PrintJanuary 20, 2008
Critically Ill Canadians Rushed to US for Care
While Canada smugly condemns the US for practicing torture and a newly comeback Billary Clinton promises/threatens more government health care, the US is once again rescuing Canada's citizens from its overwhelmed and underfunded socialist health care system. Wties Lisa Priest of the Globe and Mail:
More than 150 critically ill Canadians - many with life-threatening cerebral hemorrhages - have been rushed to the United States since the spring of 2006 because they could not obtain intensive-care beds here.
Before patients with bleeding in or outside the brain have been whisked through U.S. operating-room doors, some have languished for as long as eight hours in Canadian emergency wards while health-care workers scrambled to locate care.
Delay can cause brain damage, so there have been "devastating consequences."
The problems include: limited access to teleradiology; limited operating-room time; too few intensive-care beds; a short supply of neurosurgically trained intensive-care nurses to staff them, and too few neurosurgeons.
In some cases, neurosurgeons are available to operate, but with intensive-care beds full, there simply is nowhere to put them afterward.
Even the method of funding neurosurgical services is an enormous disincentive. Neurosurgery is funded out of fixed, global hospital budgets and is viewed as a financial drain. Orthopedic surgeons, by comparison, are seen as money makers: The more operations they do, the more their hospitals are reimbursed.
We have seen the future of socialized medicine in this country. It doesn't work. Tell that to Billary and Barack
Update: By Thomas Lifson
Lest anyone misunderstand, Canadian health insurance authorities pay for this care in American hospitals. It is not given free.
But as discussed in a previous blog on Canadian health care and American hospitals, the United States acts as the back-up reserve capacity for Canada's bare-bones health care system. It can build and staff for average demand levels. Maintaining the capacity to rapidly act on any kind of medical issue is expensive. There is a lot of standby capacity and a lot of people on call or serving shifts who have downtime.
America, in other words invests in building up the spare capacity that is needed to handle peak demand. Without the United States to provide this back-up, a lot more money would have to be spent on the Canadian healthcare system. Or else dire consequences would be suffered more often by Canadians in more areas of health care than brain surgery.
Steven M. Warshawsky explained on AT that part of the reason our health care is so expensive is that it is better than elsewhere. This situation illustrates one aspect of that quality.
Steven M. Warshawsky explained on AT that part of the reason our health care is so expensive is that it is better than elsewhere. This situation illustrates one aspect of that quality.
