Health Care

Health CareI don't normally talk about political stuff but this is something that keeps going around in Canada and I wanted to mention it. Canada has federally provided health care, and has laws that prohibit anyone from providing for-profit health care.  This system guarantees that we're all treated the same. "Two Tier" (American style) health care is generally regarded as evil in Canada, and is something we pretty much agree that we don't want (although not everyone). However, there are cases where private companies can provide health care, and that health care is paid for by the government.  The government sets an amount that they'll pay for a particular unit of healthcare (ie, putting a cast on a broken leg costs $$) and if a private company can provide it, then they are allowed to. This is very different than the American two-tier health care system, because we still all get the same care - but you get to choose who you get it from.  For a real emergency you go to the local hospital, but if you've got a sore knee you can go to a private clinic and get looked after. In Ottawa, and probably elsewhere, there's a chain called Appletree that runs private clinics, and as far as I'm concerned, they work great.  They have a website where they keep real-time updates of the waiting times at their various locations around Ottawa, and if there's something I want to get checked out, I can be talking to a doctor in an hour or so.  Compared to the wait time of making an appointment with a typical family doctor, that's excellent. So what's the problem with publically funded private healthcare?  I believe the detractors think that it will cause a lower standard of healthcare to be provided, since they assume the private company will be cutting corners and delivering inferior care, and that the government run facilities can do the same job for the same money. But that's not how it works.  When you have two clinics competing for business, and the payment they're going to receive is fixed (they both get the same $$ from the government for the same service), they're going to be competing on who can deliver better healthcare for that $$.  There are standards, obviously, that a clinic must live up to to be allowed to perform medicine, and if they don't meet those standards, they should be (and will be) shut down.  But beyond that, if a clinic delivers poor service, people will stop going there and they will not stay in business.  That's the kind of system I want - let the free market give us the best clinics it can, and don't charge us for using them.  Applying the term 'two-tier' to this system is an attempt to generate a negative knee-jerk response.  Hopefully people will look a little deeper. Thu, 01 Sep 2005 19:17:09 GMT