Layton Lionisation Excessive

[Argus]

Yes I do. In fact I know for a fact it is. Except for things like Drug costs which inflate the cost of Canadian medical costs by huge amounts it is also one of the few private parts of the system.

How do you know for a fact it is? I don't know it.

[Argus]

See that is the thing. People look at raw numbers and say "See look France has a better model because blah blah blah blah" Yet in France you can drive from anywhere in the country to the Capital in 3 hours, in many Canadian cities it takes that long to get to the nearest airport. That is part of the life that comes with living in a country that has more deep per square km then people.

I'm not buying it. The vast majority of us live in cities. I live in a major city and it still takes a year of waiting to get an MRI, and ten hours in an ER to get a broken bone set.

[Argus]

You want proof things have gotten better in Canada? You can look at wait times, how many people now have a doctor, Life expectancy, or any other metric. Almost all of them have improved quite a bit from 2000.

Not that I've noticed.

[Argus]

Keep costs down in Canada? The Canadian healthcare system costs just as much as the US system.

No, in fact it doesn't.

[Argus]

You are completely lost. The United States doesn't, as a rule, get into the habit of building hospitals to care for people. Just like in Canada, the state doesn't run the hospitals. They are private.

Canadian hospitals are not really private. They're run by boards which are told what they must offer up in services, and what their budgets will be by the province, which can overrule or fire them if it so chooses. And yes, the state does build hospitals here.

[Argus]

I know for a fact that cancer care has improved quite a bit since year 2000. Many new facilities have been built, which gave us additional radiation machines and other related resources. This was all part of a strategy developed almost a decade earlier, designed to meet a forecasted increase in demand.

And since that time the population has grown by several million people and it has aged. So it could easily be that those new facilities are merely keeping pace, or not even keeping pace. New facilities are no guarantee things are improving. Ottawa added new MRI machines and the wait is longer than it used to be.

[Sir Bandelot]

And since that time the population has grown by several million people and it has aged. So it could easily be that those new facilities are merely keeping pace, or not even keeping pace. New facilities are no guarantee things are improving. Ottawa added new MRI machines and the wait is longer than it used to be.

It could be, but the data I linked to shows otherwise.

[cybercoma]

Argus, I made a mistake. You're right. Canada and the United States don't actually spend the same thing on health care. The United States government spends much more per capita on health care than Canada does. Yet, we have universal access.

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/33/38979719.pdf

health spending as a share of GDP is much lower in Canada than in the United States (which spent 17.4% of its GDP on health in 2009)

[Argus]

It could be, but the data I linked to shows otherwise.

All the data you linked to says is that wait times for radiation has been lowered. We were talking about overall improvements, however. What the Ontario government has done, so far as I've seen is 1) played games with the definition of 'wait time' to make them seem statistically shorter than they are, and 2) funneled money into "priority" services and procedures and out of procedures and services which aren't so much of a 'priority' except, of course, to those who need them.

[Argus]

Argus, I made a mistake. You're right. Canada and the United States don't actually spend the same thing on health care. The United States government spends much more per capita on health care than Canada does. Yet, we have universal access.

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/33/38979719.pdf

Which would seem to suggest that if we spent as much as the Americans we'd have a significantly better health care system. Then again, as Dalton McGuinty has shown, spending billions more doesn't necessarily bring you much improvement, so who knows.

[Guest American Woman]

Argus, I made a mistake. You're right. Canada and the United States don't actually spend the same thing on health care. The United States government spends much more per capita on health care than Canada does. Yet, we have universal access.

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/33/38979719.pdf

Perhaps evidence that "you get what you pay for?"

[Sir Bandelot]

All the data you linked to says is that wait times for radiation has been lowered. We were talking about overall improvements, however. What the Ontario government has done, so far as I've seen is 1) played games with the definition of 'wait time' to make them seem statistically shorter than they are, and 2) funneled money into "priority" services and procedures and out of procedures and services which aren't so much of a 'priority' except, of course, to those who need them.

I know you were talking about overall improvements. But I can't speak to what's going on in other significant areas like heart surgery. I'm doing my best to show you what has been done, and gave you data. It's real data, it's not a cover-up and not games. I believe it too, because there are other indicators besides this data that prove to me it's real.

Can you support your claims? Or is this just stuff that you suspect to be true.

In other words, cite some evidence.

[Argus]

I know you were talking about overall improvements. But I can't speak to what's going on in other significant areas like heart surgery. I'm doing my best to show you what has been done, and gave you data. It's real data, it's not a cover-up and not games. I believe it too, because there are other indicators besides this data that prove to me it's real.

Can you support your claims? Or is this just stuff that you suspect to be true.

In other words, cite some evidence.

You want me to cite areas it hasn't improved? How about wait times grow or wait times grow or wait times grow

and a word about playing games with wait times Lying isn't the way to fix the system

[MiddleClassCentrist]

Perhaps evidence that "you get what you pay for?"

... Yeah. I support tossing poor people on the street with severe injuries because they don't have medical insurance too.

I also support destroying families because someone gets cancer, and the family owes hundreds of thousands of dollars for the treatments.

GREAT SYSTEM! *gag*

I'll keep the sane Canadian one, thanks.

I've never had a problem when I've actually had an emergency.

Non-emergency issues? Yeah, they can take awhile and that can be annoying. Still haven't had any issues where I really felt that I needed my non-urgent issue to be fixed immediately.

