Why Canadians and Other More Advanced Civilizations Should Root Against U.S. Healthcare Reform

Posted on January 22, 2008
Filed Under Wonkonian Rationing |

Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton, and other Wonkonians find it relatively easy to find both Canadian officials and regular Canadian folks (invariably healthy-looking ones, likely innocent of ever having needed serious medical care) who are willing to publicly extol to us Americans the innate superiority of their government-controlled, universal healthcare system, and to urge us to adopt a similar plan.

DrRich would be inclined to take the opinions of these helpful Canadians more seriously save for two things: a) their sense of smug superiority, by which they clearly hold for us loutish Americans the same level of disdain that your average aristocratic British colonel held for Bedouin chieftains during World War I; and b) the utterly self-destructive nature of their advice. For, by their urging us to go and do likewise with our healthcare system, these Canadians are not behaving logically. And so, quite simply, they cannot be trusted. And if they cannot be trusted, DrRich reluctantly concludes that those who trot them out to lecture us on healthcare reform should also be regarded with great caution.

Let us state the problem simply and precisely. Whatever success may be enjoyed by the rational and humanitarian Canadian healthcare system - as tenuous as that success may be - is largely dependent on the continued existence of the irrational, unfair, wasteful American healthcare system.

The fact that the irrational American healthcare system exists just across the border serves to decompress rising public discontent among our northern neighbors. It provides rich Canadians a place to come for “elective” hip replacements and coronary artery bypass surgeries they cannot easily or conveniently or timely get at home, and so keeps these potential troublemakers mollified.

It allows a strapped Canadian healthcare system to avoid making capital investments it finds inconvenient. For instance, Catron points us to an article in the Globe and Mail (Toronto) entitled “Critically Ill Patients Rushed to U.S. For Care,” which relates that more than 150 Canadians recently have had to come to the U.S. for intensive medical and surgical care. The reason for these transfers, it seems, is a multi-faceted Canadian system failure which includes a lack of sufficient technology, limited operating room time, too few intensive-care beds, and a short supply of adequately trained intensive-care nurses and physicians. Stories like this, which are being told more frequently these days, demonstrate not only that the American healthcare system is increasingly vital to the health of Canadians, but also that this American escape valve is increasingly vital in keeping what might otherwise become troublesome dissatisfaction among the Canadian public in check.

To the brutish enemies of Canadian-style healthcare, who argue that advances in modern medicine arise almost exclusively in America and that radical healthcare reform in the U.S. will kill innovation, proponents of radical reform reply that in Western countries like Canada which have adopted universal healthcare, plenty of medical progress continues. Canadian technology might not always be completely at the levels seen in the U.S., but Canadian medical care is clearly progressing quite nicely despite single-payer healthcare. Furthermore, this continued progress is more considered and less haphazard (i.e., more civilized) than in the U.S. Finally, proponents say, very successful and very innovative biomedical companies indeed do exist in countries that have adopted something like universal healthcare. The kind of innovation that continues in such countries therefore would most certainly also continue in the progress-obsessed U.S. under a Canadian-style system.

But a closer look shows that most of the continued medical progress seen in these other countries in fact arises and percolates there from the U.S. - often (most famously with drugs) at discounted prices to boot. So indeed, medical progress continues in the rest of the world, but it’s progress that’s paid for by the dollars and sweat of American citizens. Similarly, non-American companies that continue to innovate in healthcare can do so almost exclusively because they know a ready market exists for their new products - it exists in here.

In large part, it is the existence of the irrational American healthcare system that makes the more “civilized” healthcare systems around the world acceptable to their populations. If radical healthcare reform of anything like the Canadian variety were to occur here, thus stifling both the innovation and the consumption generated by the great roaring engine of American healthcare, then healthcare will change radically not only here, but all around the world.

This is why we shouldn’t pay attention to the smug Canadians (or French, or Cubans) who, at the behest of Wonkonians, urge us to follow them. These people don’t even understand what’s in their own best interests. How could they possibly understand what’s in ours?

Comments

2 Responses to “Why Canadians and Other More Advanced Civilizations Should Root Against U.S. Healthcare Reform”

  1. Dr. Val on January 22nd, 2008 4:45 pm

    I do think the US drives a lot of medical innovations that trickle down to other countries and substantially improve their patient care (without the cost of R&D). If we go into a recession and/or trade innovation for equal access to no one (i.e. not enough PCPs to go around) global advances in science and medicine could grind to a halt.

    I’m not sure that will happen because a critical mass of Americans are creative capitalists and can find a way to buck that system… and/or still make a buck. What we may end up with, though, is more of a two-tiered system where the gap grows larger between the haves and the have nots. The ironic and unintended consequence of trying to make the system more accessible and just for all.

  2. DrRich on January 22nd, 2008 6:01 pm

    Val,

    I agree with you. The only way American innovation will be completely stopped would be forcefully (i.e., through laws, strictly enforced, preventing innovation, in the name of preventing the two-tiered result you predict). Unfortunately, I believe we are already seeing the pattern of how this might be accomplished.

    I am thinking, of course, of the response we are seeing to retainer practices. We are currently in the vilification phase, with politicians, populists, and even respected medical authorities pronouncing this unwanted innovation to be unethical, antithetical to the profession, and a harbinger of a two-tiered healthcare system. Early exploratory thrusts are being made to render these practices illegal (for instance, declaring them to be insurance schemes). We can expect the introduction of legislation to make them frankly illegal (in the furtherance of social justice) if they ever really begin to get off the ground - or if any of the currently proposed reforms promising universal healthcare is adopted.

    Adopting a Canadian-style healthcare system would necessitate some such forceful suppression of innovation - and individual autonomy. The question is, have Americans been sufficiently reduced to accept such a solution? I believe, not yet.

    None of the Wonkonians running for president believe we’re quite ready for it either. But they’re clearly herding us in that direction. (While I obviously don’t like the Wonkonians’ plan, at least they have one. The Gekkonians, in contrast, don’t even have a clue as to what to do with the healthcare mess, aside from uttering “free markets will fix it.”)

    Rich

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