• Tag Archives healthcare

  • Socialized Medicine Is “Free” But Leads To Really, Really Long Wait Times

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Last November, CTV News in Canada ran this incredible story about growing wait times for medical care in Canada due to its socialized medical system: “‘It’s insane’: Ont. patient told she’d have to wait 4.5 years to see a neurologist.” Here’s a slice:

    An Ontario doctor says health-care wait times have reached “insane” lengths in the province, as one of her patients faces a 4.5-year wait to see a neurologist. When Dr. Joy Hataley, a family practice anesthetist in Kingston, Ontario, recently tried to send a patient to a neurologist at the Kingston General Hospital, she received a letter from the specialist’s office telling her that the current wait time for new patient referrals is 4.5 years. The letter said that, if the delay is “unacceptable” to Dr. Hataley, she should instead refer the patient to a neurologist in Ottawa or Toronto.

    Dr. Joy Hataley said she was shocked when she received this letter from a neurologist’s office. Dr. Hataley, who has been outspoken about wait times and other issues plaguing Ontario’s health care system, said the wait time “shocked” her. She wanted to shock others as well, so she tweeted a photo of the letter above and tagged Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins and Kingston-area MPP Sophie Kiwala. Dr. Hataley said she’s used to hearing back from specialists who are unable to see her patients for months, and even up to 2.5 years.  But a 4.5-year wait is “insane,” she told CTVNews.ca in a telephone interview. “This is an alarm bell,” she said. “What it is to me is a red flag to the system.”

    “When Dr. Hataley first pulled up the response from the referral, both of us were just seeing the wait time first hand, I was just in disbelief and shocked,” Wooldridge, a 40-year-old developmental service worker, told CTVNews.ca in an email. “The more I thought about it after leaving her office I was just annoyed and felt that this is ridiculous and not in any way okay.” Wooldridge said she will continue to live with chronic pain and be cared for by Dr. Hataley until she can see a neurologist. She said she shouldn’t have to travel outside of Kingston to see a specialist.

    “I don’t honestly feel that I should have to go to another city when we have a neurologist 4.5 minutes up the road and I’m a resident of the city in which my taxes help go towards,” she wrote. “I don’t think it’s right or fair to drive to another city…it’s financially not easy for me to just pick up and go, as much as I would like to.”

    (h/t Peter Krieger)

    Related: This is from the executive summary of Canada’s Fraser Institute’s most recent annual report “Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2017 Report” (emphasis added):

    Waiting for treatment has become a defining characteristic of Canadian health care. In order to document the lengthy queues for visits to specialists and for diagnostic and surgical procedures in the country, the Fraser Institute has—for over two decades—surveyed specialist physicians across 12 specialties and 10 provinces. This edition of Waiting Your Turn indicates that, overall, waiting times for medically necessary treatment have increased since last year. Specialist physicians surveyed report a median waiting time of 21.2 weeks between referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment—longer than the wait of 20.0 weeks reported in 2016. This year’s wait time—the longest ever recorded in this survey’s history—is 128% longer than in 1993, when it was just 9.3 weeks (see graphic above).

    In the video below, Ronald Reagan tells the joke about waiting ten years to get a new car in the Soviet Union. Here’s my variation of that joke for the Canadian medical system.

    A patient in Canada is told by a hospital administrator that there will be a five-year wait for an appointment with a neurologist. The patient asks, “Will that be in the morning or the afternoon.” The hospital administrator asks, “What difference does that make, it’s not until five years from today.” The patient says, “Well, I have my next dental appointment on that day in the morning.”

    Reprinted from the American Enterprise Institute.


    Mark J. Perry

    Mark J. Perry is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.




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  • Regulation is Stifling Accessible Healthcare

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Regulation is Stifling Accessible Healthcare

    While the politicians debate health-care reform (again), let’s take a moment to consider how the basic flaws in our current system of “health insurance” put someone important at risk last week. That, someone, was me.

    I felt sluggish for a while, and I said to my wife that I felt like I had a jellyfish lodged in my chest. She suggested it might be walking pneumonia. That seemed to make sense, so I spent some time on the Internet looking up that ailment, including its symptoms.

