{"id":2481,"date":"2007-07-31T07:00:42","date_gmt":"2007-07-31T12:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2007\/07\/31\/the-ugly-truth-about-canadian-health-care\/"},"modified":"2007-07-31T07:00:42","modified_gmt":"2007-07-31T12:00:42","slug":"the-ugly-truth-about-canadian-health-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2007\/07\/the-ugly-truth-about-canadian-health-care\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care"},"content":{"rendered":"

City Journal Magazine<\/a> | David Gratzer | Summer, 2007<\/p>\n

Socialized medicine has meant rationed care and lack of innovation. Small wonder Canadians are looking to the market.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mountain-bike enthusiast Suzanne Aucoin had to fight more than her Stage IV colon cancer. Her doctor suggested Erbitux\u2014a proven cancer drug that targets cancer cells exclusively, unlike conventional chemotherapies that more crudely kill all fast-growing cells in the body\u2014and Aucoin went to a clinic to begin treatment. But if Erbitux offered hope, Aucoin\u2019s insurance didn\u2019t: she received one inscrutable form letter after another, rejecting her claim for reimbursement. Yet another example of the callous hand of managed care, depriving someone of needed medical help, right? Guess again. Erbitux is standard treatment, covered by insurance companies\u2014in the United States. Aucoin lives in Ontario, Canada.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When Aucoin appealed to an official ombudsman, the Ontario government claimed that her treatment was unproven and that she had gone to an unaccredited clinic. But the FDA in the U.S. had approved Erbitux, and her clinic was a cancer center affiliated with a prominent Catholic hospital in Buffalo. This January, the ombudsman ruled in Aucoin\u2019s favor, awarding her the cost of treatment. She represents a dramatic new trend in Canadian health-care advocacy: finding the treatment you need in another country, and then fighting Canadian bureaucrats (and often suing) to get them to pick up the tab.<\/p>\n

But if Canadians are looking to the United States for the care they need, Americans, ironically, are increasingly looking north for a viable health-care model. There\u2019s no question that American health care, a mixture of private insurance and public programs, is a mess. Over the last five years, health-insurance premiums have more than doubled, leaving firms like General Motors on the brink of bankruptcy. Expensive health care has also hit workers in the pocketbook: it\u2019s one of the reasons that median family income fell between 2000 and 2005 (despite a rise in overall labor costs). Health spending has surged past 16 percent of GDP. The number of uninsured Americans has risen, and even the insured seem dissatisfied. So it\u2019s not surprising that some Americans think that solving the nation\u2019s health-care woes may require adopting a Canadian-style single-payer system, in which the government finances and provides the care. Canadians, the seductive single-payer tune goes, not only spend less on health care; their health outcomes are better, too\u2014life expectancy is longer, infant mortality lower.<\/p>\n

Thus, Paul Krugman in the New York Times: \u201cDoes this mean that the American way is wrong, and that we should switch to a Canadian-style single-payer system? Well, yes.\u201d Politicians like Hillary Clinton are on board; Michael Moore\u2019s new documentary Sicko celebrates the virtues of Canada\u2019s socialized health care; the National Coalition on Health Care, which includes big businesses like AT&T, recently endorsed a scheme to centralize major health decisions to a government committee; and big unions are questioning the tenets of employer-sponsored health insurance. Some are tempted. Not me. <\/p>\n

. . . more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

City Journal Magazine | David Gratzer | Summer, 2007 Socialized medicine has meant rationed care and lack of innovation. Small wonder Canadians are looking to the market. Mountain-bike enthusiast Suzanne Aucoin had to fight more than her Stage IV colon cancer. Her doctor suggested Erbitux\u2014a proven cancer drug that targets cancer cells exclusively, unlike conventional … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1319,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1319"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}