The cost of Canadian health care
The true costs are mostly hidden:
Let’s start with how much Canadians actually pay. The OECD arrives at its figures by the hopelessly simplistic method of dividing a nation’s total health care expenditure by its population. Thus, Canadians pay about $5,500 a head while we pay a little over $10,000 apiece for our system. But these figures are meaningless to actual Canadian families. What matters to them is how much they pay for coverage, via taxation. The Fraser Institute, a non-partisan think tank based in British Columbia, reports that the average two-adult family pays more than $12K annually. And it gets worse:
Between 1997 and 2017, the average Canadian family’s cash income increased by 96.6%.”¦ Over that two decades, the cost of health care insurance for the average Canadian family (all family types) increased by 173.6%.
Canada really knows how to do health care inflation:
For the average Canadian family, between 1997 and 2017, the cost of public health care insurance increased 3.2 times as fast as the cost of food, 2.7 times as fast as the cost of clothing, 1.9 times as fast as the cost of shelter, and 1.8 times faster than average income.
In addition, there’s the issue of choice:
As Sally Pipes, CEO and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute, writes:
I came to the United States in 1991, in part, to escape the single-payer system called Medicare, in my native Canada. A recent OECD study of nine developed nations showed that Canada was the only country that outright banned any private coverage for procedures deemed medically necessary.
And then there’s the issue of the waits. Back in the 1990s, I personally observed the terrible situation that chronic pain patients in Canada and Great Britain faced, when in connection with my arm and back injuries I was on a discussion board for chronic pain (the following quote’s from a post I wrote in 2009):
It was actually my injuries that first propelled me online over ten years ago, looking for information to help me with my decisions, and to read about the experiences of other people who suffered from similar problems. One of the things I found at that time that made a deep impression on me were the stories told by patients in Canada and Britain. Although they didn’t have to worry about insurance coverage, they were uniformly the most miserable of all the chronic pain patients on several message boards I frequented. They had to wait forever for tests. There were far fewer specialists in Canada and Britain who knew anything about their injuries or how to treat them either surgically or medically. The problems of these patients were generally considered unimportant and they were given low priority.
Until that time, if I’d thought about the health care system in those countries at all, I had assumed it was a great thing that there was universal coverage. But during this experience I learned that, at least for nerve injuries and chronic pain of the sort I had, the care here was far better. In fact, many of these people dreamed of saving up enough money to come to the US to some of the surgeons I’d been able to see. But they could not afford it, and they continued to suffer.
I’m not a rich person. But ever since then I’ve continued to pay extra for the medical insurance most likely to preserve my freedom to choose. If I hadn’t been able to have surgery on the west coast, I believe that even now, ten years later, I would probably be suffering from pain at or above the level of those early years. The prospect is so dreadful that I shudder to even think about it. I’m just grateful that wasn’t the case.
I wasn’t political in the 90s, back when this was happening. I had no ax to grind against single-payer—in fact, prior to that experience I probably would have said it was a good thing. But I couldn’t help but notice the desperation and increased suffering of the people on those boards from Canada and Great Britain.
There is no free lunch. There is no free health care. And anyone comparing outcomes in different countries by comparing statistics on infant mortality and life expectancy is comparing apples and oranges. These matters are influenced by much more than a healthcare insurance system.
Back on Capitol Hill in the 2000s many in Congress were bedazzled by the newest great thing, the supposedly far superior Canadian health care system model, and how we ought to change our health care system to emulate it.
Back then, as well, I was researching this system, and I was finding stories about things like that system allowing only one MRI per X hundred square miles.
The result?
A long wait, stories about people having to travel hundreds of miles to get an MRI that was booked virtually 24/7, and having to take a 2 A.M. appointment to do so.
I saw a mention of the infant mortality stat very recently, relating it to quality of health care, nation by nation. This is an old bogus calculation promoted by the WHO at least 40 years ago I believe. I hope the recent discussion I saw used newer and better data, but there was no evidence of that as I scrutinized the article.
The dirty secret of a half century ago was that a great many countries do not count infant deaths as citizen deaths until that infant is one week old or even one month old. Talk about skewed data.
______
Hidden costs or hidden taxes:
I’ve read that a significant percentage of salaried people believe that the fed. gov. is giving them free money when they file tax returns and get money back. Sigh.
About 20 years ago I looked at the retail price of a basic Ford Focus in the US and then the UK. After the exchange rate conversion the UK model was about 60% more expensive. The VAT not only adds a direct tax to the purchase of the UK car, but every component that the UK Ford company had to purchase was also inflated by the VAT.
