RSSFight over paying for health care in Quebec
Jan 15
Interesting to see a looming fight over a clinics attempt to charge for “necessary” medical treatments in Quebec: Charging for health care in Quebec.
I’ve thought about two-tiered systems before and while I don’t object to a tiered system in principle, assuming no one lost any existing coverage, I don’t think it would work in practice. I can’t see how you could stop all the good talent from going to the more expensive clinics. Maybe you force all tiers to use the same pay scale, but then the more expensive tiers could afford more staff and equipment?
That doesn’t sound great either. I guess the biggest reason I’m not opposed to tiers here is because we effectively already have one: rich people go to the US if they need something done quick. If we could find a way to keep them here it may not be a bad thing.
Jan 15, 2011 @ 21:02:50
But, essentially, there is no reason for those rich folks to go to the US. There are private for profits in almost every Canadian jurisdiction.
Here in Quebec, we have plenty of ‘em, yet our public system still suffers, proving this mult-tiered system simply doesn’t work.
Jan 17, 2011 @ 10:48:20
I’m decidedly against tiered health care. I believe it has the power to erode the inherent fairness of a single-tier system, and it’s that fairness that I appreciate the most.
I’m a Canadian, living in the US, with access to quality US health care, but any time I access it I’m repulsed by the thought that I’m receiving care while 50 million others get nothing.
Give me and my countrymen the health care that can be provided with the taxes we can afford to pay, or give us nothing.
Jan 18, 2011 @ 09:56:36
Someone added up all the tests that House prescribes in an average episode and it worked out to about $300,000. If you’re a hypochondriac with great insurance, you can have as many unnecessary tests as you’d like. That’s not unreasonable in the US health care system, except that all but the most premier health insurance companies would have cut you off long before you got to that point.
In the Canadian system, it’s the opposite: they perform the least number of tests possible to arrive at a diagnosis, then put you on the waiting list for a fix. A person with chronic pain may never get a satisfactory diagnosis, just a handful of pills if they’re lucky.
Where the difference in tiered health care really stands out is treatment of the elderly. In the US, age is no problem as long as you have money. They’ll keep you alive for another hundred years as long as you can pay. In Canada, there’s a philosophy that old people are going to die soon anyway, so why bother wasting perfectly good organs, blood, and medicine on them?
Jan 27, 2011 @ 14:00:05
Multi-tier healthcare is inevitably going to mean that you get what you pay for. That doesn’t necessarily mean the public system has to be worse quality than the private system — but it does mean that if the public system is going to have the best doctors, it will have to pay the most to keep them.
The root problem is that Canadian governments have allowed their health systems to coast in the absence of serious competition. We spend around half what the Americans do, on a per-person basis, and we cover a larger portion of our population (i.e. all of us) with that smaller percentage.
The waiting lists are one symptom of an under-funded healthcare system. We can increase funding one of two ways: (a) collectively, or (b) privately. The vast majority of Canadians will see more of a benefit if we invest collectively than if we invest privately.