Canada Free Press: How much sense does it make to put healthcare decisions into the hands of government bureaucrats?

...Canada, who along with Cuba and North Korea, is one of the world’s only three countries where private, for profit healthcare is illegal.

[see Pages 16-17 of the current healthcare legislation from the Obama administration...if passed, we will join this elite group]

Canada outlawed all private medical care with the passage of the Canada Health Act of 1984. Within the first decade governments were forced to control their healthcare expenses by rationing care. Rationing was achieved by limiting enrollments in medical schools, which served to reduce the number of healthcare professionals dramatically and, of course created huge shortages in the healthcare system. Twenty-five years after the enactment of the Canada Health Act, Canada’s healthcare expenditures are among the highest of all countries offering universal access to healthcare. In fact the only country out of 28 that spends more on healthcare than Canada is Iceland.

Be careful what you wish for:

So what does healthcare in Canada look like in tangible terms? For openers, access to medical specialists is so curtailed that it routinely takes upward of two months from the time a patient is referred to a specialist before the patient is even called back with an appointment. A four to six-month wait for an appointment with a specialist is the rule, not the exception, with some procedures, such as joint replacements, taking in excess of three years from initially being seen by a general practitioner to having the procedure completed.

As was predicted by many researchers back in 1984 when the Canada Health Act was first passed, the single payer healthcare model would end up with large percentages of the population having no access to primary care physicians at all. In fact in Canada it’s common for there to be doctor lotteries as new physicians entering practice are bombarded with “applications” by people desperate to acquire a family doctor. While 15% of the US population currently doesn’t have health insurance, 20% of the Canadian population does not have ready access to a family doctor.

Change. You asked for it!