The "Benevolence" of Socialized Medicine

by Dr. S. J. Adams

In the New York Times (2/28/06), there was a story by Clifford Krauss titled “Canada's Private Clinics Surge as Public System Falters.”[1] For anyone interested in the current direction of our healthcare system and what might happen should we continue down the same path, read and give serious thought to this article. I’ll only present what I consider to be the most salient information here.

Let’s begin with some basic data on the Canadian healthcare system. In 1993, the median wait time between a referral by a family doctor and an appointment with a specialist was 3.7 weeks. Currently, it is 8.3 weeks. In the same time period, the median wait between an appointment with a specialist and treatment has gone from 5.6 to 9.4 weeks.

This means that one must first wait over two months to see a specialist, then over three more months to actually get treatment. In total, close to six months have passed from the time of referral to actual treatment for many people. Furthermore…

“Average wait times between referral by a family doctor and treatment range from 5.5 weeks for oncology to 40 weeks for orthopedic surgery, according to the study,” which was conducted by The Fraser Institute, described as “a conservative research group.”

How is one to explain this data? One might argue that the data is false or at least exaggerated. After all, The Fraser Institute is apparently conservative, which means they are heartless money-grubbers, pro-capitalism (gasp!), who “put power before people.” There’s no way it’s that bad. It’s not like people are dying, right?

Well…

“Canada remains the only industrialized country that outlaws privately financed purchases of core medical services. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other politicians remain reluctant to openly propose sweeping changes even though costs for the national and provincial governments are exploding and some cancer patients are waiting months for diagnostic tests and treatment.

“But a Supreme Court ruling last June — it found that a Quebec provincial ban on private health insurance was unconstitutional when patients were suffering and even dying on waiting lists — appears to have become a turning point for the entire country.”

You read it correctly: people have been suffering and even dying while waiting for the gloriously benevolent public health system in Canada not only to treat them, but to even get diagnostic tests.

But consider this more deeply. This was a Supreme Court case. I confess to having little knowledge of the political and legal system of Canada, but I think a Supreme Court probably means the same thing to them as it does to us. It is a high court, which means that the case undoubtedly had to go through a number of lower courts before it came to them. The story doesn’t say how long the court battle has been going on, but assume a very conservative estimate of two years. How many people suffered and/or died during that time because they could not get treatment? And still worse, how many died before there was even a court case? How many lives were sacrificed to the "greater good" before Canada reached it’s “turning point”?

Now consider what Canada defines as criminal: “privately financed purchases of core medical services.” In other words, entering a doctor’s office, opening your wallet, laying down your own money, and receiving a medical service is a crime. This is unspeakably disgusting.

On the positive side, the doctors are rebelling.

“The country's publicly financed health insurance system — frequently described as the third rail of its political system and a core value of its national identity — is gradually breaking down. Private clinics are opening around the country by an estimated one a week, and private insurance companies are about to find a gold mine.”

One of these is “The Cambie Surgery Center, Canada's most prominent private hospital...” Run by Dr. Brian Day, the Center “may be considered a rogue enterprise,” as it takes money from private citizens and provides medical treatment. It is, technically, an illegal business.

“But no one is about to arrest Dr. Brian Day…or any of the 120 doctors who work there. Public hospitals are sending him growing numbers of patients they are too busy to treat, and his center is advertising that patients do not have to wait to replace their aching knees.”

Dr. Day and his associates have plans to open more private hospitals and are being threatened by the government with stiff fines. However, Dr. Day is taking a principled stance:

“‘We've taken the position that the law is illegal,’ Dr. Day, 59, says. ‘This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.’”

The Supreme Court, in the case mentioned earlier, agrees with him. “‘The prohibition on obtaining private health insurance is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services,’ the court ruled.”

The court ruling still holds the public health system as a primary, but “private doctors across the country are not waiting for changes in the law, figuring provincial governments will not try to stop them only to face more test cases in the Supreme Court.”

There are so many lessons to be learned from the events unfolding in Canada. The primary, to me, is that America is moving down the same road that Canada has trodden. Will paying for services out of your own pocket someday be a crime here? Will the wait times for basic services steadily increase? Will people needlessly suffer and die while unnecessarily waiting for diagnoses and treatments? Never in America you say?

The advance of socialism in American political, economic, and cultural contexts has been occurring since the "Red Decade" of the 1930's (if not even before then). FDR’s New Deal was a significant advance for socialism, which, in the area of healthcare, includes Medicaid and Medicare (created in the 1960's). Hillary Clinton made an outright attempt to socialize healthcare during Bill Clinton's first term as president. I remember hearing her remark casually after it failed that since people were opposed to it happening all at once, they would therefore approach it "incrementally." Most recently, the allegedly radical conservative George W. Bush expanded Medicare to include prescription drugs for senior citizens.

Socializing healthcare in this country is very much a part of the federal discussion, while things like health savings accounts or, ideally, completely privatizing the market are rarely discussed with the same commitment, if they are discussed at all.

We are moving in a bad direction. It must be reversed.

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[1]You have to register to read the story. It’s free and doesn’t take long. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/international/americas/28canada.html?_r=5&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=login.