Canadian Wendy Sullivan’s Health Care Nightmare
July 27, 2009 by Lisa Farrar Wellman
Filed under Profiles in Conservatism
By Lisa Farrar Wellman
Liberals love personal stories. On The Chosen One’s website readers can find sap story after sap story about health care woes. Visitors are encouraged to write in their own haunting tale to further the cause of Obamacare. While I don’t doubt that people need health care and certainly our system needs reform, the method of “reform” suggested by The Left sounds more like the makings of a personal rights nightmare than a dream come true.
A Smart Girl who knows a thing or two about health care nightmares, is Wendy Sullivan of Girl on the Right. Wendy is a Canadian who has not only lived with socialized medicine her whole life but who has also tasted the USA’s health system, too. Her personal story follows. Share it with a liberal you know today.
SGN: You live in Canada. Why do you care what we do with our health care system in the USA?
WS: I care for a couple of reasons. The main one is that I don’t want to see a great country fall into the bureaucratic turmoil Canada lives in. The second more selfish reason is that if America’s standard of care drops, Canadians like me will have no place to go for urgent/critical/experimental treatment.
SGN: Have you ever sought medical treatment “south of the border?”
WS: I spent four months on a Kansas farm last year. I was only supposed to be there a month, so I only had a month’s worth of travel insurance. During the third month of my visit, I got sick. It was just a stupid infection, but I had to go to a clinic for a test and a prescription. We called in the morning, and I was seen in the afternoon by appointment. The cost was $150. While I was sitting in the waiting room, the receptionist came over to tell me the doctor was running about 10 minutes behind schedule, and she apologized. I nearly laughed in her face. Ten minutes? Ha!
SGN: Will you share with us one or two personal experiences with Canada’s health care system?
WS: My mother was suffering from a bad cough and a terrible pain in the shoulder area. She was 46 years old at the time, and a heavy smoker. The doctors at the first hospital she was admitted to (Lachine General in Montreal which is now closed due to lack of money) diagnosed her as suffering from pre-menopausal depression. My father, ever the skeptic, called his insurance company to arrange for a CT scan (legal in Quebec). He walked in to my mother’s doctor a few days later with the results of the imaging and said, “You’d be depressed too if you had a tumor that big in your chest.” My mother died less than five months later, weighing just 43 pounds. It was the most horrific death I had ever seen, including in the horror movies I used to enjoy as a child. I was 14.
When I was 20, I was admitted to the Lakeshore General Hospital (Montreal) by ambulance. It was either the last day of October or the first of November. It was extremely cold where they left me on a cart by the ambulance bay, with the doors constantly opening to let in the wind and rain. They put me into that sexy, standard-issue butt gown and checked my clothes at the desk (I guess so they wouldn’t be stolen?). I was freezing, laying there without a blanket or pillow. Every time a nurse or orderly passed, I would beg for a blanket. I was so cold. They never brought me one. After about 5 hours, I noticed that the man on the next cot was dead. It was every man for himself, and I jumped up and stole his blanket. I grave robbed a man in a hospital emergency room just to keep from becoming the next casualty.
Think about that. How many people do you know wait five hours for medical care after arriving at a hospital via ambulance? In our messed up health care system, have you ever taken a blanket off a dead guy in order to stop shivering yourself? Yes, we have problems. Unfortunately H.R. 3200 neither addresses nor eliminates actual U.S. health care shortcomings. It does, however, land us squarely in Wendy Sullivan’s Canadian nightmare.
I will share the rest of my interview with Wendy Sullivan tomorrow.
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Popularity: 1% [?]
Oh yay, I never get enough of this.
We’re looking at systems of national health care covering tens or hundreds of millions of people. We have at our disposal scientific surveys of patient satisfaction, comprehensive studies of comparative health outcomes, massive databases of economic figures… and how are people making their decisions on health care policy in the United States every damn time I turn around?
“I heard some person said…”
Wow, I just can’t comprehend how the richest nation in the world ended up with a health care system internationally ranked in the neighborhood of countries like Slovenia and Costa Rica. Total mystery. I’m stumped. Yes I am.
However, on the off chance it has something to do with the inability of large segments of the population to grasp the superiority of rigorous studies over anecdotal story telling by strangers of unknown credentials on the internet when making decisions that affect millions of freaking people, perhaps this might help. Just a little.
http://www.harrisdecima.com/en/downloads/pdf/news_releases/071009E.pdf
Pay particular attention to the part where when asked if they would trade their system for American health care a whopping 8% of Canadians are willing to make that trade. Because they are, for the most part, not brain damaged.
Moving on, this might be enlightening as well:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/21/3/19
See, the insurance industry tried this “Canadians flock across the border for care” story last time health care reform was on the table too. Know what happened? Someone studied it. It’s a lie. Oh sure, you can find a handful of people who do it, and that handful will proceed to have their stories spread as far and wide as possible and presented to people as if they’re representative of something that occurs on a regular basis… but that’s pure bullcrap. They surveyed 18,000 Canadians the last time people tried pulling this, a stunning 90 of them had received care in the US in the previous year, and almost all of THOSE just happened to be travelling in the US when they got injured/sick and needed treatment before returning home, which their scary scary Canadian health care system would have then *reimbursed them for*.
They investigated border adjacent hospitals in the US looking for all these supposed Canadian patient admissions, didn’t exist. One here, a couple there… otherwise nada.
And on to the next fantasy, the idea that the US health care system enjoys some kind of significant performance advantage:
http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/8/1
Oh sure, people can find one study of one disease or another that says the US does pretty well and trumpet it far and wide claiming that’s how the picture looks across the board for all care, but sorry, not the case. These guys looked at studies for all kinds of diseases that compared outcomes in Canada and the US. Cancer… coronary artery disease, chronic illnesses, surgical procedures… and what did they find? Largely equivalent outcomes, with the CANADIANS having the slight edge in results.
And hey, we can talk economics! Like the fact thnat the Canadian system covers almost their entire population for 10% of their GDP, while the US system covers considerably less for over 15% of their GDP. A comparison that holds true when you compare the US to ANY other industrialized nation which ALL covers more of their people for less cost while producing roughly equivalent quality of care where it is delivered.
And yes, people wait in some areas for some procedures in Canada. What never seems to get mentioned however is that your position in that line depends entirely on where your DOCTOR says you should be in it based on his evaluation of the urgency of your need for care. Let’s see… do I want to live in a system where I can get my cosmetic surgery a lot faster but will face a decent chance of having to have my house foreclosed on if I ever develop a serious medical condition and my insurance company puts their lawyers to work on the fine print in my insurance policy (assuming I could afford one in the first place)… and which will then render me subsequently uninsurable because I’m a sick person, and good god we can’t insure SICK people! And that will also render me highly unemployable by any employer with a health plan since their insurer will jack their premiums for the whole company up if they take on a known sick person.
Or do I want to live in a system where I have to wait a while for non urgent care but I never, EVER have to worry about the cost no matter what the treatment needed, NEVER have to worry about losing my coverage because I lose my job, NEVER have to worry about the words” pre-existing condition” being used to disqualify me from being covered for necessary care, and in which I pay ~30% less in costs to get all of that? Gosh, that’s a real dilemna.
But yes, PLEASE, let’s keep deciding the fate of the health coverage for 300 million people on “”I heard some girl said…”. That’s genius. I just can’t get enough of that.
gcomeau
Rather than trade stats back and forth — lets try this…
Please provide Constitutional authority for National Health Care
Article and Section would be nice.