Wheelchairs and Bedpans: Canada onthe Move

...It can safely be assumed that most Canadians support some system of publicly financed medical and hospital care -and with good reason...

...One merely has to read The Future That Doesn V Work to learn that the conditions of Britain's National Health Service equally obtain in Canada...

...In other words, the state prefers it-because it is more economical-if your husband, wife, or child dies young rather than survives at taxpayers' expense...

...Obviously, this was grossly unfair...

...Manor, formerly an editorial writer for the Winnipeg Free Press, is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator...

...The doctors' insurance managed to acquire a surplus despite the low premiums and no government subsidies...

...In an interview with a correspondent of the Los Angeles Times/ Washington Post News Service, a medical official of the Swedish government health service expressed his strong disapproval of regular physical check-ups...

...There was, for instance, a recent Canadian civil court judgment against two Asian doctors who "incorrectly identified a body found in the lower left quadrant of her [the patient's] abdomen and excised this believing it to be an ovarian cyst...

...No wonder that even the blue-eyed Arabs of Alberta decided that enough was enough and hospital administrators were warned that there would be no more budgetary increases...

...An the United States private hospitals are said to make profit out of sickness, something considered repugnant to contemporary ethos...

...In the socialist jargon, which has now seeped into general usage, health care has been placed semantically on the same level as groceries or furniture...

...Theoretically, such a clinic consists-in a descending order of importance -of all-powerful administrators, social workers, paramedics, and a small number of salaried doctors doing shift-work and restricted in the number of X-ray or laboratory tests they can order per day...

...It then occurred to me that the thousands of dollars extracted from me for compulsory health insurance provided me with no insurance whatever, and that what care I received was entirely due to the fortuitous circumstance that I was the patient of a highly skilled and competent doctor who happened to be associated with that particular hospital...

...But I am certain that in the event of an emergency I would be assured of a decent hospital bed...

...I was wheeled into the emergency room...

...In the same way it should not matter which doctor-so long as he is duly licensed to practice medicine-pokes at your body and ultimately decides whether you will live or die...

...Stripped of her dignity as she had been stripped of her clothes, lying in a roomful of strangers, this woman, who no doubt had brought up children and grandchildren, was now being shouted at by a chit of a girl as if she were a not-yet-toilet-trained two-year-old...

...In Canada, because of the Utopian dream of equality, the money criterion has been abolished and the way opened to patronage and special treatment, usually tending to prove that politicians, bureaucrats, and their friends are more equal than others.** So I lay in the emergency room watching an old woman of Ukrainian extraction lie between two male drunks...

...but need'st not strive Officiously to keep alive...

...This is not the case...

...The paramedic then decides whether or not the patient should be referred to the doctor on duty...

...I woke up in the hospital where an immigrant doctor asked me to move my arms and wiggle my toes...

...This is in accordance with the dictum of former British cabinet minister Enoch Powell, the so-called Powell's Law: The demand for "free" medical care quickly outruns any possible provision for it...

...She turned her face to the wall, and the nurse, uncomprehending, did what socialized medicine does best: called in a social worker...

...Clough's The Latest Decalogue: Thou shalt not kill...

...But the union-hall ideology denies this distinction, and thus one of the basic principles of our society: free choice...

...One recalls the verses from A.H...

...It turned out that apart from swollen legs and multiple abrasions I had suffered a concussion,, a broken back, and a damaged eye...

...The plan was cheap and efficient, covered in its last year 65 percent of the population, and, when the F.S...

...The plan, as it evolved, included unlimited medical and surgical services, the cost of drugs, X-rays, laboratory tests, private nurses, ambulance services, an annual physical check-up, two annual consultations and, of course, a free choice of doctor...

...As Mr...

...Nevertheless, my doctor, prominent specialist though he is, could find no bed for me...

...Fortunately, my own doctor arrived at the hospital, X-rays were taken, various specialists were consulted, and I was admitted for observation...

...As I lay there among drunks and sick old women on a narrow, hard stretcher, broken, swollen, and hurting all over, it further occurred to me that if a local politician, a health service apparatchik, or a union boss had been struck in my stead, not only a hospital bed but no doubt a private room with a view would have been found for him...

...In the chapter called "The Infirmity of British Medicine," Harry Schwartz of the editorial board of the New York Times quotes Bernard Dixon, editor of the British magazine New Scientist: "Not only is there an acute shortage of resources, but the expertise and facilities that are available are all too often dispensed via a conveyor-belt system which can at times be positively inhuman...

...Such checkups, he said, were expensive and wasteful since only seldom would a doctor find any pathological condition...

...The woman stared back...

...Please , note the fashionable verb "delivered...

...I do not know what kind of health insurance $200 a month would buy in the United States...

...Eventually, the nurse came to cover her and asked whether she wanted a bedpan...

...The medical profession itself policed the plan to prevent abuses by unscrupulous physicians...

...To pay their hospital bills many victims, having run out of their Blue Cross and other insurance benefits, had to sell their homes and liquidate their savings...

...The strange body the two doctors failed to recognize was in fact the patient's only kidney...

...Nonetheless, this conveyor-belt system remains the great ideal of Canadian socialists and labor union officials who persist in their dogmatic assertion that health care should be "delivered" through what are known as "community clinics...

...There are now 14 ophthalmologists left, of whom six are over 60 years of age and no longer willing to undertake delicate eye surgery...

...If the patient is referred to the clinic's doctor, this may be Dr...

...government ordered it disbanded, had accumulated a surplus of $500,000...

...One fairly successful medical insurance scheme, attempted in Manitoba from 1944 to 1969, was run entirely by the medical profession...