Edited August 29, 2011 by MiddleClassCentrist

[bush_cheney2004]

...Non-emergency issues? Yeah, they can take awhile and that can be annoying. Still haven't had any issues where I really felt that I needed my non-urgent issue to be fixed immediately.

Great...you're happy to wait as long as it takes in the interest of "civic duty". Doesn't mean that others have to be satisfied with that.

[bush_cheney2004]

and a word about playing games with wait times Lying isn't the way to fix the system

What's this....a wait list within another wait list? In order to get bariatric surgery in Ontario, there is a registry for out-of-country surgery authorization? No wonder some people just say "screw that" and go directly "out-of country" to the US.

[Sir Bandelot]

You want me to cite areas it hasn't improved? How about wait times grow or wait times grow or wait times grow

and a word about playing games with wait times Lying isn't the way to fix the system

Thanks for taking the time to produce those links. As I said, I can't speak for other areas of health care. I think that overall cancer care is improving, but I;m not trying to paint a rosy picture. It still needs to improve in some areas. I believe that health care will always be in need of constant maintenance and reform, no matter how it's funded.

[cybercoma]

Which would seem to suggest that if we spent as much as the Americans we'd have a significantly better health care system. Then again, as Dalton McGuinty has shown, spending billions more doesn't necessarily bring you much improvement, so who knows.

Perhaps evidence that "you get what you pay for?"

Research has shown that spending more does not necessarily mean a better system. You get to a point where more money only creates marginal increases in metrics related to health and quality of life. At this point, I don't think we need to spend a lot more.

I really wish I could post the pictures of the graphs directly in this thread, but check out this link: http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php

The United States spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world and their life expectancy is not any higher. In fact, it's actually down towards the low end of developed nations.

The second graph a little further down the page shows that countries only need a small amount of money spent on healthcare to dramatically improve life expectancy; however, after that it flattens out quite a bit.

Life expectancy, though, may not be the best indicator of an effective health care system. There are other metrics like infant mortality rates of course.

But there is an elephant in the room on that site: how could the United States government be spending such an extraordinary amount on health care, but not have universal access?

It seems incredibly immoral.

Edited August 29, 2011 by cybercoma

[cybercoma]

Great...you're happy to wait as long as it takes in the interest of "civic duty". Doesn't mean that others have to be satisfied with that.

With all of these incredibly long wait times, you would think people that needed care would be dying young. You would think it would have a dramatic effect on the life expectancy of Canadians. Of course, our life expectancy is longer in Canada and we spend way less per capita on health care than the United States.

[bush_cheney2004]

...But there is an elephant in the room on that site: how could the United States government be spending such an extraordinary amount on health care, but not have universal access?

Because universal access did not get enough votes. Health care is not a right...not even in Canada.

It seems incredibly immoral.

It's immoral to make millions of people wait months and years for an MRI too.

Edited August 29, 2011 by bush_cheney2004

[bush_cheney2004]

With all of these incredibly long wait times, you would think people that needed care would be dying young. You would think it would have a dramatic effect on the life expectancy of Canadians. Of course, our life expectancy is longer in Canada and we spend way less per capita on health care than the United States.

Actually, Canada has the most expensive universal access system in the world, and leads in zero OECD/WHO metrics as pointed out by another member, unlike the United States. People live longer in Japan than in Canada...does that worry you?

[cybercoma]

Actually, Canada has the most expensive universal access system in the world, and leads in zero OECD/WHO metrics as pointed out by another member, unlike the United States. People live longer in Japan than in Canada...does that worry you?

Do you even know what you're talking about? Go back and look at the life expectancy chart I provided in my previous post:

http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php

Does it worry you that your per capital spending is through the roof, yet your life expectancy in the United States is marginally better than Cuba?

[bush_cheney2004]

Do you even know what you're talking about? Go back and look at the life expectancy chart I provided in my previous post:

http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php

Your site/cite:

The UC Atlas of Global Inequality - ROTFLMAO!

Does it worry you that your per capital spending is through the roof, yet your life expectancy in the United States is marginally better than Cuba?

Nope...not at all. The longest lived people are Japanese women last time I checked. Canada leads in zero benchmarks.

[cybercoma]

Your site/cite:

The UC Atlas of Global Inequality - ROTFLMAO!

Care to dispute those numbers about life expectancy and government expenditures or are you just going to rely on a logical fallacy for this one? By the way, the numbers come from the WHO, if you would have looked in the bibliography from the page you would know that. I'm open to the possibility that they've changed in the last 3-5 years. So if you have more recent numbers have at it.

Nonetheless, the fact still remains that the life expectancy in Canada is much greater than in the United States and even with a universal healthcare system our government still pays much less per capita than the United States.

[bush_cheney2004]

Care to dispute those numbers about life expectancy and government expenditures or are you just going to rely on a logical fallacy for this one? By the way, the numbers come from the WHO, if you would have looked in the bibliography from the page you would know that. I'm open to the possibility that they've changed in the last 3-5 years. So if you have more recent numbers have at it.

I don't care either way, save for the fact that you (yet again) referenced an American source. Some things never change...oh..the irony.

Nonetheless, the fact still remains that the life expectancy in Canada is much greater than in the United States and even with a universal healthcare system our government still pays much less per capita than the United States.

..and Canada gets far less too. It shows in the severe wait times and rationing of care, along with government re-directs to out-of-country health care facilities. Canada leads in zero benchmarks, while the US leads in several.