our American health insurance companies ... so want to get into your market and they have to fuck up your health care system to do it.Yes, in short. And this is one of our fears about NAFTA.
For an inside look and critique of our system from the left:
http://www.healthcoalition.ca/Huh: "NAFTA Lawsuit seeks to open Medicare to Privatizers" -- didn't even know about that one. Unfortunately, the link goes nowhere at the moment.
Ah, here:
http://www.rabble.ca/babble/national-news/us-quotinvestorquot-seeks-nafta-challenge-against-canadian-health-care(also the place to look generally for progressive news and views)
In mid-July, Melvin J. Howard, an Arizona businessman, filed legal papers that have set in motion a process that could lead to formal arbitration against Canada under provisions of the NAFTA that permit foreign investors to sue governments for certain investment losses.
And so it starts.
Five years ago, my dad spent 6 weeks in hospital with metastasized melanoma diagnosed too late to be treated. CAT scans, bone scans, biopsies, oncologist, internist, orthopaedic surgeon, MRI on two days' notice cancelled because he had a pacemaker, hip surgery purely for pain relief on two days' notice cancelled because his condition had deteriorated, delivered 30 miles by ambulance so he could die at home, three days later, with hospital bed, morphine pump, lip moisteners, visiting nurse, doctor on call ... and what did it cost us? Parking. And I had to pay $25 out of pocket because the senior cits' drug plan didn't cover the sublingual form of ativan (to alleviate anxiety should he regain consciousness). I was peeved about that.
My sister was diagnosed with stage III colorectal cancer last July. She has had all the colonoscopies, scans, etc., and 6 weeks of outpatient chemo (a body pack) and 5 days/week radiation, with the daily shuttle bus to the big city cancer hospital thrown in if she wanted it. She is undergoing surgery next month. Then on to the big-time chemo. What has it cost her? Parking.
My mum has not yet been definitively diagnosed after a mass on her aorta was detected in August, but the consensus is that it will be lymphoma. She had a biopsy that was inconclusive and recently had surgery to remove as much of the mass as possible for biopsy purposes. The tissue has again been sent to the big cancer hospital and we are awaiting the outcome. Chemo, radiation, surgery -- whatever it is, it will cost her gas and parking. Meanwhile, she decided to get a haemorrhoid on the weekend, and her doctor reiterated that she could come in any time without an appointment. She and my sister are lucky, actually, because the area is underserved by doctors, and this new one opened a practice shortly after they moved there. My mum also regularly sees an ophthalmologist in the nearby small city, having been treated for glaucoma for several years before that at the leading hospital eye institute in the city where she used to live.
I've had two cataract surgeries in the last three years. Cost me taxi fare, as did all the follow-up doctor appointments. I paid for my post-op prescriptions, because I'm not a senior, not poor, and am self-employed with no employer-based supplemental insurance. We also pay for my hypertension meds and my partner's diabetes meds and supplies. I think they all cost about half what they cost in the States. I paid to have a couple of little lumps removed from my leg by a dermatologist in office a few years ago just because they bugged the hell out of me -- $200 for two lumps and a big mole, I think it was. That included the biopsies just to be sure they weren't any more than annoying. If they had been, I expect I would have been reimbursed.
I'm embarking on the whole process of preventive/diagnostic measures to address the likelihood that my sister's cancer (advanced colorectal cancer in a 42-yr-old nonsmoking vegetarian, quite the rarity) is genetic, connected either with my father's melanoma (my brother had a stage I melanoma treated the following year) or with my maternal side's uterine cancers. My sister has started the genetic counseling/screening process on our behalves. I have to get going on the blood tests I've been sent for -- walk into the lab, hand over my OHIP card, wait a while, get stuck with needles. I had to postpone it a bit after my purse with my ID in it was stolen, although that actually wouldn't have mattered since the labs/docs have a number to call for a waiver. And get onto the mammogram thing, make an appointment with the closest Breast Screening Clinic. And get my partner in to his clinic because he isn't managing his diabetes well. And get myself transferred to his clinic, finally, because I'm finally peeved enough with mine. Community Health Centres, my ideological choice, but mine has grown beyond its britches to where it's just a bit too bureaucratic for my taste, and is not as interested in middle-aged middle-class people like myself as it is in its homeless and disadvantaged clientele. It's a good thing it does all the outreach and other services it does, I'd just rather go to a doctor, not a multiservice social centre, and the clinic I now live nearer is less impersonal.
So. I guess you're getting my drift. ;)
There are problems in the health care system. There are shortages of health care workers in some fields. There are waiting lists for some surgeries. Cataract surgery was one and may still be in some places. Mine was urgent (you don't usually go effectively blind in one eye in the space of 6 weeks -- especially at my age!), but also an eye unit had recently been opened in a local hospital specifically to eliminate those delays. Joint replacement surgery is the biggie. I'm sure that's awful if you have that problem, but given that my dad got admitted to ICU two hours after going to a walk-in clinic with a slow heart rate one afternoon and shipped 75 miles by ambulance three days later to the cardiac hospital, for genuinely emergency life-saving pacemaker surgery, I'd probably be a little tolerant of waiting for joint replacement. There are also tales of waits for cancer treatment, but that hasn't been the experience of my sister or mother, or my partner's mother, whose lung cancer that was treated last year has unfortunately now returned ...
My tale, told all over again. I should've just gone and found one of the previous editions!
But you're right. Your health care system and the people who are running it are a threat to ours.
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