I'm midway through Dr. Brian Day's book ("My Fight for Canadian Healthcare: A thirty-year battle to put patients first") so your post is timely. One of the things he posits is that in the American system, a stunning amount of funding is consumed by the endless lineup of people and organizations who do nothing but process paper and shift money around. Canada is not much better, of course. Literally legions of keyboard warriors employed by the Feds, every one of the provinces, "regional health teams", individual hospitals and clinics, all carving away funds that could have been/should have been used to hire more physicians and nurses, buy more MRI machines, build another surgical suite.
The American system is insanely complicated. I've read that some private clinics that refuse to accept any insurance are somehow able to provide services at a fraction of the normal cost. Which suggests a lot of the waste is happening inside the HMOs.
So can we envision what our HC would look like if per capita government spending in Canada was doubled to match the amount of government spending the US places into a "private" system?
I know it's a complicated apples to oranges to cars to cows system that makes comparison difficult BUT as the US system is the most frequently used alternative in discussion, and we're spending half of what they are perhaps more funding is needed?
I agree with you that, even if more money was the answer (something I doubt), there's simply no more money available. I wasn't clear enough in the article, but I really just wanted to demonstrate that public funding isn't the key differentiator between success and failure. And, perhaps, that Canadian smugness was - at best - overdone and gross.
I'm midway through Dr. Brian Day's book ("My Fight for Canadian Healthcare: A thirty-year battle to put patients first") so your post is timely. One of the things he posits is that in the American system, a stunning amount of funding is consumed by the endless lineup of people and organizations who do nothing but process paper and shift money around. Canada is not much better, of course. Literally legions of keyboard warriors employed by the Feds, every one of the provinces, "regional health teams", individual hospitals and clinics, all carving away funds that could have been/should have been used to hire more physicians and nurses, buy more MRI machines, build another surgical suite.
The American system is insanely complicated. I've read that some private clinics that refuse to accept any insurance are somehow able to provide services at a fraction of the normal cost. Which suggests a lot of the waste is happening inside the HMOs.
David Graeber's contentions about "bullshit jobs" and "managerial feudalism" keep getting more appealing.
So can we envision what our HC would look like if per capita government spending in Canada was doubled to match the amount of government spending the US places into a "private" system?
I know it's a complicated apples to oranges to cars to cows system that makes comparison difficult BUT as the US system is the most frequently used alternative in discussion, and we're spending half of what they are perhaps more funding is needed?
I agree with you that, even if more money was the answer (something I doubt), there's simply no more money available. I wasn't clear enough in the article, but I really just wanted to demonstrate that public funding isn't the key differentiator between success and failure. And, perhaps, that Canadian smugness was - at best - overdone and gross.
Personally, I suspect that we'd be far better off moving towards some kind of private/public hybrid system. Such things seem to have worked a lot better in Europe: https://www.theaudit.ca/p/national-healthcare-funding-systems