Long waits and shitty care? I wish I'd seen that program. I've never experienced either long waits or shitty care. Over the past 20 years or so I've had three rounds of abdominal surgery, two of which could probably be called "elective". No long waits, good care, good outcomes each time.
My father was diagnosed with an agressively malignant brain tumour 6 years ago. He was through surgery in a couple of days, and received excellent follow-up care, through chemo and radiation and a subsequent year-and-a-half battle that he eventually lost. But as a 75-year-old at the outset, even though his chances weren't good, they threw everything they could at him in an effort to save him. Do I wish he was still alive? Absolutely - every day. Do I attribute his eventual death to "long waits and shitty care" due to our "utterly horrible" health care system? Not for a second.
My sister just blew her knee apart dirt-biking a few weeks ago, and had her surgery earlier this week. She could have had it sooner if she'd chosen to stay in Vernon where it happened, but she wanted to have it done here in Squamish so it was delayed while she made arrangements to come back to the coast for the operation. All indications are the procedure was completely successful and she should be skiing again by springtime. (Oh, and no additional "risky behaviour" premium charged by our rapacious, grasping government health care rationers, either. Maybe they forgot.)
I can't say I've heard anything about a private clinic owned by "Canada's own version of the Surgeon General". We don't really have a version of the Surgeon-General, just Ministers of Health at the federal and provincial levels, and they're generally not doctors themselves. I do recall something in the news earlier this year about the federal Minister of Health. I don't know what it was about, but maybe that had something to do with it. Or the ABC program may have been referring to the recently-elected head of the Canadian Medical Association - he does indeed own a private clinic in Vancouver, but he's nothing like the Surgeon-General, just the head of the doctors' professional association. His clinic has gone through a couple of variations since it was first proposed, and the last I heard it was in fact operating within the bounds of the Health Act, but I haven't heard much about it in a few months now, so maybe he's gone all renegade on us in the interim. Just so you know, there are in fact clinics of various kinds all over the country, and have been for years. My present doctor practices out of one. The vast majority are perfectly in keeping with the Canada Health Act, but as different clinics start offering different services, or try different methods of delivering existing services, it's inevitable that they sometimes run afoul of the regulations. When that happens, sometimes they are penalized, sometimes they modify their practices to bring them into compliance, and sometimes the rules are adapted to allow for the new methods.
It's no more perfect a system than what currently exists in the US. But "utterly horrible"? That's a tad hyberbolic, even for you, Fairweather.
And I won't even ask you to take my word for it, Fairweather. You ever heard of an outfit back east called "Johns Hopkins University"? They've been studying comparative outcomes under various different countries' health care systems for a few years now. Their basic findings are that, among the countries studied (generally the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, although some of their research has cast a much broader net), overall health care outcomes are comparable - the countries each do better in some areas, and worse in others, and no one country can be definitively stated to be "better" or "worse" when measuring those outcomes. The one clear differentiating factor they found between those five countries is that the US is spending far more money than the others to achieve basically the same results. They didn't find that any of the systems studied were "utterly horrible" or that any could be summarised as "long waits and shitty care".
2004
2005
2007 "Commonwealth Foundation" (they're probably commies or something)
If I can find a re-broadcast of the ABC program you cite, I'd be interested in watching it. I just took a quick look for an on-line copy, but couldn't fnd it. Do you recall the name of the program?
FW is an expert in a vast landscape of subjects about which he has no personal experience. It is his specialty, almost sixth sense really. From welfare to warfare, he is our own one stop go to guy for judgements by proxy on a universe of tough issues requiring a man with tough-love values. He is like a lone high beam piercing the fog of liberalism on the windy mountain road of our difficult times. He knows, instinctively, that the way back is the way foreward.
In this case, he saw it on TV, so your nice little anecdotes are obviously extreme outliers.
