There are more stories in here: Canada Has a Health Care Lottery?

Late that night, unable to sleep because of a splitting headache, I got up to take some strong headache medication. The last thing I remember was reaching up to the cabinet containing the pills. My wife then heard a crash as I hit the floor. I had collapsed and gone into a convulsion.

This is the point where we discovered just how fast and effective our health system could be. The complaints you hear directed at Canada's health system about waiting times for treatment are simply without foundation. As you will see from what happened next, my experience says quite the opposite.

The next thing I recall I was being carried downstairs by some fire fighters who responded to the 911 call and had made it to our house ahead of the ambulance. I was taken immediately in the ambulance to the Mount Sinai Hospital emergency. I drifted in and out of consciousness and don't remember much from that period, but a CAT scan done in the wee hours of Thursday, April 22 revealed a large mass in my brain.

A few hours later, I was admitted to the Toronto Western Hospital neurology ward (which has an international reputation for excellence). I had a brain tumour and needed surgery. The doctors were optimistic that what they didn't get with surgery could be dealt with by chemotherapy and radiation. They assumed I had brain cancer, but they said it would be a few weeks after surgery before tests could determine the exact nature of the tumour. The medical staff could scarcely believe that I had actually been at work the previous Friday.

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Just 60 hours or so after my collapse, on Saturday, April 24, , I underwent five and a half hours of surgery to remove a large brain tumour.

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Our experience with Canada's health care system has been first-rate. This includes the cancer care my wife is currently receiving, which has included a sophisticated procedure whereby she successfully received a transplant of her own stem cells at the wonderful Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. She did not have to wait for that complex operation either: it was performed upon completion of the essential preliminary treatment.

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I think our experience with health care is comparable to that of most Canadians. Our system may not be perfect, but we are more than happy with how it has treated us, and, like other Canadians, we would not trade it for the American system.

My brain and the Ontario health-care system
by Paul E. Barber, August 20, 2009

See: Health care in Canada

Health care in Canada is funded and delivered through a publicly-funded health care system, with most services provided by private entities.[1]

Health care spending in Canada is projected to reach $160 billion, or 10.6% of GDP, in 2007. This is slightly above the average for OECD countries. In Canada, the various levels of government pay for about 71% of Canadians' health care costs, which is slightly below the OECD average. Under the terms of the Canada Health Act, the publicly funded insurance plans are required to pay for medically necessary care, but only if it is delivered in hospitals or by physicians. There is considerable variation across the provinces/territories as to the extent to which such costs as outpatient prescription drugs, physical therapy, long-term care, home care, dental care and even ambulance services are covered.[2]

Considerable attention has been focused on two issues: wait times and health human resources. There is also a debate about the appropriate 'public-private mix' for both financing and delivering services.

Canada's healthcare spending is expected to reach $171.9 billion, or $5,170 per person, in 2008. Health expenditures are expected to be 10.7% of the gross domestic product. Hospitals account for the largest segment in spending at $48.1 billion, however, this amount is declining. According to the OECD, spending was second amongst other countries, less than United States and more than Norway, Switzerland and Luxembourg[3].

Canada has a federally sponsored, publicly funded Medicare system, with most services provided by the private sector. Each province may opt out, though none currently do. Canada's system is known as a single payer system, where basic services are provided by private doctors (since 2002 they have been allowed to incorporate), with the entire fee paid for by the government at the same rate. Most family doctors receive a fee per visit. These rates are negotiated between the provincial governments and the province's medical associations, usually on an annual basis. A physician cannot charge a fee for a service that is higher than the negotiated rate -- even to patients who are not covered by the publicly funded system -- unless the physican opts out of billing the publicly funded system altogether. Pharmaceutical costs are set at a global median by government price controls. Other areas of health care, such as dentistry and optometry, are wholly private.

Also see: Has Canada Got the Cure?

Publicly funded health care has its problems, as any Canadian or Briton knows. But like democracy, it's the best answer we've come up with so far.

Should the United States implement a more inclusive, publicly funded health care system? That's a big debate throughout the country. But even as it rages, most Americans are unaware that the United States is the only country in the developed world that doesn't already have a fundamentally public--that is, tax-supported--health care system.

That means that the United States has been the unwitting control subject in a 30-year, worldwide experiment comparing the merits of private versus public health care funding. For the people living in the United States, the results of this experiment with privately funded health care have been grim. The United States now has the most expensive health care system on earth and, despite remarkable technology, the general health of the U.S. population is lower than in most industrialized countries. Worse, Americans' mortality rates--both general and infant--are shockingly high.

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The United States spends far more per capita on health care than any comparable country. In fact, the gap is so enormous that a recent University of California, San Francisco, study estimates that the United States would save over $161 billion every year in paperwork alone if it switched to a singlepayer system like Canada's.3 These billions of dollars are not abstract amounts deducted from government budgets; they come directly out of the pockets of people who are sick.

READ THE WHOLE THING...

I was born with a malformed kidney. A U.S. health insurance company would have called it a pre-existing condition and refused to pay for it.

And I might be dead by now.

Instead it got done in what I considered a reasonable length of time that I was quite comfortable with, as their were other people with more urgent conditions, as I explained in the diary, who needed more immediate surgery so they wouldn't die in a matter of hours or days.

And the "reality" is also that it got done costing me only a kidney that I had no need for, rather than costing me an arm and a leg and bankruptcy.

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Economics Professor Richard Wolff of the New School University in NY made a very good point a few weeks ago when he suggested in a TRNN video interview:

...a return to the the old American prideful mindset of "if we're not producing the best quality at the lowest price we should go and find out who's doing that and replicate their experience", and points out that the number one thing standing in the way of doing this is the lack of will to challenge the status quo and to do what everyone already knows needs to be done: spend less to get more.