Update: Eine kleine Krankmusik

Now if only Ralph does not go wobbly.
...
Canada is the only developed nation with a universal access health insurance program that does not allow private contracting for medically necessary treatment. In each of the other 27 developed nations where a universal access health insurance program exists, patients have the freedom to choose between competing financiers of care. Not one of these nations has had to abandon the principle of access to care regardless of ability to pay -- a fact recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Fear mongers also oppose allowing private competitive health care providers to deliver publicly funded care, claiming these providers will be more expensive and of a lower quality than the public ones. But on the contrary, private providers would inject much-needed resources and capacity into our overburdened program and are known to speed up access to high-quality publicly funded treatment for patients in a cost-effective manner. That has been proven not only in nations such as Sweden, Spain and the U.K., but also in Canadian provinces such as British Columbia and Alberta...

And this is critical to the argument:

...the output of physicians in Canada is limited in a number of ways, including annual limits on billings and restrictions on the number of certain surgeries that can be delivered.

Physicians are also limited in their access to operating rooms, with some surgeons receiving as little as four hours of operating time per week. There are spare physician resources in Canada in terms of hours of service available, but the number of doctors is limited. Allowing Albertans to access the "down" time during which physicians are simply unable to provide publicly funded care stands to benefit patients and doctors alike...

Those opposed to Alberta's plan are effectively claiming that aligning the province's health care policies with those employed in the developed world's most successful universal access systems -- policies that have proven themselves superior -- will make for a worse universal access health care program. Clearly, the departure from the status quo is not the problem. The real problem is that Alberta's plan doesn't go far enough fast enough.

Posted by markc at March 3, 2006 11:07 AM | TrackBack