America Relieves the Pressure

CTV.ca:

Liberal MP Belinda Stronach, who is battling breast cancer, travelled to California last June for an operation that was recommended as part of her treatment, says a report.

Clayton Cramer:

Some of the comments on the Canadian Television story from Canadians are very revealing. A lot of the liberals are basically saying that it is an invasion of Stronach's privacy to discuss what seems to be a failure of the Canadian health care system. Other comments by Canadians reveal some deep disgust with what is going on.

Click here to read them.

Comments

[Josh Scholar]

Unless something has changed since I lived in Canada, there IS no Canadian system. There is one system per province.

As I remember British Columbia's system has always been a failure. Sask, where I lived, it was reasonable - better than some private insurance in the States according to my doctor-step mom, who now works in the States. And in Alberta, where they have oil, there was twice the money for medicine than in Sask.

One important difference is that most of the world, Canada included, pays much less for the same medicines as the United States. You can try to blame socialized medicine's group bargaining, but that can't be accurate, since the same medicines are even cheaper in Mexico (and Africa and the middle east and Europe - ie the entire rest of the planet). I know, having priced various medications. Americans pay up to eight times as much for the same pills.

[Classical Liberal]

We pay for the drug company's profits which they use to develop new medicines. I've heard that the vast majority of new drugs are developed in the States. In other countries a company that would like to be entrepreneurial won’t be entrepreneurial and develop new cures because they know they won’t be able to recoup their costs and make enough profit to justify the risks. Or so I’ve read.

[Josh Scholar]

If you can afford good insurance then maybe you can fool yourself into thinking that it's worth paying 8 times as much.

You'll have trouble with that argument when you're older and find that your insurance costs more than many americans pay for rent - no joke.

No really, we need an open market in Medicine. If the regulatory agencies allowed you to buy medicine, like anything else, at world prices we wouldn't be having this discussion.

I thought it was the left that was in favor of protectionism.

But in this case, it's protectionism for the one thing many people need to survive that they can't afford.