AARP: 5 Myths About Canada’s Health Care System

[Bucky]

http://www.aarp.org/politics-society/government-elections/info-03-2012/myths-canada-health-care.html

Myth #1: Canadians are flocking to the United States to get medical care.

According to one study, 0.5% of Canadians elect to come to the US for medical care, 0.1% come for emergency care, and 99.4% get their healthcare in Canada.

Myth #2: Doctors in Canada are flocking to the United States to practice.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information has been tracking doctors’ destinations since 1992. Since then, 60 percent to 70 percent of the physicians who emigrate have headed south of the border. In the mid-1990s, the number of Canadian doctors leaving for the United States spiked at about 400 to 500 a year. But in recent years this number has declined, with only 169 physicians leaving for the States in 2003, 138 in 2004 and 122 both in 2005 and 2006. These numbers represent less than 0.5 percent of all doctors working in Canada.

So when emigration “spiked,” 400 to 500 doctors were leaving Canada for the United States. There are more than 800,000 physicians in the United States right now, so I’m skeptical that every doctor knows one of those émigrés. But look closely at the tan line in the following chart, which represents the net loss of doctors to Canada.

Myth #3: Canada rations health care; that’s why hip replacements and cataract surgeries happen faster in the United States.

This has been debunked so often, it’s tiring. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, concluded: “At least 63 percent of hip replacements performed in Canada last year [2008] ... were on patients age 65 or older.” And more than 1,500 of those, it turned out, were on patients over 85.

More at AARP ==> http://www.aarp.org/politics-society/government-elections/info-03-2012/myths-canada-health-care.2.html

[gollygee]

1. Good article!

I'll hold onto it for when someone posts something about this issue on Facebook.

[Thinkingabout]

2. More lies and misinformation from the RW

I was sitting in the waiting room near a senior couple right after ACA passed and the lady said "we had a good healthcare system until obamacare ruined it". I am sure she was using Medicare for her office visit. She also agreed with faux news so she perhaps did not know nothing had started with ACA and I wanted to tell her if ACA had not ruined anything in our health care. The US is far behind many other countries in health care.