http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601202&sid=aNkLyH2VecGMCanadian Health Care, Even With Queues, Bests U.S. (Update1) By Pat Wechsler
Sept. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Opponents of overhauling U.S. health care argue that Canada shows what happens when government gets involved in medicine, saying the country is plagued by inferior treatment, rationing and months-long queues.
The allegations are wrong by almost every measure, according to research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and other independent studies published during the past five years. While delays do occur for non-emergency procedures, data indicate that Canada’s system of universal health coverage provides care as good as in the U.S., at a cost 47 percent less for each person.
“There is an image of Canadians flooding across the border to get care,” said Donald Berwick, a Harvard University health- policy specialist and pediatrician who heads the Boston-based nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement. “That’s just not the case. The public in Canada is far more satisfied with the system than they are in the U.S. and health care is at least as good, with much more contained costs.”
Canadians live two to three years longer than Americans and are as likely to survive heart attacks, childhood leukemia, and breast and cervical cancer, according to the OECD, the Paris- based coalition of 30 industrialized nations.
Deaths considered preventable through health care are less frequent in Canada than in the U.S., according to a January 2008 report in the journal Health Affairs. In the study by British researchers, Canada placed sixth among 19 countries surveyed, with 77 deaths for every 100,000 people. That compared with the last-place finish of the U.S., with 110 deaths.
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“Both systems ration medical care,” he said. “In Canada, they make people wait. In the U.S., we make people pay.”
Fifty-four percent of chronically ill Americans reported skipping a test or treatment, neglecting to go to a doctor when sick, or failing to fill a prescription because of the cost, according to a 2008 survey by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that focuses on health care, and pollster Harris Interactive. That was more than twice the number in Canada, data from those New York-based groups showed.
As the price of health care in the U.S. has risen three to four times faster than the rate of inflation, surveys show that Americans have become concerned they won’t be able to pay medical bills. Forty-three percent of consumers in a June poll by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor said they worried they might not be able to afford care, even with insurance.
“Canadians value fairness, and they cannot conceive of a system in which someone can’t get health care,” said Wendy Levinson, a Canadian who runs the department of medicine at the University of Toronto and worked in the U.S. from 1979 to 2001.
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In both the U.S. and Canada, 26 percent of people interviewed told the Commonwealth Fund survey of chronically ill adults they got a same-day appointment with a doctor when they were sick -- the lowest number in any of the eight countries polled by the foundation. Thirty-four percent of the Canadians said they had to wait six days or more, compared with 23 percent of the Americans.
Canadians visited their doctors more frequently: 5.9 visits per person compared with four for those in the U.S., according to 2005 OECD data.
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