Health Care: “Has Canada Got The Cure?”

Has Canada Got the Cure?

Holly Dressel, Yes Magazine

Publicly funded health care has its problems, as any Canadian or Briton knows. But like democracy, it’s the best answer we’ve come up with so far.

Should the United States implement a more inclusive, publicly funded health care system? That’s a big debate throughout the country. But even as it rages, most Americans are unaware that the United States is the only country in the developed world that doesn’t already have a fundamentally public–that is, tax-supported–health care system.

That means that the United States has been the unwitting control subject in a 30-year, worldwide experiment comparing the merits of private versus public health care funding. For the people living in the United States, the results of this experiment with privately funded health care have been grim. The United States now has the most expensive health care system on earth and, despite remarkable technology, the general health of the U.S. population is lower than in most industrialized countries. Worse, Americans’ mortality rates–both general and infant–are shockingly high.

The United States spends far more per capita on health care than any comparable country. In fact, the gap is so enormous that a recent University of California, San Francisco, study estimates that the United States would save over $161 billion every year in paperwork alone if it switched to a singlepayer system like Canada’s.3 These billions of dollars are not abstract amounts deducted from government budgets; they come directly out of the pockets of people who are sick.

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    • Edger on July 24, 2009 at 18:18
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  1. the United States has been the unwitting control subject in a 30-year, worldwide experiment comparing the merits of private versus public health care funding

  2. net.soapblox.exception.SoapBloxException: java.sql.SQLException: Incorrect string value: ‘xC4xAB-xCBx8Ck…’ for column ‘commentText’ at row 1

    I tried posting a comment and all that would happen is the subject line, then this text red (meaning, obviously, a mistake of some kind) and then the text of the comment. And it wouldn’t post.

    ??

  3. to big boobies?

    Michael Jackson’s detachable nose?

    Will this mean an end to the “ask your doctor for” era?

    Can get hurt or sick sitting home jobless, moneyless and waiting for those black helicopters.

    • jamess on July 26, 2009 at 05:11

    thanks Edger!

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