The Tyranny that is Public Healthcare

Well, dear readers, it's time for yet another reader request. This one is for you, DJ!

I'll begin with a personal anecdote. In my final year of college, 48 days to graduation for those who know what it means, I was engaged in my last fencing practice of the year. Our team had just won the OUA championships, and we were out for some final fun before we parted ways for the summer. One of my younger teammates, Oli, wanted one last match. I had already half stripped out of my gear, but you don't get to be a sabre medallist by refusing challenges. We weren't fighting that hard, just the comfortable friendly strife of old opponents, when my left kneecap dislocated. It wasn't Oli's fault; I was executing a standard dodge (the pass short) tha I had done thousands of times before. The uneven gym floor, the dust, the fact that my IT bands were overdeveloped: all these were contributing factors. Suffice to say, it's a frighteningly agonizing injury. Regardless, we called the ambulence.

For those of you not aware of how the Canadian system works, you just call an ambulence, it shows up, it takes you to the hospital, and you flash your public health insurance card. Supposedly fast and foolproof. I'm a bit of a special case, but that part doesn't change (I just notify my employer, and somewhere in Ottawa the cost of my treatment goes from one budget to another). Unfortunately, due to the inherent inefficiencies of government run ANYTHING, my simple knee dislocation happened to fall on a shift change. Due to budget shortfalls, the City of Kingston shared EMS with the Leeds and Grenville County EMS, who use smaller ambulences. And are not totally familiar with Kingston geography. Thus, my ambulence took 20 minutes to find me (even though I was literally a 20 minute walk from the hospital). When it arrived, the paramedics were exhausted and at the end of an 18 hour shift, with 2 hours to drive to get back to their home station. Their ambulence stocked painkillers from their home station, not the hospital, so when they got to me there was literally nothing left but pure morphine, which can only be administered in cases where the pain might cause someone to die. While driving me back to the hospital, they took a couple of wrong turns, so it took 15 minutes to get back. And their oxygen tank ran dry after 5. Don't get me wrong- they were competent and caring paramedics. They were just exhausted and abused by a system that doesn't work.

When I got to the hospital, it took 4 hours to be seen by a student doctor specializing in oncology, who put me in a splint that actually made my injury worse. I was x-rayed to ensure no bone damage, but there were no MRI machines available. It took 6 and a half months to get an MRI, and that was rushed because my job gets a higher priority than the average bear. And here's the kicker: all hospital MRIs were overbooked, so I went to a PRIVATE CLINIC in Halifax.

I once visited a buddy of mine in Philly, and stayed at some guest housing that happened to be in a hospital outbuilding. I discovered that there are more MRI machines in the city of Philadelphia than there are in my entire country. Population of Philadelphia? 1.5 Million. Population of Canada? 32+ Million. And you're telling me that somehow the economics of a single payer government controlled system will ensure fair healthcare for everyone? It's garbage. Canada had a comparable death rate from SARS to Namibia. The head of the Canadian Medical Association put an article in the National Post on how healthcare in Canada desperately needs reform. Health Canada itself actually put out a statement telling people that if they get sick, they should go to hospitals. Why? Because a common-sense model accounting for hospital overcrowding (and based on the SARS data) showed that if the Bird Flu became an epidemic, people should stay home and let doctors come to them, because going to the hospital increased your risk of fatal infection.

Americans love to quote statistics. The last one I can remember stated that 50 million people in the US have no healthcare coverage at all. That truly is tragic, and something should be done. But not by government. The ingenuity of the free individual is the solution. Corporations provide healthcare to their workers because it makes them more productive. The competitive environment ensures reasonable pricing. Everyone claims that in Canada, healthcare is free. That is also garbage. Talk to me when you start earning more than 55 thousand dollars a year in Quebec. And you end up paying 49.3% of your income in taxes, not including sales tax or gas tax. Then talk to me about how an inefficient, criminally negligent system is still better because "it's free".