A long wait, stories about people having to travel hundreds of miles to get an MRI that was booked virtually 24/7, and having to take a 2 A.M. appointment to do so.
The elites ration critical medical resources based on the old consumption laws. There’s no reason for peons to be given medical care above that of cows.
It is better for the power elites to reserve the true medical resources for their own clans and scions.
Australia’s system is only slightly better than its Commonwealth siblings’ (in terms of costs, access, & waits) but only slightly.
And the big debate here is if private insurance, which is supposed to give you a “queue jumper’s privilege” in terms of access, is actually worth the cost when you still can’t get in to a Dr, specialist, or surgical theatre quickly. You MAY get in ahead of your public-health neighbour IF you can get in when you need to.
This is especially true in rural communities where it is not uncommon for a fly-in Dr from a capital city to work only a few days per week in a rural centre and then fly back to the big smoke where they live the life of Riley for the rest of the week…and the local health system pays their large salary, travel, and temporary rural housing while they jet in and out at their leisure.
In ALL single payer systems the System, itself, becomes the priority concern — its rules its protocols, etc.
It tunes out all but the most politically connected patients…
And there is no escaping the Kafkaesk protocol structure… no Plan B.
The only escape requires national escape.
On the money, heart operations are very expensive and only extend life for, say, a decade. To Ottawa that’s a Bad Bargain. So they queue up the needy, VA style, so that Nature solves the economic problem.
Statistically, this results in Great Looking Stats. Terminating the elderly is without question the ultimate economic solution that pulls into view with all single-payer plans.
It is something that can always be buried in the statistics.
There’s herbal healing, healing powers from the Holy Ghost, all kinds of alternatives to paying 600 dollars per month for your special pills.
Charlie Munger of BRK said in Omaha on Saturday that when the Dems capture the WH and Congress, we will have single payer health care.
Munger railed against the cost of US health care as a percentage of GDP.
This is my golden oldie on Canadian health care. Krugman gets p3wned on Canadian Health Care
By virtue of Krugman’s half minute on this video, I have stopped reading anything he writes. Saves me time.
And of course there are nautropathic “medicines,” snake oils, laetrile, and the placebo effect. Nobody gets out “alive” and you can’t take it with you.
blert: “In ALL single payer systems the System, itself, becomes the priority concern – its rules its protocols, etc.”
Very true. It’s the law of the bureaucracies – The bureaucracy itself always becomes more important than the mission. Look at the VA. That’s a government run healthcare system much like the NHS or Canada’s medicare. The incentive to perform isn’t there. The incentive to beef up the bureaucracy and its employees becomes the main driver. To improve the VA, you have to get rid of it and make it an all voucher system. No progressive politician is ever going to do that.
Our healthcare system could be improved by making prices transparent. allowing fifty state competition between insurers, medical tort reform, and less Federal government involvement. Why is that so hard to achieve? Because progressives want to centralize everything. As if that has ever been successful. As if the USSR, Red China, North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe all worked out splendidly.
Om needs to get off the pharmaceutical Doctor Class payment system.
If you end up dying on it, don’t blame me, as you were warned. I wash my hands of the blood of this generation.
Look at the VA.
They told us that O care would work because VA worked. But VA worked under Bush II’s war funding. It suddenly broke when Demoncrats like Shinigami Shinseki were put in charge of the VA…
Ymar take your snake oil at your own risk. Heal yourself, but be wary, even doctors figured out long ago that it isn’t wise to diagnose and treat yourself. But hey, you know more than any mortal that has ever lived, eh?
TommyJay Says:
May 7th, 2018 at 12:41 pm
The dirty secret of a half century ago was that a great many countries do not count infant deaths as citizen deaths until that infant is one week old or even one month old. Talk about skewed data.
* * *
I bet they don’t count these either.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/hundreds-of-dead-babies-found-in-trash-in-pakistan-99-percent-are-girls/
“Welfare organizations reported finding hundreds of dead newborn infants thrown away in the trash – 345 in the city of Karachi alone during the past 16 months. The overwhelming majority of them are girls.”
Capitalism sacrifices its poor. Churchill’s “unequal sharing of blessings”. Financial leverage determines quality of care.
Socialism sacrifices the politically unconnected, the elderly and those suffering from maladies that require “counter productive expenditures”. Tribal connectedness and bureaucratic regulations determine quality of care.
Arguably, neither can objectively claim to be an inherently superior moral determinate for quality of care.
Wherein that superior moral determinate is revealed is in their “fruits”. Capitalistic medical systems allow for the advancement of medicine, whereas socialistic systems do not. Collectivist, single payer systems are a “zero sum game”, which precludes medical advancement given that none of the resources are funneled into investment…
As long as capitalistic medical systems exist, socialistic systems can benefit through a parasitical relationship. The West’s socialistic systems can hide their static nature by adopting the medical advances capitalistic systems make possible.
