There are so many lies out there now about the Canadian health care system, it is almost impossible to enumerate them, let alone try to correct them. But, I will give it a shot.
First off, our system is, in fact, an insurance system with payments and monthly costs to employers, not some free system paid for totally from taxes. Each family MUST be covered, and, if the income is above a certain level, each family pays premiums.
Doctors are NOT bound by any government, but do and will have the ability to open a practice and to become a business entity, incorporate. Doctors are free to move wherever they want to, and can, in fact, make a very handsome living.
What really annoys the hell out of me are some of the selective advertisements seen in the U.S. that somehow portray our system as being selective on the treatment and allowing people to be untreated. IF anyone has a life-threatening condition and requires immediate treatment, they do get it, provided they have seen a doctor in the first place. Some of the ads from the Conservative groups in the U.S. portrays a woman who claims she “will die” from not receiving an operation on her brain. That was, and is, a completely false assertion. That woman had a CYST on her gland, and the cyst could, NOTE could, cause her to lose sight in her eye or eyes, which is certainly NOT cancer, NOT a death sentence.
I grew up when people were billed for visiting the doctors and even then, people were suffering needlessly because they had lost a job, had been ill, and had no way to pay. Tommy Douglas was Premier in one province, and he introduced the concept of a health care system. Imagine! One man who wanted to see every citizen in his province healthy. Wow!
There are so many lies about this that it boggles the mind. Single payer systems usually are cheaper than the current system in the U.S. The cost of medical services in the U.S. is far higher than here, around 16% of GDP in the U.S. and around 9% in Canada, yet we manage to have every single person insured and our hospitals are working well.
In May of this year, the Republicans admitted that the health care system in the U.S. MUST be changed, must be fundamentally altered.
“The status quo is no longer acceptable,” political strategist Frank Luntz wrote in a confidential memo to congressional Republicans earlier this month. “The overwhelming majority of Americans believe significant reform is needed — and they see Republicans (and the insurance companies) as the roadblock.”
“It is time to publicly admit that the health-care system in America is broken. Costs are rising at an unacceptable rate — more than doubling over the last 10 years, which is nearly four times the rate of wage growth. Too many patients feel trapped by health-care decisions dictated by HMOs. Too many doctors are torn between practicing medicine and practicing insurance. And 47 million Americans worry what will happen to them or their children if they get sick.”
Here is where some lies get going. There are many people in the insurance industry that have put out messages to Congressmen, Senators and others that are just flat out lies.
This is from a letter sent out by Doctor Frank I. Luntz, to Congressmen, Senators and anyone lobbying to stop the reform of the health system in the U.S. It is available in PDF form on the internet.
“In countries with government run healthcare, politicians make YOUR healthcare decisions.
THEY decide if you’ll get the procedure you need, or if you are disqualified because the
treatment is too expensive or because you are too old. We can’t have that in America.”
Sorry, that is a lie. What is the reality is that there are people who stand between Americans and their doctors, but that person is an employee of the insurance company who is being prodded by stockholders in the company to increase the profit margin of the company, hopefully by dumping people who are ill.
If there is no available treatment in Canada, then the health care system here does, and will, pay for patients to go to the nearest place to get that treatment, even in the U.S. AND the treatment is paid for by the insurance in Canada. Believe me, American doctors LOVE to see Canadians come there for treatment because they are GUARANTEED payment.
Here is more of the “information” Doctor Luntz asked others to use against the current reform.
(19) Always place protecting the doctor-patient relationship an essential priority for any
healthcare initiative. Your three most powerful phrases are:
— “No Washington politician or bureaucrat should stand between you and
your doctor.”
— “Decisions about you and your healthcare should be between you and
your doctor and no one else.”
— “Let your doctor decide.”
Yes, there are rules for this……
WORDS THAT WORK
Federal standardization is healthcare by committee – and we don’t need the inefficiencies of government committees making healthcare decisions.
Doctors are our true experts. The best system is where a patient and a doctor make the decisions about care. Doctors have to go through a pretty rigorous plan to get “Dr.” next to their name, and the overwhelming majority of them are great doctors.
We don’t need some committee rationing care and telling people what they can and can’t have. We need to give patients the best choices of health plans and doctors and let them make their own decisions.
– Senator Jim DeMint
Sorry, Senator, but there are no such committees here. Doctors are quite able to make the decisions without anyone from the government interfering.
(15) ISSUE: Federal Standardization. Oppose this policy idea by attacking bureaucrats in the name of protecting the doctor-patient relationship. Polling reveals two attacks that work best against the creation of a federal panel that would determine a standardized approach to medical care.
— “It would have federal bureaucrats determining healthcare standards rather than the doctors who are actually providing the care.”
— “It will take the power away from patients and doctors to choose what treatment the patient receives and give it to the politicians in Washington.”
Yeah, and where is there any mention of any federal bureaucrat determining standard of care? I seriously doubt any politician, even a wildly “socialist” one, would ever want to get involved in this at all.