    I got to thinking about how regulation is responsible for the enormous gap between the expert and the amateur. A lot of sites counseled me to consult a physician for an official diagnosis but noted that walking pneumonia tends to go away without treatment.

    I decided I would take the second route rather than suffer the time, the hassle, and the copay that comes with visiting a doctor.

    The problem is that healthcare consumers have limited options. At the two ends of the spectrum, they can see a licensed doctor, or they can do it themselves. One option is extremely expensive, time-consuming, and reliable, and the other is free and still time-consuming but not as reliable. In between, there are few other choices. It’s possible to use a service like Teladoc or visit a drugstore clinic in some areas for minor issues like strep throat, an earache, or a sprained ankle, but in the absence of the current system of occupational licensing, there’d be a much broader continuum of possibilities between my unlettered amateur visits to Dr. Google and visits to an actual doctor’s office.

    The problem is compounded by the fact that we pay for health-care via “insurance” coverage, which isn’t really insurance but just prepaid health-care.

    This system requires lots and lots of rules about what can and can’t be covered and what constitutes medicine. The entire healthcare market would function much more efficiently if there were more options. For treating a lot of conditions, you don’t need someone who went to four years of medical school and worked through a grueling residency. Better to save that talent for more challenging stuff and allow people to seek marginal improvements over DIY diagnosis.

    Worried about quality assurance? There’s an app for that, and it’s called the market. Just as Underwriters Laboratory and Consumer Reports test products rigorously and vigorously, a free market would lead medical practitioners to sensitively vet service providers. The American Medical Association, for example, might offer its own certification course.

    Note that certification is distinct from licensing. A license means government permission. Doing business without a license could land you in jail. Certification merely says that the certifying organization vouches for the quality of the product or service. If quality differences matter a lot to patients, the AMA certification will be extremely valuable.

    But who’s going to protect people from charlatans? It’s a valid concern, but market mechanisms can complement existing rules against fraud. Courts and professional associations should be able to arrive at enforceable standards. Moreover, the relevant alternative to a cheap healthcare provider for a lot of people isn’t a medical doctor. The relevant alternative is doing it oneself. It’s hardly clear that a society of patients making decisions after consulting the Internet is safer and healthier than a society with lots of different healthcare professionals providing lots of different levels of service.

    Reprinted from Learn Liberty.


    Art Carden

    Art Carden is an Associate Professor of Economics at Samford University’s Brock School of Business. In addition, he is a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics, a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network. Visit his website.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • What True Health Care Reform Would Look Like

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    With the relatively recent passing of America’s new healthcare law; the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the topics of healthcare, health insurance, prices and reform have been particularly hot lately. This of course does not mean that the controversies surrounding the American healthcare system are anything new. Healthcare prices are getting higher with many hospital visits for certain conditions totaling bills of millions of dollars. Also, the laws regulating the industry are getting heavier by the day. People have known for a while that a solid reform of the system has been in order, though it is unfortunate that most of these people calling for reform have a tendency to find their influence for such reform across the ocean.

    What is “Fairness” in Health Care?

    Many Americans are so fed up with the American healthcare system, that what seems too many to be the most sensible thing to do is to follow the European model and nationalize the entire industry. With a quick glance at some snapshot statistics, it doesn’t seem to be a crazy idea. After all, according to the WHO (World Health Organization), the United States ranks only no. 37 in quality of healthcare worldwide. Look a little closer though, and one will find that this data does not tell the whole, unbiased story. It turns out that the WHO uses “fairness” as one of its criteria for evaluating nation’s healthcare systems. In fact, a number of the criteria used by the WHO are not that relevant to healthcare itself, such as how much patients pay out of pocket for healthcare. Factoring all criteria together, the US ranks no. 37, however even the WHO ranked the US as no. 1 worldwide in “responsiveness to patients’ needs in choice of provider, dignity, autonomy, timely care, and confidentiality.””

    via What True Health Care Reform Would Look Like


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