Posted on 06/30/2009 5:13:32 PM PDT by WhiteCastle
Health Reform: A critically ill premature baby is moved to a U.S hospital to get the treatment she couldn't get in the system we're told we should emulate. Cost-effective care? In Canada, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for.Ava Isabella Stinson was born last Thursday at St. Joseph's hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. Weighing only two pounds, she was born 13 weeks premature and needed some very special care. Unfortunately, there were no open neonatal intensive care beds for her at St. Joseph's — or anywhere else in the entire province of Ontario, it seems.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
But you also had to spend a decade and a half in higher education just to enter your specialty. I should hope you are very well compensated for the effort it takes to get where you are and for the tremendous responsibility you have to exercise in your decisions and actions. If "Obamacare" takes away the incentive for the best and brightest to go into medicine, we will all be much worse off in the future.
The problem is that health care is the third rail for Canadian politicians (IOW touch it and you’re dead), so we just get more money thrown at it. All serious efforts to reform our health care mess have failed because our politicians don’t have the cojones to point out that “free” health care is costing us a fortune.
No to worry. Look for a young lady who is a lawyer and marry her. Lawyers will make out very well. What else is new.
Sadly, from my point of view over on the US side of the border, the apparently impending demise of the last vestiges of our private health care system, may end up helping Canadians start to dismantle their mess of a socialized medicine system. It seems to be hanging on only because of the pressure valve provided by the US — both by the Canadian system shipping patients over the border, and by wealthier patients skipping the waiting lists and shipping themselves over the border. When the situation on the US side is as bad as in Canada, that pressure valve will be blocked, and more Canadians will be ready to draw a line in the sand.
As a third generation back surgery patient, I can appreciate your expertise. I'd hate to have all the progress in surgical techniques frozen to eliminate further advances.
My mother had surgery at age 30 in 1967 prior to the introduction of surgical microscopes and CAT scans. She had two surgeons, an orhtopedic surgeon and a neurosurgeon. One of them diagnosed her myelograms indicating a herniation at L5-S1 on the left side; the other surgeon diagnosed a heriation at the same level but on the right side. Her surgeons had to make a 6 inch insision and found that she had heriations on both sides surrounding the spinal chord. It took months for her to recover. She had to lie in the back seat of a car, because she couldn't comfortably sit in a moving car.
I had surgery in 2001 after 5 years of worsening pain. The myelograms and CAT scans showed I had a massive herniation at L5-S1 that completely surrounded the spinal chord and compressed it to a diameter of about 1/4 inch. My surgery was done as day surgery. The surgeon was able to use just a 1 inch incision to enter the spine. I was walking 2 hours after my surgery and was released from the hospital that afternoon. A week later I no longer had to take Vicodin. Prior to surgery, I had to take 4-5 Vicodins a day, and I still had excruciating pain if I stood up too long or tried to walk more than 50 feet. A month later I went on a trip with my father, driving throgh Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. I was able to hike up and down mountain trails.
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