[Gallup 2003 poll shows that See the Gallup poll below this article based NOT on biased reports by individuals but by a poll which at least represents some sort of norm. See end for 2006 poll which I believe is the latest.]
Do you notice that ...
- 57% of Canadians are somewhat satisfied or very satisfied?
- Only 25% of Americans are satisfied or very satisfied. That is less than 1/2. Why would that be?
- ONLY 41% of Canadians are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied, however ...
- 72% of Americans are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied
Those Americans that think their system is so superior should WONDER WHY OVER 30% MORE Americans are dissatisfied !!!
Okay Kathy and Tom and Sandy, explain those figures would you? You are such smart people with great common sense but you are SO WRONG about our CANADIAN HEALTHCARE!!!]
I hate to tell my American friends that you are mislead about Canadian Health Care but it is the truth!
Big deal! We are 1/10th your size. We don't expect you to KNOW the facts about our Canadian medical system. In fact on WBEN, in Buffalo, right next door, the news NEVER broadcasts our TSX markets even knowing that they have Canadian listeners. American ignorance [just means 'lack of knowledge' ... don't get upset!] of Canada is very real!
My wife has had cancer, my mother-in-law as well, and even my dad. My wife also has a weak heart, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. My mom has macular degeneration and she seems to get in within a week or so to a specialist to get injections.
My mother-in-law also had to have a growth [non-cancerous] removed from her hand. She had to wait a month. If it had been cancerous she would have been able to get it done sooner.
In all the appointments & experiences we have NEVER had to wait too long. I mean not critically too long! If you are like me you want everything right now! I guess we can all get impatient and want it today. But if you have patience, it is no problem and FULLY COVERED.
David Bach says that the stats are that 25% of Canadians visiting an emergency room wait for 4 hours or more to see a doctor compared to 12% in the U.S. About 50% wait for four or more weeks or more to see a specialist compared to 23% for Americans.
I was covered for prescription drugs by the Board of Education I worked for until age 65. At age 65 Ontario Drug Benefit pays for almost all drugs needed! Good thing! Both my wife and my mother-in-law have some very expensive drugs amounting to hundreds of dollars every few months. We pay a small charge always less than $10 after our first $100 of prescriptions.
Is our system perfect? No? Is the U.S. system perfect? No way Hosea!
You could cite that you pay almost twice as much on medical care so your system SHOULD be better! After all if you pay twice as much for a refrigerator, it BETTER be TWICE AS GOOD.
However here is where YOUR SYSTEM FAILS! According to David Bach, in his book, Fight for Your Money, some 700,000 American families are forced into bankruptcy because of health-care costs, while another 80, 000, 000 or so Americans struggle with medical bills they can't afford to pay.
My daughters married Americans. My son-in-law Tedd in 1995 was diagnosed with Hodgkins. Many of the bills they got like $2100 for a CT scan and many others were bills that would take my daughter 2 years AFTER his death to pay. She was fortunate as she got a job in a bank and the group insurance paid the more than $100,000 for the bone marrow transplant alone.
If it was not for us and their church, they would have been out on the street. Living in Southfield on the northern Detroit border, one year they had an income of only $12,000 and yet were well fed, apartment, car insurance and gas paid for by their church and several anonymous donors in that church as well as some help from us.
What if you had NO church which increasing numbers do not and NO relatives close by???
Where would they have been?
In Canada all but a few odd medications of low cost would have been paid for.
We HAVE our choice of doctors. We DO NOT have to go to ones approved by some HMO system.
Choosing between bankruptcy or no life due to spending the rest of it paying for medical bills, I would choose a few weeks wait, thank you!
I would NEVER recommend an Obamacare system because it is too big and the bigger things get, the more people become numbers in a file, not real people. This often engenders unnecessary wastes or coverages not being accepted because of some clerk making a decision on your life!
Both of my daughters are Canadians, whooppeee, if my wife and I are, I guess that is obvious but they live in the U.S. . Payments to have a baby born are expensive so midwives are often employed and doctors only called in an emergency.
We actually have real doctors attending ALL births in Canada unless someone chooses something different.
When you hear the roar decrying the Canadian system, please check your bankruptcy rate and ask yourself, "Would I want my daughter to go bankrupt?"
You are hearing the complaints from physicians who moved to the U.S. for more money, or from the exceptions to the rule. They are NOT representative of anyone I know or even have heard of through our news media in 65 years of my life! I am sure I have heard a few stories in that length of time but they were NOT the norm!
Implosion? Improvements are needed. Private care should be available if you want to pay the extra above what our province allows. In fact last year's head of the CMA [Canadian Medical Association] was a firm believer in having both systems in parallel.
So please take it easy on our system because the choice between waiting and GOING BANKRUPT is a no-brainer.
Loving my misinformed American neighbours,
Sincerely
Charles G. Pedley
[This was an answer to the letter received below from an American source.]
- On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 12:41 PM,
"Public Health Care is IMPLODING in Canada. Meaning we should get rid of the best health care in the world and adopt what has provably NOT worked...right across the border. NO CREDIBLE EVIDENCE PRESENTED
While we're at it, we should also adopt the Brit's and Ausssie's gun control laws. Take away American's guns so our crime rate too, can explode!
