US corporate media outlets distort truths about Canadian Medicare system

[DaveSZ]

http://venus.uwindsor.ca/flipside/vol3/may00/00my17a.htm

US AND CANADIAN MEDIA DISTORT CANADIAN MEDICARE, TO PROMOTE PRIVATIZATION


By Theodore Marmor

As an academic observer of Canadian and American medical care for a quarter of a century, I want to say to Canadians Despite the strains of the past decade, you don't know how lucky you are. It is precisely because Canada has good value for money through medicare that it represents an ideological threat to U.S. medical and pharmaceutical interest groups. This is playing out in Canadian medicare's image in the North American media.

Crisis and crowding in the emergency room has been a familiar story in Canada and the United States over the past decade. The media took special notice when this past winter's flu season aggravated overcrowding in the ER. Between mid-December and early February, ABC News, The New York Times and The Washington Post did stories on the quality of Canada's ERs. Steven Pearlstein of the Post asserted that "most experts" agree that Canada's medicare is doomed. He wrote "While money might alleviate the shortage of advanced machinery, hospital beds, and medical school slots, it will only be a matter of time before the demand for medical services once again overtakes the willingness of voters to pay for it."

During the same period, USA Today and Time magazine published substantial reports on U.S. emergency rooms -- with this difference While the reports on Canada used the overcrowding problem to suggest that your medicare is critically flawed, by contrast, parallel reports on U.S. overcrowding did not indict my country's health-insurance arrangements.

The image of a troubled medicare program is being amplified in the Canadian media, too. Yet this fearful portrait is strikingly at variance with the research. A 1992 study (Roos et. al.) found that three-year mortality rates following surgery were better in Canada than in the States for eight out of 10 types of surgery (including bypass surgery). A 1997 U.S. General Accounting Office study found that Canadians are 5-per-cent more likely to survive lung cancer than Americans, 4-per-cent less likely to survive breast cancer, and do equally well with colon cancer, Hodgkinson's disease and hip fractures -- at far less cost to the patient.

[DaveSZ]

1. Sorry, I know this article is a bit old

I thought it was interesting, and it shows once again the power the corporations have in influencing policy and public opinion.

[izzie]

5. This is always dragged out about the bad care but.........

Someone is my family in Can. and she said care is very good. Once my mother was in England and got ill and her care was very good. Had govt. care for 35 years under service and my care was very good. Usually they get going on the MRI and the wait, but them most of ours sit and do nothing for hrs. on end and we have to spend millions for those machines, so maybe one is a city that is busy is better than 10 in a city that are rarely used. Waiting in waiting rooms is also done in this country.

[Kanary]

2. Those comparisons are quite helpful

for a group of people who wanted to put together *real* facts to establish the need for Universal Health Care.

I'd be very interested in anything else you find along these lines, and suggest you post it on the health care thread on the Health/Education forum.

Thanks for posting this!

Kanary

[KT2000]

3. This is how it works

where i live:

Without insurance? A Lutheran church has a clinic on Monday 5PM - 7 PM. Nurses there, maybe a doctor at times.

Doctors will not make appointments with people who do not have insurance - the church clinic is it.

Emergency care at the ER is for the purpose of stabilizing. If the problem is not life threatening the person is released from the ER with the suggestion to make an appointment with a doctor for follow-up care. But that is a joke if the person does not have insurance.

When a person without insurance calls a doctor to make an appointment, the receptionist tells the person they will have to go to a doctor who accepts patients who do not have insurance. Ha Ha Ha - there aren't any.

If the sick person is a cute little child - people put cans that have a picture of the child on the can at the cash register in stores, and ask for donations to help pay for the child's cancer treatment etc.

I am told that our local hospital is quite aggressive in getting money they are owed. There goes the house!

This is what media does not cover in this country. Disgraceful.

[DaveSZ]

4. where do you live KT2000?

It's true, Wall Street usually gets what it wants regardless of the well-being of some sick child.

[KT2000]

6. Rural NW Washington State

Sorry I had to sign off so you may not get my reply.

We do have one good thing here - state plan health insurance for the working poor. But that has problems - people may make too much to qualify (that amount is not very high), waiting lists to get on, pre-existing wait periods. The state plan is under constant threat of being discontinued.

It is insane.

[Malva Zebrina]

7. It is even a joke if all the person has is Medicare without any supplement

You go to the ER and then given an appointment. You try to make an appointment and find out that you MUST call on the day you wish to make an appointment. I did that for three days and each time I called, at the first minute the office was opened, I was told all the appointements were already filled for that day. There is absolutely no reason why this office cannot make appointements in advance.

I fired my doctor and think it is not any wonder that people seek alternative health care.

[KT2000]

8. Right! Which insurance??

You make a good point that even though some are considered to have insurance, there is a bureaucratic way of weedong out those people who have insurance that does not pay doctors well.

In a community of many retired people, the doctors here quit accepting patients with Medicare, Medicaid, military health insurance as well.

Ours is a brutal medical system. The insurance industry wants to cover only those who are in good health because that is how they make money. The rest of us fall into the shell game that is our healthcare system.

Again -media does not cover the realities of this system.