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If healthcare is so great in Canada, why do so many Canadians come to the US for healthcare when it takes too long to get tests and procedures needed in Canada?
A popular misconception, those few that do for whatever reason avail themselves of medical services south of the border are re-reimbursed by the provincial government healthcare, usually if some one goes to the USA for treatment it could be the American hospital is closer than the Canadian one.
In my 40 years in Canada i've never met any one who went to the USA to get medical treatment.
IMO your implication of many is more like a few.
A popular misconception, those few that do for whatever reason avail themselves of medical services south of the border are re-reimbursed by the provincial government healthcare, usually if some one goes to the USA for treatment it could be the American hospital is closer than the Canadian one.
In my 40 years in Canada i've never met any one who went to the USA to get medical treatment.
IMO your implication of many is more like a few.
Do you have anything to back that up? Because from what I have heard a lot of people are forced to come to the US because the waiting list is too long in Canada - which makes sense because the same thing is going to happen here when you have more people receiving medical care and the same number of doctors. And the fact is fewer people are going into medicine now so that is really going to cause a problem. And I don't blame them. With the uncertainty in medicine right now in the US and insurance companies making decisions instead of doctors, and doctors being owned by hospitals instead of being in business for themselves, I wouldn't do it either.
Do you have anything to back that up? Because from what I have heard a lot of people are forced to come to the US because the waiting list is too long in Canada - which makes sense because the same thing is going to happen here when you have more people receiving medical care and the same number of doctors. And the fact is fewer people are going into medicine now so that is really going to cause a problem. And I don't blame them. With the uncertainty in medicine right now in the US and insurance companies making decisions instead of doctors, and doctors being owned by hospitals instead of being in business for themselves, I wouldn't do it either.
Nothing to back it up other than personal opinion/experience of living in Canada for 40 years and never meeting anyone who even contemplated a healthcare trip to the USA,Waiting lists for some procedures are a fact but Canadians in general dont seem to have a problem with waiting a month or two for procedures like CT scans,MRI's,Echo cardiograms,Ultra sounds,etc,,be assured if its life threatening you'll get seen immediately. Of course there are specialty cases that require a particular course of medical attention that may need to go to a specific hospital that maybe best served in the USA,
Are you implying there are no wait times in the US medical system? As my Dad who lives in Fla. just went through a 3 month wait for a dialysis stint implanted in his arm.
If you have some data on the amount/number of Canadians availing themselves of USA healthcare i'd find it an interesting read.I'd find it an even more of an interesting read if there were a large number of Canadians wanting to trade our healthcare system with what is available in the USA.
Heres a couple of links you may enjoy reading. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/myt...ked-2012-08-09
I really don't care how they do things in other countries. If people who live there are satisfied with what they have, more power to them. When they try to claim it's some great superior thing, I say they're delusional.
No system is perfect, and there are a multitude of problems with any state-run system.
Here in the U.S., we like to at least think we have total control over our individual lives. Yes, we care deeply about other people and their well-being, but at some point, able-bodied and intelligent people have to figure out how to fend for themselves. This is partly why we like to keep the government at arms-length or more.
As for low-income people, we've had the clunky medicare for some time now. Yep, state-run healthcare will turn the system into another Amtrak after we have gotten used to jet service. Should go over well.
Our healthcare system was/still is world-class. You cannot deny that. It got to be that way in spite of the government, not because of it. For decades, we avoided state-run healthcare while other countries went with it, and yet the quality of ours is at least as good, if not better than most out there. Liberals, feel free to explain this phenomena.
Other countries may have better overall health, but that has nothing to do with the quality of care we receive in the U.S. or the system we once had. Rather, it's an issue with cultural traits pertaining to diet and exercise. We eat too much fast food, and we do everything imaginable to avoid physical activity. If we want our "healthcare" system to be better and more affordable, that's where we need to start.
One more thing, calling the ACA a republican thing is comical. Let's see, Mitt Romney, a center-left northeastern moderate (not the rwnj Mitt fashioned in Obama's fibber machine), in the bluest state in the country..... okay.
Last edited by northbound74; 12-22-2013 at 06:48 AM..
So personal responsibility is dead in your country, now what?
Our country goes to pot, just as you are seeing right now.
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As a Canadian i get to be privy to all the same media that you do
Most of the media in the U.S. is little more than the public relations arm of the Democrat Party. Of course you are going to hear that things are going great and that anybody who says otherwise or opposes Obama is "racist" from those outlets. If you actually lived here, you'd see it's a considerably different story from what the official party line coming from CNN et al. states.
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I have no idea who put together your ACA program but most of it was based on a Republican system based in Massachusetts and implemented by Mitt Romney..
We don't really know who wrote it either. It was a group of people but due to the extreme unpopularity of it few have come forward. The PhD economist Jonathan Gruber is about the only person to publicly say that he did much with helping to write the bill. Democrats Max Baucus and Henry Waxman are thought to have played a role as well but that is currently unconfirmed.
