To Your Health

Finally got around to watching Sicko today (thanks, Mom) whilst recovering (still) from my little operation the other day.
Michael Moore paints an idyllic picture of the Canadian health care system. And why wouldn't he? From the outside, particularly from a country like America that seems to discard anybody who can't afford the outlandish sums demanded for simple operations, Canada's government-pay system seems almost perfect. From the outside.
Moore visits a hospital waiting room, one I'm pretty sure I've been in myself at some point--and surveys the population. Nobody, it seems, has been waiting any more than 45 minutes for care. Given my experiences in hospital waiting rooms over the years, that strikes me as rosy to the point of impossibility.
The few times I've been really sick or hurt, I've had to weigh my pain level against what is almost certain to be at least four or six hours sitting in a waiting room--only to quite possibly be given aspirin I could get myself from any drugstore. And that's just the emergency rooms: waiting for the attentions of a specialist, or a specialist's machine, routinely stretches into months, sometimes many months. You could die, waiting. People have.

Then again, the opening scene of Sicko brought to mind an ex-girlfriend of mine and her lettuce-shredder-induced visit to hospital one day in 1991.
We were working, the both of us, at a Wendy's on Highway 401 just outside Woodstock, Ontario. I was on one side of the kitchen, doing some sort of prep work, I forget just what, and she was feeding lettuces into a shredder. All of a sudden I heard her say "uh-oh".
That was it. "Uh-oh."
I turned around and beheld her walking quickly across to a sink. The blood was not immediately discernable. Nothing was, really, until she had her hand under running water. Then something was discernable, all right, screams were discernable, all the way from in town they were as discernable as hell. One of the managers took over, escorting her out of the kitchen, stopping just long enough to tell me to throw out the batch of lettuce Lynne had just shredded.
Gee, d'ya THINK?
Nobody tried to retrieve the two fingertips Lynne had lost--her ring and middle fingertips, just like the guy in the opening frames of Sicko. Wouldn't have mattered if they had--by the time Lynne got to the hospital and was seen and treated, a couple of hours had passed; they couldn't have re-attached anything after that long a delay. So they patched her up somehow and her fingers were ever so slightly truncated and misshapen, ever after.
What they did not do was ask her to pay $12,000 or $60,000. She didn't have to pay a dime, and that would have held true no matter what she'd done to herself.

So that's an unabashed positive point. The negatives, as I mentioned above, have to do with scarcity: not enough doctors, not enough nurses, not enough beds, not enough machines. Not enough money for any of these things. Never enough money. The Canadian health care system is a voracious beast, consuming up to fifty percent of government budgets, and costs are always rising.

I live in a city of half a million people, midway between the capital of the province (Toronto, a metropolis of over four million) and London, Ontario (seen in Sicko and renowned for its medical facililities). You would think a city this size in this area would have doctors aplenty. Not so. In fact, finding a family doctor who's able to take on new patients is something akin to winning a lottery. And that's here in Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge. In the remote parts of Ontario (and most of this sprawling province is remote), finding a family doctor taking on new patients is more like winning the lottery despite the fact you never bought a ticket. It would actually be a good thing--from the point of view of long-suffering townspeople--if the American myth was true and the Canadian government dictated where a doctor could practice.

The Canadian system is nowhere near as ideal as Moore paints it. Nor, I suspect, are the systems in Britain, France, and Cuba. But that doesn't lessen his attack on the American health care system one cc.

The trouble is not that one system is flawed. The trouble is that both systems are flawed.

There are, as Moore so eloquently points out, vested interests keeping Americans shackled to a broken system. Likewise, there are vested interests up here in Canuckistan doing their utmost to keep our system exactly as it is: one level of mediocrity for all. The merest whisper of privatized health care here is political suicide...despite the fact it already exists. About thirty percent of our system is open to private involvement: it's an open secret. The government doesn't pay for everything.
But to even acknowledge the serious issues in our health care system is to brand yourself a damnyankeebastard. It is, of course, patently unfair that poverty should prevent medical treatment; to my admittedly un-Canadian way of thinking it's also patently unfair to prevent me from spending my own money on my own health care, or that of someone I love, should I choose to.
There is obviously a happy medium to be found here, if only people would look for it. Unfortunately, both sides are far too entrenched in their own positions. Americans will point northward with wagging fingers and cite any number of horror stories concerning Canadians waiting unconscionable lengths of time for surgeries; Canadians will look down their noses at thousands of American families bankrupted by mere illness or injury.

Should a Democrat win the White House in November--a prospect that, barring terrorist attack, seems all but certain from this side of the 49th parallel--it looks as if Americans will be taking their first tentative steps towards socialized medicine. To my American readers regarding that prospect with some trepidation: don't. You need not make all our mistakes, and the hybrid system you really ought to consider would meld the best of both worlds.