Snopes Debunks Email Attacking Canadian Health-Care

[Hissyspit]

Bookmark this for further use...

http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/canada.asp

[Yael]

1. Good find! K & R & Bookmarking

[papau]

2. excellent response - well written - thanks for posting n/t

n/t

[area51]

3. k&r

If Canadian healthcare was as bad as the nazis say, all Canadians would be streaming across the border to the U.S. & there'd be no one left in Canada. Instead what they have is Americans going there to try to get healthcare because our healthcare insurance system is barbaric.

[Hissyspit]

4. Exactly. n/t

[Spazito]

5. Thanks for posting this...

That "e-mail", aka HMO propaganda, was so full of lies it was hard to know where to start to debunk it, kudos to snopes for doing it!

[Common Sense Party]

6. "Wait Times Reduction Fund"? What's that about?

That debunking generates more questions than answers.

The whole business of "discouraging a parallel private system" was disturbing.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. I think the reasoning is that allowing a parallel private system will lead to

two-tier health care, one system for the poor and another for the rich.

I'm willing to do without private health care. I supposedly have it now, but I can't afford to use it.

[Common Sense Party]

8. That's not too far removed from saying

that allowing a parallel private education system should be discouraged.

That the government should be the only game in town?

That no one should be allowed choices?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. You're confusing the Canadian and British systems

Canadian doctors are in private practice. You can go to any doctor or clinic that you want.

This is not the British system, where NHS doctors are employed by the government.

(You can in the U.S., too, of course, but I have to laugh when right-wingers claim that there are long waiting periods in countries with government health services. I've had long waiting periods here, and besides, most of the long waiting periods are for elective surgery, like hip replacements, not for urgent care.)

Of course, if the Republicans were running a national health program they'd do their best to make sure that it was lousy.

That's their approach to government services: underfund them, appoint incompetents to run them, and then say, "See? They don't work." (cf. FEMA)

[Spazito]

10. The government pays the bills, they DO NOT control the doctor, etc.

You do have choices, if you want to pay the BIG bucks you can go to the US and pay the outrageous prices there and have what you want done but you don't get any help from the Canadian healthcare system if you choose to do so.

I love the "choices" argument, it is the ultimate straw-man argument against universal healthcare and public school systems for those who want to privatize everything.

The "game", as you put it, is that every Canadian has healthcare and they don't have to go bankrupt, sell their home, go deep in debt to access that care, rich or poor, everyone has it, damn, what a crappy thing to have, eh!

[Common Sense Party]

11. If you read the Snopes explanation,

they're trying to prevent the doctors from practicing OUTSIDE the public program {in some provinces, anyway).

If you accept patients that are on the public plan, you CANNOT also have patients that pay privately.

Some doctors that opt out of the public system are not allowed to charge more than what they would under the public system.

That isn't, in a sense at least, controlling the doctors?

[Spazito]

12. Absolutely, and so they should, imo (I am Canadian, btw, and know

our system quite well. The only reason someone would pay "privately" is to get special, front of the line service simply because they are rich enough to do so. The universal healthcare program is one of equity, rich or poor, you get access and care. You obviously see a problem with that, why?

As I said, if someone wants to shill out the thousands charged by US doctors for care that, in Canada, costs you only your premium (mine is 49 dollars a month) they can do so just don't expect Canadian taxpayers to subsidize your choices.

Doctors in Canada make a very good living, they are not hard done by at all.

[Common Sense Party]

13. I just think if someone wants to opt out, they should be able to

truly opt out.

Do Canadians have private schools--elementary and secondary, I mean?

[Spazito]

15. Religious schools, yes

ie Catholic. Each province determines their own education system, it is not a Federal responsibility. There is not the proliferation of private schools that is found in the US as yet though there are continuous attempts to try and increase the privatization of education.

The majority of schools are still public across Canada. Private schools should get NO government funding, they should be funded solely by those who wish to opt out of the public system, imo.

Edited to add: You can opt out, you just can't gouge the public because you chose to do so, in reference to doctors.

[iverglas]

16. they can opt out any time they want!

They can move to the US, or to, oh, Bolivia.

Or they can get jobs as lobbyists.

If they want to practise medicine in Canada, they can do so within the health insurance plan. Nobody's forcing 'em to. And very few doctors in practice in Canada today didn't know the rules when they applied to medical school.

We have private schools. Not a whole lot, but some. The public system hasn't suffered noticeably from demands by the rich for lower taxes to reflect their decision not to use the public system.

The NHS in the UK, on the other hand, suffered very noticeably when Thatcher opened the market to private health care and private health insurance, and cut funding to the public system. The low-income, immigrant and otherwise disadvantaged people with whom I spent a night in an dirty waiting room in an NHS hospital in North London in 1994, while my friend's partner with her private insurance was selecting delicacies from the room service menu at the lovely new hospital where she was ensconced that week, could tell you about it.

We Canadians are lucky. We don't yet have a significant mass of people saying that anyone's desire to "opt out" of a system that provides everyone with essential health services outweighs the desire of the rest of us to have access to those services when we need them. Maybe smart and decent, rather than lucky.

How come nobody seems to want to opt out of the public firefighting system? Surely there are people who'd be willing to pay for faster and better services to put out their fires ...

Maybe firefighters just haven't realized what huge bucks they could be making by going private, and started the campaign they obviously need to undertake to persuade the public that private firefighting is a really good thing.

[gateley]

14. K&R! nt