Surgery waiting list 'inflated' (Why can't we have a medical system like Canada's?)

Vancouver Sun ^ | January 12, 2005 | Pamela Fayerman

[Tribune7]

its numbers inflated because it includes patients who died before surgery

[Budge]

'Hillerycare.'

[KidGlock]

The provincial surgery waiting list website is inaccurate and its numbers inflated because it includes patients who died before surgery

Great! I feel much better about medical waiting lists now!

Sign me up.

[yankeedame]

Once the state is responsible for the cost of medical care, the state is going to want you dead.

Well, the state may not want you dead, they just don't particularly care if you're dead.

[dAnconia]

Thanks for the ping Free.

We should all realize that our own government (including the Bush administration) holds the Canadian standard of med-care as the ideal for the socialization of the American health industry. (Or the European standard for that matter.)

[texasflower]

As a paramedic, I regularly picked up ill Canadian PHYSICIANS who were flying in to the US to have THEIR SURGERIES. We would meet their flights and their private nurses.

I took one young Canadian female doc (34) who was just coming for an MRI because she would have had to wait 12 more weeks there.

She was shocked when I told her the MRI would be done within hours of her arrival while she was still in the ER. She thought I was teasing her.

Sadly, her symptoms had not been investigated AT ALL in Canada. They just put her on the list just like everyone else.

She had a brain tumor. Our docs saved her, but one more month while waiting there in Canada would have killed her.

Even more sad is that with the symptoms she described to me on the way to the hospital, it sounded like a brain tumor to me, this lowly paramedic. Don't they have any doctors in Canada that are able to take a set of signs and symptoms and send a person for urgent care?

She never went back. She moved her family here. She said she couldn't risk her or her family's health again. EVER.

[shubi]

Shubi's Law:

The more government interference in the health care system, the more screwed up and expensive the system gets.

[Lizavetta]

When our daughter was heading at warp speed into a diabetic coma you can't imagine how happy I was to walk into our local hospital's emergency room........not a soul in the waiting room and they whisked her in the back immediately. If we would have had to wade through illegals and/or 'rationed' health care a la Canada I don't even want to contemplate what might have happened.

[festus]

If your daughter had something seriously wrong they would likely have moved her past all the waiting illegals etc. In the US anyway.

I went into a room full of all sorts of folks clearly there because they had minor issues and had no health insurance. All I said was I'm having chest pains and blammo I was being treated asap.

[Mike Darancette]

The provincial surgery waiting list website is inaccurate and its numbers inflated because it includes patients who died before surgery

Canadian medecine is like a "Dead Pool".

[gridlock]

Shubi's Law (restated):

If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free!