Countering misconceptions about Canadian health care

[eridani]

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/020508HA.shtml

2008 is shaping up to be the election year that we finally get to have the Great American Healthcare Debate again. Harry and Louise are back with a vengeance. Conservatives are rumbling around the talk show circuit bellowing about the socialist threat to the (literal) American body politic. And, as usual, Canada is once again getting dragged into the fracas, shoved around by both sides as either an exemplar or a warning - and, along the way, getting coated with the obfuscating dust of so many willful misconceptions that the actual facts about How Canada Does It are completely lost in the melee.

I'm both a health-care-card-carrying Canadian resident and an uninsured American citizen who regularly sees doctors on both sides of the border. As such, I'm in a unique position to address the pros and cons of both systems first-hand. If we're going to have this conversation, it would be great if we could start out (for once) with actual facts, instead of ideological posturing, wishful thinking, hearsay, and random guessing about how things get done up here.

To that end, here's the first of a two-part series aimed at busting the common myths Americans routinely tell each other about Canadian health care. When the right-wing hysterics drag out these hoary old bogeymen, this time, we need to be armed and ready to blast them into straw. Because, mostly, straw is all they're made of.

[dmosh42]

1. Thanks for posting this information...

I'm printing a copy for myself for reference later. Obviously, single-payer is the way to go, but our eventual system will still have the "golden-parachute" for our insurance companies. AFter all, they are bankrolling these primaries!

[glarius]

2. I'm a Canadian in the province of Ontario and agree with the above except

that we in Ontario don't even have to pay a monthly premium. I recently saw Rudy Giuliani in a Republican presidential debate make a crack that without the American health care system, where would the Canadians go for health care. And McCain made a crack too....something to the effect that "you would never want to have the horror of the system the Canadians have". These politicians and other right wingers are constantly scaring the American people about the horrors of "socialized medicine" like Canada's. We pay a little more in taxes, but without premiums to pay and zero expenses when we see a doctor or are operated on, or have the services of specialists or ANY medical procedure, we come out ahead in the long run.
Here's a DU thread I posted at the request of an American DUer:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3009706

[dmosh42]

3. I appreciate you following up on this with your experiences...

This has been my opinion for years. You don't hear any civilized country in the world clamoring to change their system to what we have in the US. I wish more people would get into this subject a little deeper, but you can tell on this site, it's only about politics. More people need to demand that the candidates lay out more specifics on their plans. I suspect that most of their expertise and advisors are from the very medical and insurance industry that wants the 'status quo'.