Robert Reich famously admitted this long ago, though of course the media repressed it.
http://www.humblelibertarian.com/2009/10/obama-advisor-to-elderly-were-going-to.html
om Says:
May 7th, 2018 at 8:53 pm
I have healed myself. What does that matter to you? You’re not a healer nor are you credible enough to judge healers.
I’m in Australia too and my experience is quite a bit different from John Guilfoyle’s. I’m not sure if he is trying to access the system from the bush of not, but I live in a capital city and I have had no delays accessing first class care in the private system. That is why I pay for private insurance. I’m 75 and it costs me about US$1500 a year and that gives me full hospital cover with a private room and pays almost all of the Doctor’s bill. They do ding you for internet access in the private hospitals. It is unconscionable! I have had several major surgeries and the total out of pocket ran well well under $1000. In the public system you wait bigly for non urgent procedures – just like any public system. Still I had a friend diagnosed with bowel cancer last month and they were operated on 12 days later using keyhole surgery – no stoma – no chemo – no bill. In practice the two systems complement each other. The insured free up the public system to serve those who depend on it. The public system takes reasonable care of those who can’t pay for insurance. In the bush, just like it is in rural America, the service level is lower. I recently had a young friend who is a PhD student doing field work in the US. He was burned in a steam geyser and the local hospital was sub par and ended up sending him by ambulance to the state capital which had a first class burns unit. The had him two months – I doubt I would be sufficiently numerate to read the bill – but fortunately his Australian university had him insured with full coverage – which goes to show you God takes good care of PhD students and Aussies. My larger point is that it may work to avoid single payer – that is a monopoly – and have competition between the public and the private system. Crudely it works like this: If the private insurance gets too expensive, people drop their insurance and rely on the public system. If the waiting lists get too long people take out private insurance. Notice that my current premium is yearly, not monthly.
Yamar, you proved my point, thanks for the reinforcement.
For some years I worked for M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. It is the world’s largest cancer research facility.
We regularly got Canadian patients whose treatment in Canada would not have begun before their predicted (based on diagnostic criteria) likely deaths.
Also, the Texas Medical Center (at that time, 10-12 years ago) had more MRI machines than all of Canada.
om Says:
May 8th, 2018 at 10:03 am
No problem. Maybe you’ll stop your trolling as you did with GB when you said he was somehow ridiculous for supporting Trum in the primary.
I at least believe in free will. Om was never given authority nor does he have it on his own authority, to judge and condemn people for voting their conscience and making their choices in life.
These totalitarians will be popping out of the woodworks as self proclaimed whatevers more and more as time goes on.
Projection much?
Are you suggesting that two of the primary arguments made by proponents for single payer health insurance:
1. It will lower costs
2. More people will have access to top quality care
are proven false by the Canadian mandatory single-payer health system?
Says the Left, everyone other than those on the Left is afflicted with “false consciousness,” and is unable to see “what is in their best interests.”
Thus, for our own good, the Left and it’s “advocates” and “experts” have to step in, and to arrange things–through a series of different incentives, benefits or penalties–to “nudge” all of us benighted, ignorant souls in the right direction, have to “force us to be free,” to arrange things so that our range of options is constricted and, thus, we will have a greater chance of walking down the right lane, of making the right decisions, of choosing the right courses of action, and picking the right things.
If you think about it, all the schemes/proposed or enacted legislation of the Left–presented as beneficent programs to increase our knowledge, health, safety, our well-being, or that of the Planet/Ecosystem–be it Obamacare, legislation to deal with “Global Warming/Climate Change,” Gun Control legislation, Federal control over education, or Speech codes at Universities, etc.–are all, at base, really schemes to get us to cede to the Left and to their self proclaimed “advocates” and “experts” ever more access to and control over us, our lives, and our assets–over the extent of our knowledge, over what we are permitted to say, our ability to defend ourselves against both hostile strangers and a government turned hostile, over our range of choices, our actions and decisions, and our money, property, and other assets.
And a gigantic, very well organized (and disguised) scam by the Left to relieve us of our control over our lives and over our wealth, to limit our ability to defend ourselves, and to transfer them to the Left, is all it’s ever been.
