Why does Japan have six times more MRIs than Canada?

[LinkSoul60]

3 minutes ago, suds said:

All universal healthcare means is that everyone has equal access. And I'm sure that would be the case in Europe because I doubt Europeans (or Canadians) would put up with anything less. In the Netherlands everyone is forced to pay mandatory private healthcare insurance and over 99% of the people have doctors. If you can't afford the insurance then it's subsidized by government. Most of the best run healthcare systems have private and publicly run hospitals, and what's best about it is that everyone has choices. As the CD Howe Institute study claims, competition makes for better healthcare. In my opinion, it's a mistake to give government such a monopoly over healthcare, because what we're basically doing is giving them a monopoly over life and death. We pay taxes which goes into general revenues and then what happens to it after that is anybody's guess. That's for both federal and provincial. We know how wasteful and incompetent governments can be, where political considerations are always the first priority and which makes reform of anything almost impossible. Yep, we gotta start looking at the European systems of healthcare because ours has just turned into a giant money pit.   JMO

I'm probably not coming across properly but every Canadian not having that equal access would be unpopular with the majority of Canadians regardless of income... my opinion.   I'm not disagreeing that we should look at other models that have worked at all, but to where the pain points are right now I don't follow how an scaled to income system is going to address the lengthy wait times or the amount of additional healthcare professionals we need.  I'm 100% for any organization or practitioner to follow Canadian Medical Standards but there is no government monopoly today, is there?  Most of our doctors and physicians are 'private contractors' who are paid by service provided by the province, and we have private clinics, although they can't charge for services covered by the public system.  The first thing need to address are the pain points we have today and do it much sooner than later.  That means getting more bodies in our systems to align with our population growth. Once (or if) we can do that and somewhat normalize then I'm for looking into every corner of our system and others to improve it, and not get back to where we are now.  Just my 2 cents...

[suds]

5 hours ago, LinkSoul60 said:

I'm probably not coming across properly but every Canadian not having that equal access would be unpopular with the majority of Canadians regardless of income... my opinion.   I'm not disagreeing that we should look at other models that have worked at all, but to where the pain points are right now I don't follow how an scaled to income system is going to address the lengthy wait times or the amount of additional healthcare professionals we need.  I'm 100% for any organization or practitioner to follow Canadian Medical Standards but there is no government monopoly today, is there?  Most of our doctors and physicians are 'private contractors' who are paid by service provided by the province, and we have private clinics, although they can't charge for services covered by the public system.  The first thing need to address are the pain points we have today and do it much sooner than later.  That means getting more bodies in our systems to align with our population growth. Once (or if) we can do that and somewhat normalize then I'm for looking into every corner of our system and others to improve it, and not get back to where we are now.  Just my 2 cents...

As for the hospitals, the government does have a monopoly as far as I'm concerned. We seem to be on the same track concerning equal access which btw we don't have now with millions of Canadians without family doctors. You'd think that someone in government would see that coming. But maybe your right about leaving the system alone and just pumping more dollars into it. If the government ever did try and reform our healthcare system they'd probably just fuk it up in any case and make it worse. Anyways, I've got nothing else to contribute. Good-bye for now 🙂