Posted on 06/28/2009 6:09:44 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
My friend Michael Stickings links to a story of bureaucratic outrages involving an acutely ill premature baby, but only focuses on one particular outrage while excusing the other. Because Canada does not have the capacity to deal with the demand for neo-natal intensive care for premature births, the single-payer system sent the critically ill child to the United States for treatment. Unfortunately, the parents do not have passports which are now required for crossing the border, and the US refuses to allow them into the country without them:
A critically-ill premature-born baby from Hamilton is all alone in a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital after she was turned away for treatment at local facility and transferred across the border without her parents, who don’t have passports.
Ava Stinson was born Thursday at St. Joseph’s Hospital, 14 weeks premature.
A provincewide search for an open neonatal intensive care unit bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two pound, four ounce baby to Buffalo.
Her parents Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson couldn’t follow their child because as of June 1, a passport is required to cross the border into the United States.
They’re having to approve medical procedures over the phone and are terrified something will happen to their baby before they get there.
Stinson has a criminal record, which makes matters worse for entry to the US. Obviously, though, this is not a planned diversion but a real medical crisis. Surely the US and Canada can agree to temporary measures that will allow the parents to cross the border, even if under embassy supervision and security, to join their child. As Michael notes, keeping them away from their child at this critical juncture is needlessly cruel.
But let’s not place the onus on the US for the need to separate the parents in the first place. Michael attempts to dismiss the underlying problem:
I won’t get into the relative merits of the American and Canadian health-care systems here. Suffice it to say that there obviously need to be more neo-natal intensive care unit beds up here. Thankfully — and this doesn’t mean that the American system is better (after all, at least the couple and their baby are guaranteed care up here, thanks to our public system, even if it’s not perfect) — there was an opening south of the border.
Well, it’s impossible to look at this situation without seeing the relative merits of the American and Canadian systems. First, the child would have gotten care in the US, too, regardless of insurance status. People get emergency care regardless in this country. There is a difference between health insurance and access to care that some people elide for purposes of political argument. No one gets turned away from emergency care for lack of ability to pay.
But why wasn’t there a NICU bed for the child in the entire nation of Canada? The government of Canada won’t pay for more. They don’t exist to expand supply to meet demand; their single-payer system exists to ration care as a cost-saving mechanism. In a free-market system, supply expands to meet demand, which is why Canada could subcontract out to a US hospital for capacity. Michael writes that paragraph as if it was mere luck that an NICU bed happened to be open in the US, but that’s a function of the system, and not luck. These parents are separated from their child at the moment through the fault of Canada’s government and not the US.
It’s a good lesson for both Americans and Canadians as the administration and Congress attempt to push a systemic overhaul of the US health-care system that will cost trillions and push us towards the same kind of single-payer system that Canada has. When we handle our health-care system like Canada, where will Canadians send the next NICU case they can’t handle? And where will America send ours?
Obama care will be coupled with assisted suicide for your convenience......
Where are we going to go for anything?
Old World: we are coming home again
” transferred across the border without her parents, who don’t have passports. “
Can’t they make an exception? This is disgusting. And where will Canadians go if we also have socialized medicine, and where will WE go?
Write letters to editors and get Americans to call their congresscritters to stop this.
Maybe they can go to Kenya?
The main reason why Canada’s health system works even a little bit is because US hospitals are right there willing and able to help.Of course,under HusseinCare,there’ll be plenty of Mexican hospitals ready to help out all you folks in the South and Southwest.I guess all of us here in the frozen North will be *bleep* out of luck.
Why to M. Moore’s Medical Paridise - Castro’s Cuba. < / sarc
black market will developed where wealthy will be able to get ahead of the peasants
ThAt’s how socialism functions
I’m glad someone gets it. How cruel of American bureaucracy that we can’t find a way to let this poor baby have her parents with her.
America is as bad as Canada in this story.
I agree.
The “powers that be” could have made an exception.
These people were of no importance.
Meanwhile Jacko is still dead tho.
Obamacare will probably shut down NICU’s everywhere - any baby needing that much help just to survive won’t be a useful citizen. It will get nasty!
You are wrong. This is not America’s problem. The Buffalo hospital is taking in the baby, as American hospitals do with thousands of other Canadian medical cases on a regular basis, because we have more doctors, nurses, RTs, PTs, lab techs, hospital beds, ventilators, etc, than Canadian hospitals. It is because the government decides how many “beds” will be staffed in each town, that they do not have enough.
Yes, it is very sad that this baby is separated from both parents, but this is not a new or unanticipated situation. Canadian health officials have been using American hospitals to give care to Canadians for more than ten years.
It is not possible to enter the US “legally” with a criminal record. Perhaps, Canadian prenatal care will have to include “get a passport in case you suffer complications in this pregnancy.”
Often mothers are flown to American hospitals to deliver preemies, when no beds are available in Canada. And then the mother is separated from her other children and entire support system that are left behind.
Canadian care for those lucky enough to get it is great, but the system stinks.
While I don’t like the cruel bureaucracy, America is far better (for now) in this story, because the baby has a chance to LIVE with U.S. healthcare!
Prayers for the baby and all concerned!
Read the comments after the article, like this one:
‘”Earlier this year, I woke up at about 4 in the morning with serious abdominal pain. My Mom and I went to the ER and got checked in. They did all their tests, and it turned out I had appendicitis. I got the appendix out in the next 2 hours, stayed overnight, and got checked out the next day.
Our healthcare system is far from perfect (and way too damn expensive). We need to make it better, but I don’t believe socialized medicine is the way to go. If I couldn’t have gotten care at my hosipital, and had to be moved I would’ve been scared shitless. I can’t even imagine it.
Emily M. on June 28, 2009 at 4:04 PM
And if you had been in Canada or Britian you might have died. Much cheaper to deal with than some pesky operation.
Canada’s Nationalized Health Care Continues Jeopardizing Patients’ Lives
http://ginacobb.typepad.com/gina_cobb/2007/10/canadas-nationa.html
Yet another near disaster in Canada’s socialized health care system, as a man desperately searched for a hospital to give him an emergency appendectomy:
. . . the 21-year-old Gatineau [Quebec] student went to bed, thinking he’d feel better by the morning. But when he woke up the next day, the pain was still there, and it was getting worse.
He headed to Gatineau Memorial Hospital, thinking that doctors would soon figure out what was ailing him and take care of it.
He never imagined the ordeal that would follow: The young man was turned away from five hospitals, got lost in an ambulance and, 28 hours after he was diagnosed, he had a burst appendix removed — in Montreal.
Single Payer Singularly Unsuccessful
http://www.i2i.org/main/article.php?article_id=158
In 2001, Lisa Campbells physician suspected appendicitis and sent the 18-year-old to the Royal Cornwall Hospital with a letter requesting urgent attention. She spent 12 hours on the hospital floor wrapped in a blanket. Despite a high fever, vomiting, and excruciating pain, the hospital would not examine her until a gurney was available. It took two more days to diagnose appendicitis.
As treating sick people is more expensive than letting them die, single payer systems also discriminate against the elderly and powerless.
izoneguy on June 28, 2009 at 5:24 PM’
This is no different than all the countires around the world whose citizens are starving because their government refuses to follow America’s lead in Agriculture.
For over a hundred years we’ve shown the rest of the world how to produce so much food that there are constant surpluses of food. Yet they insist on staying with the same ineffective systems, and their citizens starve to death.
I say let them starve. We’ll burn our surplus food to power our cars and heat our homes. And eat huge portions of steak.
There is no shortage for the babies of democrat party politicians, oops I meant Liberal Party politicians.
Maybe the Honduras military has the right answer.
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