Ymar: “They told us that O care would work because VA worked. But VA worked under Bush II’s war funding. It suddenly broke when Demoncrats like Shinigami Shinseki were put in charge of the VA…”
The VA was limping along under the radar dealing with WWII, Vietnam, and Desert Storm vets until the GWOT stirred the pot. The demand for services ramped up. Per the bureaucratic law, the bureaucracy could/would not respond. The VA has been a problem as long as I can remember. I’m a vet and have veteran brothers who been well aware of the VA problems from way back in the Vietnam War days when it went through the same sort of bungling and non-service as is well known today.
The military itself is a huge bureaucracy that is inefficient, slow to change, and only manages to do a middling job because it has enough motivated people that keep focusing it on the mission. And, of course, better technology than any other armed forces in the world. Highly political/administrative officers do well in the Pentagon under Presidents like Obama. Hard nosed operators who focus on the mission are gaining traction under Trump.
Whether rump can re-energize the military and reform the VA is one of the major struggles going on in D.C. As well as the struggle to dismantle Obamacare.
Hi Lorenz…you note the 2 BIG factors in your experience:
1. Big City vs the bush (I live in a regional centre…but we are bush for all intents & purposes even with a public AND a private hospital)
2. PRIVATE insurance. (We have that too, but the private hospital has no Emergency Dept. So…in a pinch we are all public patients…and the queue is horrendous even with the fly-in/fly-out medical staff keeping the place running alongside our hardworking locals.)
Both of those almost guarantee your experience is better than your average Cockie west of the Great Dividing Range.
I’ve seen people wait more than a year for surgery because the backlog at the public hospital was huge. Granted it was not life-saving surgery, but if you are trying to get a knee replaced & are always being bumped out of theatre…it can easily become a life-changing thing.
Australia does fairly well compared to our Commonwealth Cousins…but if you were to drop your private cover & move out of the capital, your experience would be different.
om Says:
May 8th, 2018 at 10:45 am
It’s time to come back from The Nile; your vacation has lasted long enough omni.
You don’t even have the Spirit of Fire and Contention now vs the spirit in your words lambasting Trum voters back in 2015-2016. If it didn’t beat them back, it’s not going to be enough to beat me. Bring your A game or don’t even bother.
My position was neutral and I wrote that people should vote their conscience, whether that was Trum or not.
The VA was limping along under the radar dealing with WWII, Vietnam, and Desert Storm vets until the GWOT stirred the pot. The demand for services ramped up. Per the bureaucratic law, the bureaucracy could/would not respond. The VA has been a problem as long as I can remember. I’m a vet and have veteran brothers who been well aware of the VA problems from way back in the Vietnam War days when it went through the same sort of bungling and non-service as is well known today.
I didn’t think the government healthcare for vets was very competent either. But plenty of conservatives and American patriots seemed to have fallen for that propaganda, especially near Virginia and DC and Maryland. These were wives of veterans or veterans themselves.
Ymar:
Here is another clue: it’s not all about you.
No matter how many times you say “I predicted” this or that all that you show is your ego and bluster; as Geoffrey might say, an argument from “authority.” But carry on, as you will.
Meanwhile somewhat on topic, see this article
about our dysfunctional healthcare payment system.
“The unholy Frankenstein monster that is the leftover, adulterated, selectively enforced remnants of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is working with an almost entirely dysfunctional healthcare system to generate massive profits for insurers in 2018. …
Is this the inevitable result of free-market, for-profit healthcare? Hardly. We cannot remind our readers enough: we do not have “free-market” healthcare in America. Instead we have something more like an unholy alliance between a gargantuan, rent-seeking, oligopoly and Big Government. Recall that in California alone, 70% of all persons are covered by taxpayer-funded healthcare:”
Holy cow, 70% including me BTW who is covered by Medicare.
Does this make me feel any better that Gavin Threesome Newsom who is almost certain to be the next gov has made a totally government run medical system the central promise of his campaign? NOT
om Says:
May 10th, 2018 at 10:17 am
Ymar:
Here is another clue: it’s not all about you.
If it isn’t me, then why do my comments always invoke some kind of spirit of rage and snark and disagreement from you. If it is not me, then is it you perhaps…
Your Authorities I do not listen to. After all, my comment here had to do with medical sources and effective treatments, not about what I predicted or not.
A witness’ testimony comes from the authority of the witness as a human being. Reject that Authority all you wish, if you would like.
The Authority of your Bioscience credentialed debaters, Geoscience ignorant uncredentialed debaters, and Popular Opinion, OM, holds no effect or leverage on me. Everytime you argue from the position that “Ymar is wrong because Scientific Consensus and Ymar is arguing from Authority”, you just… you just need to go back and learn what logic means.
Yamar:
Keep the flow going prove by you bluster that you are the authority. Hoot. And then drink some green tea and calm down. Heal yourself at your own peril. Rage? Look in your mirror that’s where you will find it.