rsfarrell said:
You are. Private healthcare isn't illegal in Canada, the infant mortality rate and life expectancy are higher, and waiting for critical surgeries is a myth.
What you have been reading on the web is propaganda by free-market ideolouges afraid universal healthcare will happen here.
sennp9 said:
So what is the system all about then? Plz share. And, is having a higher infant mortality rate really a plus ?
I have a feeling rsfarrell meant to write that Canada's infant mortality is "better" or "lower"...unless he really can't stand little babies.
Also, he or she is right about private healthcare not being illegal in Canada; but there's more to it than that. Private healthcare does not have the presence in Canada that it does in the UK or France or Japan (three other countries that attempt universal coverage). Privately owned and operated hospitals that allow patients to pay out-of-pocket for services cannot obtain public funding in Canada, as they contravene the "equal accessibility" tenets of the Canada Health Act.
rsfarrell is right about the Canadian system being misrepresented by many people with an axe to grind. But even though there don't appear to be long waits for any critical surgeries, there are waiting lists in general. But unlike what some critics suggest, there's no reason to think that simply introducing a parallel and robust private system would help shorten them. Just look at the UK. They have a well established private system and it seems to make their public healthcare waiting lists
worse, not better. The problem seems to be the underlying shortage of doctors, not public vs private. Healthcare is expensive and politicians in Canada, France and the UK seem unnerved by the size of their healthcare budgets. (Even though these "out of control" healthcare budgets still cost their taxpayers less than what American taxpayers pay for theirs.)
France doesn't seem to have the long waiting lists that Canada has but it also has more doctors and what seems to be a well integrated private sector that doesn't (as far as I can tell) draw resources from public healthcare. France has its own share of problems, though. Public healthcare coverage is quite comprehensive (more so than in Canada or any other country I'm familiar with) and this is becoming expensive. The government is in the process of trying to streamline its healthcare system to cut down on unnecessary prescriptions (all covered by the state) and different types of duplication. It's also switched to a gatekeeper system like in most (all?) Anglo-Saxon countries.
Also, doctors salaries are in the process of being reformed. They're lower than in the UK and Canada and Switzerland and a lot of people (well, all doctors really
) would like to see them increased. Family doctors and psychiatrists, in particular, really need an increase.
The French government sets specific figures on how much it will reimburse people for different Medical costs. Doctors in "secteur 1" are required by law to keep all their charges within those figures. But there's another group of doctors in "secteur 2" who are free to charge whatever they want, even though their patients will only be reimbursed by the amounts fixed by the government. The number of docteurs in "secteur 2" seems to be kept quite low and I'm not sure how someone obtains "secteur 2" status.
Unlike what I've seen some people suggest on this site, there's pretty much no unemployment for doctors in countries like Canada, the UK and France. However, in Canada there seems to be a problem with one or two specialties in which the number of new job openings is kept artificially low (i.e. Neurosurgery).