“WORDS THAT WORK
This plan may sound good rhetorically, but at the end of the day, we are moving very swiftly towards a Washington-engineered, bureaucratic controlled, healthcare system. And we all know that when the government gets in the middle of anything, the quality can quickly diminish. – Eric Cantor”
Oh really Mr. Cantor, then I guess the military and the FBI, CIA, and many other things have gone down in quality then? The federal aviation system is now poor in quality?
That argument is what is known as a straw man argument. BUT, I am wondering if they really do think that any federally run system is guaranteed to fall in quality just because it IS run federally.
(13) Maximize your attacks on the Democratic plan by choosing the BEST words. For instance, calling it the “Democratic plan” isn’t your best bet; doing so makes it political in the wrong way. It makes the issue Republicans vs. Democrats – which doesn’t favor you. The issue needs to be Americans vs. Washington. So here are the words to use:
“This plan puts politicians in charge of your healthcare” is even better than “bureaucrats.” Bureaucrats are scary – but at least they are professionals. But politicians? They bring all the wrong things to something as vital as healthcare. Both words do damage to the Democratic plan, but “politicians” does the most.
“Washington” beats “Government.” Washington has all the problems of every other level of government, and more.
“Washington Takeover” beats “Washington Control.” Takeovers are like coups – they both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom. What Americans fear most is that Washington politicians will dictate what kind of care they can receive.”
Does this look and sound familiar? Yes, it definitely should because this script is written expressly for those who have no idea what else to say, or how to say it.
Now, to get to the other side of this thing.
1. Bureaucrats do exist, and they do interfere with the care you and many other receive now, but they are not from any government, but within the insurance industry. They are in front of those stockholders who DEMAND that at least 20% of every dollar the insurance companies get, stockholders will receive.
Don’t believe me, then maybe you will believe someone who worked in the industry for decades.
WENDELL POTTER who worked for CIGMA for 15 years.
“Well, I was beginning to question what I was doing as the industry shifted from selling primarily managed care plans, to what they refer to as consumer-driven plans. And they’re really plans that have very high deductibles, meaning that they’re shifting a lot of the cost off health care from employers and insurers, insurance companies, to individuals. And a lot of people can’t even afford to make their co-payments when they go get care, as a result of this. But it really took a trip back home to Tennessee for me to see exactly what is happening to so many Americans.”
“I went home, to visit relatives. And I picked up the local newspaper and I saw that a health care expedition was being held a few miles up the road, in Wise, Virginia. And I was intrigued.
I borrowed my dad’s car and drove up 50 miles up the road to Wise, Virginia. It was being held at a Wise County Fairground. I took my camera. I took some pictures. It was a very cloudy, misty day, it was raining that day, and I walked through the fairground gates. And I didn’t know what to expect. I just assumed that it would be, you know, like a health– booths set up and people just getting their blood pressure checked and things like that.
But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they’d erected tents, to care for people. I mean, there was no privacy. In some cases– and I’ve got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement.
And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee– all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.
There could have been people and probably were people that I had grown up with. They could have been people who grew up at the house down the road, in the house down the road from me. And that made it real to me.
I had been in the industry and I’d risen up in the ranks. And I had a great job. And I had a terrific office in a high-rise building in Philadelphia. I was insulated. I didn’t really see what was going on. I saw the data. I knew that 47 million people were uninsured, but I didn’t put faces with that number.
Just a few weeks later though, I was back in Philadelphia and I would often fly on a corporate aircraft to go to meetings.
And I just thought that was a great way to travel. It is a great way to travel. You’re sitting in a luxurious corporate jet, leather seats, very spacious. And I was served my lunch by a flight attendant who brought my lunch on a gold-rimmed plate. And she handed me gold-plated silverware to eat it with. And then I remembered the people that I had seen in Wise County. Undoubtedly, they had no idea that this went on, at the corporate levels of health insurance companies.
“It was just the most difficult. We call them high profile cases, when you have a case like that — a family or a patient goes to the news media and complains about having some coverage denied that a doctor had recommended. In this case, Nataline Sarkisyan’s doctors at UCLA had recommended that she have a liver transplant. But when the coverage request was reviewed at Cigna, the decision was made to deny it.”
There it is, a company denies health care for their own patient because they NEED to have profits and patients who get ill cut into those profits. Nataline’s doctore recommended treatment, life saving treatment, and she was denied coverage by some damn bureaucrat in some damned corporation more concerned with profits than healthy customers!
Michael Moore came out with his film “Sicko” and this is what the industry saw and did.
Again, words from Wendell Potter.
“I thought that he hit the nail on the head with his movie. But the industry, from the moment that the industry learned that Michael Moore was taking on the health care industry, it was really concerned.
The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that, you’re heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism. So they have used scare tactics for years and years and years, to keep that from happening. If there were a broader program like our Medicare program, it could potentially reduce the profits of these big companies. So that is their biggest concern.”
