Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

-Video: Steven Crowder goes undercover in Canada to find out what America's future health care under Obama will provide.

Don't get sick on Sunday! In fact, don't get sick at all...

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

-For the true face of ObamaCare, take a closer look at Canada

obama health care long lines

From Gateway Pundit via American Issues Project

Ava Isabella Stinson was born at St. Joseph's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario on Thursday of last week. Ava was 13 weeks premature. She weighed only two-pounds, four-ounces at birth. Ava needed special care and equipment to keep her alive. Unfortunately, there were no open neonatal intensive care beds for her at St. Joesph's Hospital. In fact there were no open neonatal care beds in her entire Canadian province. Ava had to be transferred to the United States. Toronto's Channel 24 reported on Little Ava's ordeal:

A critically-ill premature-born baby from Hamilton is all alone in a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital after she was turned away for treatment at local facility and transferred across the border without her parents, who don't have passports.

Ava Stinson was born Thursday at St. Joseph's Hospital, 14 weeks premature.

A province wide search for an open neonatal intensive care unit bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two pound, four ounce baby to Buffalo.

Her parents Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson couldn't follow their child because as of June 1, a passport is required to cross the border into the United States.

They're having to approve medical procedures over the phone and are terrified something will happen to their baby before they get there.

The Canadian Consulate in Buffalo is providing advice and guidance to the first-time parents, and their local MP, New Democrat David Christopherson, is working to arrange emergency passports.

This was not an isolated incident. Hamilton's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is closed to new admissions about 50 per cent of the time. The rest of the special needs babies are sent elsewhere and often to the United States. Don Surber at the Daily Mall reported that this tends to be the rule rather than the exception:

Remember the Jepp Quads? Thanks to socialized medicine, there was no hospital in the second-largest nation on Earth that could accommodate the quadruple birth and so Mrs. Jepp flew 325 miles from Calgary (population 1 million) to Great Falls, Mont. (population 56,000) to give birth. She may be Canadian, but her 4 daughters are American.

Well, it turns out the Jepp quads are not the exception, they are the rule. Rather than build enough neo-natal intensive care units to handle their preemies, the Canadian government ships mothers to the United States to give birth.

Lawmakers and liberals tend to ignore history and frankly to ignore reality when it comes to policy making and spending your money. Where will Canada send their citizens who are in need of intensive care? The better question is, where will WE send our citizens in need of REAL health care?

premature baby born tiny
If this baby isn't aborted under Obama's socialist policies, it will die not long after birth due to his Universal Health Care.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

-Another story no one reported: the case against Canadian style health care

obama looking over doctor shoulder universal health care political cartoon
Just another strong case against Obama's universal health care plan. Great read.
From IBDeditorials via FreeRepublic:


As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates' comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in Detroit, the overworked doctor in Orlando, to name a few.


But no one will mention Claude Castonguay — perhaps not surprising because this statesman isn't an American and hasn't held office in over three decades. Castonguay's evolving view of Canadian health care, however, should weigh heavily on how the candidates think about the issue in this country.

Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: "the father of Quebec medicare." Even this title seems modest; Castonguay's work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in "crisis."

"We thought we could resolve the system's problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it," says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: "We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice." (emphasis mine)

Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.

In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It's as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced.

What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.

Years ago, Canadians touted their health care system as the best in the world; today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.

Sick with ovarian cancer, Sylvia de Vires, an Ontario woman afflicted with a 13-inch, fluid-filled tumor weighing 40 pounds, was unable to get timely care in Canada. She crossed the American border to Pontiac, Mich., where a surgeon removed the tumor, estimating she could not have lived longer than a few weeks more.

De Vires is far from unusual in seeking medical treatment in the U.S. Even Canadian government officials send patients across the border, increasingly looking to American medicine to deal with their overload of patients and chronic shortage of care. Since the spring of 2006, Ontario's government has sent at least 164 patients to New York and Michigan for neurosurgery emergencies — defined by the Globe and Mail newspaper as "broken necks, burst aneurysms and other types of bleeding in or around the brain." Other provinces have followed Ontario's example.

Canada isn't the only country facing a government health care crisis. Britain's system, once the postwar inspiration for many Western countries, is similarly plagued. Both countries trail the U.S. in five-year cancer survival rates, transplantation outcomes and other measures.
The problem is that government bureaucrats simply can't centrally plan their way to better health care.

A typical example: The Ministry of Health declared that British patients should get ER care within four hours. The result? At some hospitals, seriously ill patients are kept in ambulances for hours so as not to run afoul of the regulation; at other hospitals, patients are admitted to inappropriate wards. ...

Declarations can't solve staffing shortages and the other rationing of care that occurs in government-run systems. Americans should know that one of the founding fathers of Canada's government-run health care system has turned against his own creation. If Claude Castonguay is abandoning ship, why should Americans bother climbing on board?

But then his his supporters will say "well Obama's plan allows you to keep your private health care if you want it!" This makes no sense. If a government option is available it will be cheaper and more available, obviously, so of course there will be people who choose to go that route. This will not "keep the private health insurance companies honest" as Barack likes to justify, but it will put them out of business, leading into the single-payer system that Obama has said he supports, but cannot "start out" in.

Good plan, good work!
canadian health care long line political cartoon