That is, why should we continue the FREE choice of health care or self-defense when the alternative could give us equality of misery and victimhood? -- AGB
Thought you might be interested in this article "Top doctor says system 'imploding'" from HealthZone.ca- [the only thing I see here that is IMPLODING IS THE TRUTH! (:-) Remember we Canadians are different. We are self-efacing. In the U.S. you are not self-efacing! You don't have to be! The LEFT does that for you! (:-)]
Please visit link: http://www.healthzone.ca/health/newsfeatures/article/681882
- [Ed. A good article above but what the person sending it to me missed is the fact it came from the Toronto Star, Canada's far leftist newspaper. Read the NATIONAL POST IF YOU WANT TRUTH. To use the word "implode" exaggerates the truth. Some are prone to exaggerate in order to make people fearful and get something done. Does OUR system need changes? Of course! Does YOUR AMERICAN SYSTEM need changes? YES EVEN MORE BUT NOT OBAMACARE! Remember Obama's compassion for life is represented by an aborted baby that lived for a while in a dirty laundry hamper and he didn't think that was any problem at all! I'm glad he is not in charge of MY CARE!!!]
and a story about the benefits of public "health care" in England:
"....."I went to Senator Ben Cardin's town hall meeting last Monday and came across a woman who had worked as a nurse in Britain's public health system. She provided a personal anecdote that is little peek into what is to come should we adopt the Democrats' plan.
Catherine Midkiff, RN RSN, has been a nurse since 1979 and lived in the UK in 1991 and 1992. She earned $10 per hour there, compared to the $22 per hour then being earned by nurses in the US. As an agency night-shift nurse she earned more than staff nurses. [NO CREDIBLE EVIDENCE PRESENTED So in two years she digested all of this from what source? They should come to Canada where nurses are well-paid!]
Those women had to live in a dormitory on site as their pay would not afford them private residences. She said at St. George's Hospital she worked on a seniors ward where 23 elderly men and women shared the same room. [Imagine all the companionship they would have instead of being ALONE in their own home and in danger of falling or getting hurt and not being able to reach help! To me this seems an advantage!]
When she asked where the code card was, her British counterparts laughed, saying, 'Oh you must be from America...' For non-seniors, most British hospitals put six people in a room. Wait lists are extremely long.
An elderly British citizen she knew came to the US to get heart surgery after waiting a full year in the UK system. Others weren't so lucky. She said for many years, British hospitals had no trauma centers and thousands died as a result.
For his part, Cardin simply perpetuated the smear against Obamacare protesters, claiming they were Republican stooges spreading disinformation.
[So then YOU should smear the Canadian system right so that you get equality of smearing? Is this an outgrowth of your equal rights amendment?]
However, there were over 2,000 of us and only a handful of ACORN, union and party thugs. That we are no longer being fooled is becoming more and more apparent. The Dems control both houses of Congress so this remains an uphill battle, but if enough get the message that their careers are on the line, these utterly self-serving pols may actually come around to our point of view, simply for sheer survival purposes. We cannot let up. Not for a minute." --columnist James Simpson[I wish you luck however smearing our Canadian system and lying about it or spreading rumours or exceptions to the rule about NEVER give you credibility to those of us who know better from experience having lived it! Why don't you check your facts?]
and:
"A community organizer is by definition an outsider, someone hired not by the community itself, but by outside political operatives attempting to gain a foothold in the community. Precisely the way a young Barack Obama was hired by outsiders to infiltrate a Southside Chicago community in the late 1980s. Barack Obama dropped in for a few years on the Southside of Chicago.
Rather than actually doing anything to improve the community where he was sent to 'work,' he made political friends and established a political base from which to launch his Organizer in Chief presidential campaign.
... When Bill Clinton put forth the notion of Barack Obama as a 'fairytale' and was trounced for it, Democrats should have listened. They now have a man in the office of the presidency, for whom they must provide cover every single day. Why?
It's simple. Barack Obama mastered Alinsky tactics of campaigning for power and working the crowds down to the last little letter, but he absolutely has no plan of governance, no workable solutions, and can't even talk about such things without a live-feed teleprompter glued to each hip. ...
And 52% of the American electorate has bought this faster than they would buy a used car from a slick-suited salesman on a shady lot.
Suckers United for Change. Wow. I'm impressed. Dr. Obama? I would sooner trust Dr. Frankenstein." --columnist Kyle-Anne Shiver"
GALLUP POLL REGARDING U.S. CANADIAN AND U.K. Healthcare
The following is the conclusion of the Gallup pollsters.
Bottom Line
In all three countries, there is great variation of opinion within the population on both the quality of medical care and the availability of affordable healthcare. It is a testament to national health systems that people in Canada and Great Britain
are significantly more satisfied with availability of affordable healthcare than their American counterparts are.
In Great Britain, satisfaction with access to affordable healthcare (43%) is consistent with satisfaction with quality (42%). In Canada, satisfaction with access to affordable healthcare (57%) is slightly higher than satisfaction with quality (52%). But the most dramatic variation in satisfaction with these two facets of the healthcare system occurs in the United States, where only 25% are satisfied with the availability of affordable healthcare, but 48% are satisfied with quality. Once again, this dichotomy seems to support the hypothesis that private healthcare encourages high-quality standards, but may be a barrier to access and affordability.
On a less relative basis, the fact that 72% of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the availability of affordable healthcare, and 50% are dissatisfied with the quality of medical care are cause for concern. Regardless of how these numbers measure up to those in Canada and Great Britain, they indicate that the U.S. healthcare system has considerable room for improvement.
"
Over the three years Gallup has asked this question in all three countries, the ratings in Canada have remained essentially unchanged, while the ratings have become slightly more positive in Britain and somewhat more negative in the United States."