@IanKennedy
You had a well phrased and informative answer, but I think you misunderstood the question. What you're talking about is the public health care system. What we were asking about was the seperate private one that I believe both countries have. I don't know much about it. I've just seen some commercials for a Canadian company where they show graphs of the the massive wait times you
could have if you used the public system, but that if you go to them they could do it right away. My impression was that you had to pay straight up case for their services.
If the treatment is important, the kid gets shoved to the front of the line. Very few people die while waiting.
See, if anyone else had mad such a statement and you disagreed with it you'd have demanded evidence. I think most of us (certainly those of us in the US), have heard an array of ancedotal tales of death while waiting, tales of famous people refusing to buck the system and dying in the months before treatment, desperate people going across the boarder for needed treatment they feared they wouldn't get in time, and grief stricken family members when a loved one passed away while waiting.
Of course ancedotal stories can easily conceal the facts of the matter. However what they do prove is that some people do in fact die while waiting. The question is how many and how often.
The only study I'd found that seems relevant was waiting times for emergency angioplasites from the one paper. That's a life and death situation and while many factors would weigh in on the outcomes certainly waiting increases the odds of a bad outcome.
sunnyside wrote:
So, yet again, what treatments can you get in the US that you can't get anywhere else?
Before I spend time in medical journals let me state the situation for you. The US hospitals and companies are not putting up some kind of red, white, and blue curtain behind which they sit on their new technologies. New procedures and techniques are published for all to access and new drugs and equipment are offered for sale wherever they can be.
Therefore a treatment you could only get in the US would be something on the cutting edge or a brand new machine that simply hasn't been purchased anywhere else yet. But other countries will aquire the stuff before long.
The difference is that for things like proton therapy the UK or Canada will have one machine in the whole health system, while the US will have a bunch of machines with a resulting wider range of abilities.
So access and waiting times are the issues. I say access because in most cases there is an older procedure or piece of equipment that can be used as a treatment. So often hospitals will simply use what they have and call it good enough, which isn't unreasonable, but it isn't the same either.
Burden of proof.
This is actually where I think the Democrats are really making a mistake.
What you're doing is saying that you're by default always correct, and never need to actually try and find evidence or convince someone of something, such as by looking into whether the well known waiting times do indeed not result in poor outcomes. But everyone else needs to find a wide array of facts, which you will likely than dismiss out of hand and feel you have won.
The Democrats are in effect doing much the same thing. People opposed to health care reform are putting out all sorts of facts and statements (there is a bit of a media blitz going on that many of you outside the US or that get all their news from the Young Turks are likely insulated from). Some claims are correct, many are overblown, and some are outlandish or patently false.
But except for the "death panels for grandma" bit Democrats aren't even attempting to refute anything with factual evidence any more than Rochey will. Certainly nothing that would involve numbers. This gives the impression that both Democrats and Republicans feel that the UK and Canadian systems are far worse, just that the Democrats feel it's still worth it to insure the uninsured.
As a result large numbers of Americans with health insurance believe all sorts of dire things are about to befall them and their loved ones.
So you get stuff like:
http://news.aol.com/article/tampa-town- ... nce/607580
because increasing numbers of people seem to be reaching panic mode.
If public health care really would be better, and it gets trashed because too many liberals believe in insulting instead of convincing, I'll be miffed.