This is what the industry saw as being true about the Moore film, and certainly does NOT want YOU to know.
That we shouldn’t fear government involvement in our health care system. That there is an appropriate role for government, and it’s been proven in the countries that were in that movie.
You know, we have more people who are uninsured in this country than the entire population of Canada. And that if you include the people who are underinsured, more people than in the United Kingdom. We have huge numbers of people who are also just a lay-off away from joining the ranks of the uninsured, or being purged by their insurance company, and winding up there.
And another thing is that the advocates of reform or the opponents of reform are those who are saying that we need to be careful about what we do here, because we don’t want the government to take away your choice of a health plan. It’s more likely that your employer and your insurer is going to switch you from a plan that you’re in now to one that you don’t want. You might be in the plan you like now.
But chances are, pretty soon, you’re going to be enrolled in one of these high deductible plans in which you’re going to find that much more of the cost is being shifted to you than you ever imagined.”
HERE is where YOU get to give more money to the insurance companies for service that is actually going to be paid for with higher costs. YOU really want this??
All of this and more is on the following site:
Wendell Potter exposes Insurance Resistance to Health Reforms (video)
“REP. JOHN BOEHNER: The forthcoming plan from Democratic leaders will make health care more expensive, limit treatments, ration care, and put bureaucrats in charge of medical decisions rather than patients and doctors.
SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL: Americans need to realize that when someone says “government option,” what could really occur is a government takeover that soon could lead to government bureaucrats denying and delaying care, and telling Americans what kind of care they can have.
SEN. JON KYL: Washington run healthcare would diminish access to quality care, leading to denials, shortages and long delays for treatment.
REP. JOE WILSON: How will a government run health plan not lead to the same rationing of care that we have seen in other countries?
REP. TOM PRICE: We don’t want to put the government, we don’t want to put bureaucrats between a doctor and a patient.”
Hmmm wonder where that comes from??
“The industry doesn’t want to have any competitor. In fact, over the course of the last few years, has been shrinking the number of competitors through a lot of acquisitions and mergers. So first of all, they don’t want any more competition period. They certainly don’t want it from a government plan that might be operating more efficiently than they are, that they operate. The Medicare program that we have here is a government-run program that has administrative expenses that are like three percent or so.” Wendell Potter
“You told Congress that the industry has hijacked our health care system and turned it into a giant ATM for Wall Street. You said, “I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick, all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.” How do they satisfy their Wall Street investors?
Well, there’s a measure of profitability that investors look to, and it’s called a medical loss ratio. And it’s unique to the health insurance industry. And by medical loss ratio, I mean that it’s a measure that tells investors or anyone else how much of a premium dollar is used by the insurance company to actually pay medical claims. And that has been shrinking, over the years, since the industry’s been dominated by, or become dominated by for-profit insurance companies. Back in the early ’90s, or back during the time that the Clinton plan was being debated, 95 cents out of every dollar was sent, you know, on average was used by the insurance companies to pay claims. Last year, it was down to just slightly above 80 percent.
THIS IS A PLAN TO SABOTAGE THE REFORM, TO ENSURE THAT THE INSURANCE COMPANIES FORCE EVERY SINGLE PERSON TO BUY INSURANCE FROM THEM. Make no mistake, they want Congress and the Senate to do NOTHING! That would be the ultimately desirable outcome.
This is what the GOP want.
The GOP plan would make the health benefits that companies provide their workers count as taxable income, and then use that money to provide tax credits with which individuals could purchase their own health coverage. Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who advised the McCain campaign, said the new plan goes further than previous Republican offerings. For instance, it would provide new incentives for insurers to offer coverage to people who now have trouble buying it because they have pre-existing health conditions. It also puts more emphasis on preventive care and sets up “state exchanges” — similar to the one now operating in Massachusetts — in which individuals and families could comparison-shop for insurance plans.”
In short, the GOP want to keep the insurance companies happy, and force YOU to buy the coverage. What?? That must have the insurance companies smiling gleefully!
When I first heard of Pre-Existing Conditions, I had absolutely NO idea what they were or how they factored into health care. Then, I found out and was totally appalled and disbelieving. If a woman had, at one time, a yeast infection (which, by the way, can happen in babies) then she could and, in one instance, be denied health insurance coverage. What the hell??
If I lived in the U.S. and applied for health insurance, then I would possibly be turned down because I DID have Rubella twice in my childhood and my titre count is higher than normal. What in hell does that have to do with any health issues I now have? Or, because I did have gall stones at one time, and have not had them at all since, I am refused coverage? Bizarre!
I guess it comes down to not knowing that this type of exclusion is unknown elsewhere. If you are not aware that other places don’t even know what a pre-existing condition is, nor that it is grounds for exclusion of health coverage, then you come to think this practice is normal. Believe me, it is NOT.
I can go and get health care even though I have had Rubella twice, had gall stones (and have my gall bladder) and other things including yeast infections because of the effects of taking an antibiotic or other medicine. It is inconceivable to me that I would not!
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