...Having been ruled by the socialists for eight years, until 1977, Manitobans are well acquainted with their ideal of community clinics...

...Powell's Law has proven its validity in Canada...

...When the socialists came to power in Manitoba, there were 30 ophthalmologists in Winnipeg, a provincial capital of half a million that serves as the main medical center for the one million Manitobans...

...Here indeed was the epitome of socialized medicine...

...Jones, who will tell the patient to return next week when the doctor on duty may be Dr...

...In I960, when Canada's population was 18 million, the cost to government of medical services amounted to $2.2 billion...

...But then, the operation was "free...

...More specifically, in 1977 the oil-rich province of Alberta (with a budgetary surplus now amounting to $5 billion-a kind of North American Abu Dhabi) spent half a billion dollars to operate 150 hospitals serving a population of two million-$33 million per hospital, or $10,000 a year for a family of four...

...And we can do it cheaper...

...Shortly before state medicine was introduced in Canada, Manitoba's doctors had warned: "The more we can do in the field of health, the less there is for the government to do...

...In 1953, the province of Manitoba suffered the worst polio epidemic ever to afflict any part of the North American continent...

...I found a stark illustration of socialist thought on state medicine in a report out of Sweden last summer...

...Now I have to wait for six to eight weeks for an examination, often given at 5 or 6 p.m., the doctors having to work for 10-12 hours a day to see all their patients, As happened in Britain, the departing doctors, graduates of respectable Canadian medical schools and often post-graduates of famous American medical colleges, are being replaced by doctors from the Third World, often poorly trained...

...For the benefit of Americans, possibly susceptible to the alluring promises of Senator Edward Kennedy, let me now recount a recent experience of my own that demonstrates what it means to live in a place with state health insurance...

...The burden of medical catastrophe should be borne by the community at large, and whether it is an epidemic or a long-term illness, the cost should be co-insured out of public funds...

...Little wonder that many Canadian doctors have felt that they can make a more comfortable living in the United States...

...Schwartz said: "Mao Tse-tung got far better care than a Hunan peasant, just as Leonid Brezhnev gets better care than a Ukrainian factory worker...

...Indeed, the Canadian experience serves to prove that state medicine, wherever practiced, produces the same syndromes...

...Furthermore, he continued, when an incipient disease is discovered it prompts the patient to insist on expensive modern treatment that will often prolong life for as many as 20 years, during which time the patient will continue to make demands upon the state health services...

...There is no full equality in access to medical care anywhere, nor can there be so long as human societies must depend upon differential rewards to provide incentives...

...In the socialist egalitarian vision it should not matter whether the carpenter sent by the union-hall to do a job is Jones or Smith so long as he has his certificate and his union card...

...I myself have lost two ophthalmologists, both highly skilled men and good friends: One moved to Phoenix, Arizona, the other to Los Angeles...

...But when the profit motive is abolished and the administrators given access to public funding, costs explode beyond imagination...

...Last August, while walking home from the office, I was knocked down by a hit-and-run car that mounted the pavement and collided with a standard first and me next, causing substantial damage to both...

...In contrast, state medicine has become a veritable Moloch, ruthlessly consuming the nation's substance while at the same time grossly underpaying the doctors...

...It had to be wound up because the federal government, upon introducing universal medical and hospital care, insisted on compulsory coverage of the entire population...

...In 1977, for a population of 23 million, this figure had risen to $15 billion, or $652 a year for every man, woman, and child...

...This is the "delivery" concept...

...The nurse, using the old proven method of dealing with foreigners-enunciate clearly and shout at the top of your voice-asked again, very loudly, whether the old woman wanted to go on the pot...

...What we have discovered is that state health insurance is expensive, wasteful, inefficient, and all too often offensive to human dignity...

...Nasser...

...The unfortunate woman was awarded $300,000 in damages, an amount that will not provide enough money for the nursing care she will need for the rest of her life...

...In real life, of course, there are good and bad doctors just as there are good and bad carpenters...

...Therefore, over the last five years I have spent about $12,000 for a program that I believed would provide me with adequate medical and hospital care...

...The patient is first seen by a social worker who, if unable to treat the pktient's psyche, passes him along in that conveyor-belt fashion to the paramedic...

...Her hospital gown was open at the back showing age-mottled skin and mauve underpants...

...The problem is that we have not yet discovered how to do it...

...When the nurse suggested that I be sent for X-rays, the doctor, conscious of the need "to find ways of reducing the use of X-ray services," decided that no X-rays were required and that I could go home...

...The Friday night atmosphere in the emergency room could only be described as a contemporary reflection of William Hogarth's pictures of low life in 18th-century London...

...What's worse, state medicine has proven regressive, depriving the population of the high-class medical and hospital care it once had...

...According to Canadian federal officials, one-third of every tax dollar goes to pay for health care...

...But the warning fell on deaf ears...

...Here the pitfalls of false pride and insuf- , ficient knowledge are truly frightening: Instead of having the medical man see the patient first, leaving it to his expertise to ascertain whether or not there is a pathological condition, this life-or-death decision is left in the hands of half-trained staff- because it is cheaper that way...

...On the contrary, the fee paid to doctors out of public funds is so low that a Canadian doctor has to see between 35 and 55 patients a day to earn as much as a moderately skilled physician across the border who sees about one-third of this number...

...Because one out of six people each year enters an acute-care hospital on an in-patient basis, hospitals have had to save money by finding ways of reducing the use of laboratory tests and X-ray services.* Since all hospital workers other than doctors are unionized, the socialists have concentrated their fire on doctors as the main culprits responsible for the high cost of health care...