Romney isn't very conservative. Conservatives were not very happy with him being selected as a candidate in 2012 and many stayed home, which is a large reason of why Obama got re-elected. But even Romney said that the Massachusetts healthcare regime was a mistake and that it had grossly exceeded its cost predictions.
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Originally Posted by Mzurie
Research has shown that people who go off on tirades and obsess about what the other poor saps are doing, til they are red in the face and their veins are popping in their foreheads, have a 45% greater chance of suffering high blood pressure, a stroke or chronic heart disease than those who eat bacon cheeseburgers. Why do we have to pay for these people's higher medical costs?
[[citation needed]]
Even if that were true, which I strongly doubt, you wouldn't pay for their higher medical costs anyway. The reason they are angry is because they are being made to pay large amounts for everybody else's entitlements.
Most of the media in the U.S. is little more than the public relations arm of the Democrat Party. Of course you are going to hear that things are going great and that anybody who says otherwise or opposes Obama is "racist" from those outlets. If you actually lived here, you'd see it's a considerably different story from what the official party line coming from CNN et al. states.
I dont need to actually live 60 miles further south to get some different viewpoint of America. I'm listening to the same Limbaugh,Beck,Jones,Levine,Doyle FOX,CNN,and MSNBC that you are, And in my opinion the American right wing hates their duly elected President and hopes he fails in his every attempt to improve things in the USA. The republican politicians obstruct filibuster and vote no on almost every piece of legislation tabled and the President must not appear in a positive light under any circumstance.,including the ACA program.
I guess if one sits around listening to only rightwing hate speech about the President its easy to conclude what your views on the President and Democrats will be, its called brainwashing.
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Originally Posted by Mzurie Why do we have to pay for these people's higher medical costs?
because its called insurance, if only people who needed insurance paid for insurance most insurance companies would be out of business in short order.
Ultimately your country has 30-40 million people who for whatever reason cant afford or dont qualify for insurance,i'd call that a problem that needs addressing, Obama and the Dems have come up with this ACA act to try to address the problem,the Republicans have no plan of their own they offer no help to help make the plan run smoothly they just want the plan to fail because they dont like the President.
I am not lazy, a drug-user, irresponsible. I eat healthily, pay attention to nutrition, fresh foods and veggies. I used to ride 30-50 miles a day on my bike, 4 to 5 days a week. I built my own house with my own two hands. When I fell ill I had no insurance - because I was working on a doctorate and caring for my elderly father at the same time. Not because I was a lazy no-good do-nothing meth-eating slob.
The truth is that if you are poor and have no insurance, you cannot get health care. I needed surgery, but since my condition was not considered (immediately) life-threatening, I couldn't get it done. It's ok if it will be life-threatening EVENTUALLY, that still won't get you surgery. And in case you are wondering - student insurance (which had a 5k deductible anyway) wouldn't cover any of it because everything was considered a "pre-existing condition". At my age, EVERYTHING can be considered a pre-existing condition.
Because of that condition, other systems in my body also started to fail. The upshot is that now I am on disability. As part of the problem is neurological in nature, eventually I was going to be disabled no matter what - but had I been able to get the surgery I needed WHEN I needed it, the estimate is that I could have staved off the rest of my condition for at least 10 to 20 years - 10 to 20 years of productive continued employment. I could probably have retired before the neurological stuff caught up with me. I was compensating for that adequately for many years up until I couldn't get the surgery I needed.
So how much does THAT cost "taxpayers", every time someone who was formerly productive ends up on disability because they can't get a health procedure in time to do any good? A LOT MORE.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And the problem you have with (so-called) Obamacare is not that it exists - this is EXACTLY the plan Rethuglicans have been agitating for for about 20 years - it's that it was passed in the era of a black, Democratic president. If anything, it doesn't go nearly far enough.
It is way past time to get the profit motive out of our health care system. As insurance companies have got a lock-grip on our health care, costs have skyrocketed and the quality of care for all but the top 1% has declined. We are at the top of the charts for health care costs per person among the developed countries of the world, but near the bottom for quality of care. Last I checked, Italy - which is a borderline 3rd world country - had better quality of care than the USA.
I have been gainfully employed since the 70's and I have watched access to health care decline while costs go up and up and up. Whether you pay for it in taxes or in the increased prices of retail goods or services, the money has to come from somewhere. Because businesses bear the brunt of the cost under our current system - do you have ANY IDEA how much money they pay per employee for even a BAD health care plan?
When you insert a pack of middle-men into the equation you artificially create bloat and unnecessary expense. Furthermore these middle-men decide what you can be treated for, what treatments you are allowed to have, and where you can go to get your health care. These middle-men are insurance agents and processors. They are looking at actuarial tables and their goal is not to see to it that people are healthy, but to cut their costs and maximize their profit, something they have been doing VERY successfully for at least 50 years. The are not responsible to anyone but their CEO's and stockholders. They are not there to help you. They have no mandate for public service. Their bottom line is how much money they can squeeze out of the customer and how little they can manage to pay out. It's a system guaranteed to destroy healthcare, and that is exactly what it has done. When they refuse services, they profit.
