percent more MRI units and 183 percent more CT scanners per capita than Canada.163
Doctors in the United States perform twice as many inpatient surgical procedures than Canadian doctors.164
And there are 14 percent more physicians and 19 percent more nurses in the United States, per capita, than in Canada.165
The study found that the Canadian health care system is a disaster:
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OBAMA’S GOAL: TO BRING THE CANADIAN SYSTEM HERE
The average waiting between the time patients first saw their family physician and the time they actually got treated is now 18.3 weeks. In 1993, it was 9.3 weeks. Is it reasonable to have to wait four months for treatment?
Less than half—44 percent—of all new drugs approved by the Canadian government in 2004 were covered by the government insurance program in October 2007. To get them? A one-year wait, on average!
1.7 million Canadians—about 5 percent of the population—couldn’t access a family physician in 2007.
Four years ago, the average waiting time for nonurgent cardiac surgery (which can become urgent in a hurry) in Manitoba was nineteen days. Today it’s seventy-seven days.166
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When government bureaucrats ration health care, the results can be a disaster. Take the grim story of colon cancer in Canada. Colorectal cancer rates are much higher in Canada (6.7 per 100,000)167 than in the United States (4.8 per 100,000.)168 And although 41 percent of cases in Canada prove fatal,169 only 34 percent in the United States lead to death.170
Even though colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of death in Canada, the drug Avastin—the standard treatment in the United States—is not available to patients in Canada through the government health system. “What is going on in Canada is shameful,” says Barry D. Stein, president of the Colorectal Cancer Association of Canada. “This treatment, which was finally approved last year in Canada and which was long overdue, is not reaching patients who are desperately in need of…a treatment which is the standard of care in the treatment of the disease.”171
In British Columbia, parts of Quebec, and parts of New Brunswick, the drug is available for free. But in other provinces, patients have to pay $36,000 for a six-month treatment.172
A second drug for colorectal cancer, Erbitux, which the government approved at the same time as Avastin, has not even been launched