A Better Souvenir From Canada For Obama

Written by David Gratzer on Friday February 20, 2009

President Obama visited Canada yesterday. During his first official foreign trip, he discussed the environment, trade, and other issues with Prime Minister Harper. Health care wasn’t on the agenda.

That hasn’t prevent commentators on both sides of the 49th parallel from suggesting that the President has much to learn from Canadian health care.

NPR’s To The Point included fawning reviews of the system (disclosure: I was the one guest on the show who didn’t wax poetic on socialized medicine).

Writing in Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria argues: “Its health-care system is cheaper than America’s by far (accounting for 9.7 percent of GDP, versus 15.2 percent here), and yet does better on all major indexes. Life expectancy in Canada is 81 years, versus 78 in the United States; ‘healthy life expectancy’ is 72 years, versus 69.”

David Olive in the Toronto Star makes a similar point. Indeed, Olive closes his essay by pointing out that President Obama himself spoke kindly about the system just a few years ago:

Still, Obama finds the “socialized-medicine” bogeyman risible. In an interview in the liberal U.S. journal Nation three years ago, the then-U.S. senator from Illinois was asked if the single-payer option “is revolutionary or reformist.”

“Anything that Canada does can’t be entirely revolutionary, it’s Canada” Obama laughed. “When I drive through Toronto, it doesn’t look like a bunch of Maoists.”

Maybe not, but Canadian cities don’t seem stocked with heath-care visionaries either. Since entering a non-Maoist Canadian medical school, I’ve written much on that system and government-run systems in general, including this rebuttal of the life expectancy argument.

With the American President’s trip to Canada in the news, I wish to draw attention to an excellent interview of a Canadian doctor’s exodus to the United States.

The physician – a Canadian by birth who believed in government-run health care for most of his adult life – talks about illness in the family:

A few years ago, my brother was sick with a really bad cancer. He’d been working for months to try to get it addressed. When he explained his symptoms, I said, “You really need to have an MRI of your head and neck.” He just couldn’t get one. On Christmas Day three years ago, he was in great pain. He presented himself to the emergency departmentÑnot in his own town of Guelph, because there was no MRI machine for people in that community of 70,000 although there is a scanner available for petsÑbut in Kitchener, which is about 15 miles away and where there is an MRI machine for humans in the hospital. Because it was Christmas, they said, “Nope, the MRI scanner is closed. You can’t have an MRI. You can only have it on a business day, during regular working hours.” My parents happened to be there visiting, and they just raised the roof. He got his MRI on Boxing Day, which is the day after Christmas. It’s still a holiday in Canada, but he got the MRI. It was not read properly. I had to actually go to Canada and look at the MRI, and I diagnosed my brother’s nasopharyngeal cancer.

It was very interesting visiting my brother in the hospital. They’ve got this kiosk in the lobby for Tim Horton’s, which is a very popular restaurant chain in Canada, and it was open, basically, 24/7. You could go, sit down in the lobby of this hospital and get a nice sandwich, cup of coffee, and doughnut, 24/7, because it was a free market thing. Yet at the same time, you could not get the health care that you needed, because it’s delivered under a socialist model.

He also describes the limitations of central planning:

When I was working in Canada, we had this personnel meltdown when we had only three radiologists for 250,000 people. I was director of the department at the time, and I said to the hospital administration, “We need a rolloscope.” A rolloscope is a device where the X-rays and CT scans are set up on the scope, and you can push a button and go from case to case to case. It really expedites your ability to read the cases promptly. I was reading about 40,000 cases a year at that time, which is just an enormous number, especially if you’re reading without a rolloscope. The hospital said, “Well, you know, what? There’s no money in the budget for us to buy your rolloscope. Perhaps, you could plead the case to the Ministry of Health. Perhaps, they can make a special dispensation of dollars so that you can get this rolloscope.” The radiologists in Thunder Bay eventually got the rolloscope three years later, but there was no money to hire a clerk to load the films, so it just sat and collected dust for another year.

When I moved to Minnesota, I worked at St. Francis Medical Center in Shakopee, and we were seeing increasing volumes and just getting busier, and busier, and busier. My partner and I approached our organization, Consulting Radiologists Limited, and said, “We need a rolloscope. We’ve got these increasing volumes.” They looked and said, “Hey, you guys are phenomenally productive. We want to facilitate your productivity. Here’s your rolloscope.” We had the rolloscope in a month, and we had someone to load it, too. That’s the free market versus central planning.

Category: News