So for all the whinging about people in the middle of your health care because of Obamacare - we already have that system, only with NONE of the checks and balances of public service. No oversight, no responsibility. No public mandate. No ethic of service. Just pigs feeding at the trough, and sick people not getting the care they need even when they have insurance.
Nearly every other developed nation in the world handles health care better than we do. The claim that millions of Canadians are trying to jump the border for medical procedures is fallacious. The ONLY thing I've ever seen anyone come over here for is elective surgery, eg face-lifts and boob jobs. GB (EDIT: that's Great Britain, not George Bush, LOL!) tried to switch over to a USian system of health care and practically destroyed themselves in the process - they found out it DOESN'T WORK and promptly switched back. You make the accusation that Canadians want our healthcare, and then when a Canadian tells you that isn't the case, you tell them they are (1) lying, (2) hopelessly brainwashed and ignorant, and (3) not allowed to post anything because this is 'merca and only 'mercans know anything about anything.
Keep it up. You guys already look horrible over the government shutdown. You can only make it worse by continuing to spew your hatred and vitriol. The vast majority of the 40 million Americans who are uninsured and the additional 50 million who are UNDER insured are not lazy drug-using slobs. They're working class poor - a segment of the population that is getting larger and larger with every job shipped to China.
I am not lazy, a drug-user, irresponsible. I eat healthily, pay attention to nutrition, fresh foods and veggies. I used to ride 30-50 miles a day on my bike, 4 to 5 days a week. I built my own house with my own two hands. When I fell ill I had no insurance - because I was working on a doctorate and caring for my elderly father at the same time. Not because I was a lazy no-good do-nothing meth-eating slob.
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To the righties if you arent a Republican you are a lazy good for nothing being supported by all those hard working republicans,every one is thrown in the same basket in their view , you Sojj with your disabilities to my 90 year old parents who both fought in WW2, out of work and collecting unemployment benefits? your a lazy bum
The right has lost all compassion for their fellow Americans who happen to believe in liberal political ideology, In my opinion they've gone completely mad..
I really don't care how they do things in other countries. If people who live there are satisfied with what they have, more power to them. When they try to claim it's some great superior thing, I say they're delusional.
Umm, Canada has better outcomes? Lower costs? I would call that superior, without any hesistation.
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No system is perfect, and there are a multitude of problems with any state-run system.
Not as many problems as in the private for profit free-for-all.
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Here in the U.S., we like to at least think we have total control over our individual lives. Yes, we care deeply about other people and their well-being, but at some point, able-bodied and intelligent people have to figure out how to fend for themselves. This is partly why we like to keep the government at arms-length or more.
Able bodied intelligent people, and well, everyone else, have better things to do than deal with private insurers' various strategies for charging a lot and delivering little. In a single payer system, we could free up so much wasted time, money, and effort that we currently spend simply trying to get insurers to do the job we are paying them to do.
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As for low-income people, we've had the clunky medicare for some time now. Yep, state-run healthcare will turn the system into another Amtrak after we have gotten used to jet service. Should go over well.
A system that the regressive elements of Congress have fought to ensure does not work well in their ongoing effort to prove the gummit is broken by breaking it.
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Our healthcare system was/still is world-class. You cannot deny that. It got to be that way in spite of the government, not because of it. For decades, we avoided state-run healthcare while other countries went with it, and yet the quality of ours is at least as good, if not better than most out there. Liberals, feel free to explain this phenomena.
For those that can afford it. We do have a pool of 330 million people feeding the RnD departments of our healthcare companies, so I'd chalk it up to economies of scale and nothing more. By odds, we should have ten times as many med technologies in development as our Canadian peers. That does not mean we are doing a better job. There are simply more of us doing the job.
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Other countries may have better overall health, but that has nothing to do with the quality of care we receive in the U.S. or the system we once had. Rather, it's an issue with cultural traits pertaining to diet and exercise. We eat too much fast food, and we do everything imaginable to avoid physical activity. If we want our "healthcare" system to be better and more affordable, that's where we need to start.
Well, when we refuse to pass laws that promote land use that encourages walkable, dense development, we shouldn't be surprised when people don't use their legs. When our minimum wage is a joke, we shouldn't be surprised when people load up on cheap, bad calories.
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One more thing, calling the ACA a republican thing is comical. Let's see, Mitt Romney, a center-left northeastern moderate (not the rwnj Mitt fashioned in Obama's fibber machine), in the bluest state in the country..... okay.
Riiiiight. So since he isn't some fascist TPer/libertarian buffoon from ol' dixie, he can't be a real Republican, and I assume by that logic a real American either? Wow. I guess Gov. Christie doesn't pass the purity test either then? Today's GOP is a f***ing waste of human meat.
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