|
Lying about healthcare, indeed, fear mongering about healthcare has ramped up as insurance companies attempt to keep their profits. Those profits are created by having the US spend 5% more of its economy on healthcare while receiving worse results than other western nations.. To insurance company executives, their profits, their executive salaries and their bonuses, are worth not just lying about, but killing for. Shona Holmes is the current poster girl for the lying liars slandering Canadian health care in an attempt to discredit reform. Ms. Holmes alleges she was horribly endangered by Canada's healthcare system: Both CNN and McConnell made a big deal out of Shona Holmes, an Ontario woman who claims she was forced by Ontario's health system to go to the United States for life-saving surgery for a brain tumour. She claims that in 2005 delays in access to treatment at home made it necessary to go to the Mayo Clinic in Arizona and pay $97,000 for her care.
Sounds bad, doesn't it? Except, of course, it's a lie: On the Mayo Clinic's website, Shona Holmes is a success story. But it's somewhat different story than all the headlines might have implied. Holmes' "brain tumour" was actually a Rathke's Cleft Cyst on her pituitary gland. To quote an American source, the John Wayne Cancer Center, "Rathke's Cleft Cysts are not true tumors or neoplasms; instead they are benign cysts." There's no doubt Holmes had a problem that needed treatment, and she was given appointments with the appropriate specialists in Ontario. She chose not to wait the few months to see them. But it's a far cry from the life-or-death picture portrayed by Holmes on the TV ads or by McConnell in his attacks.
In other words, she didn't want to wait behind people who needed care more than she did. Her condition was not immediately life threatening, and it was prioritized as such. Here's the deal: both the US and Canada prioritize patients, and both engage in health care rationing. In Canada health care is prioritized by how urgently a patient requires treatment. In America, to a much greater extent, access to medical care is prioritized by how much money the patient has. Someone in the US who was sicker than Ms. Holmes got pushed back because she was rich enough to pay $97,000. I should add that I have first hand experience with how the Canadian system prioritizes treatment. In 1993, at the age of 25, I became very ill with ulcerative colitis. I was hospitalized, and put on very expensive drugs. About a week after being hospitalized, on Sunday, the nurse watching me called in my doctors, because I was deteriorating fast—pain killers were no longer having any effect (i.e., high doses of morphine were no longer working), I wouldn't let anyone touch me and I was becoming delirious. At about midnight, they wheeled me into the operating chamber and took out my large intestine. While they were digging around, they found out I had appendicitis, and they took that out too. It would have burst within 2 days, and in my weakened state, it would have killed me. Unfortunately, one of the ways they treat ulcerative colitis is by using immune suppressing drugs. My immune system basically shut down, my liver almost shut down, and I spent almost another 3 months in the hospital, riddled with extremely painful and crippling infections and other problems. At one point I was on 9 drugs. One of them was an antibiotic so expensive that only a single doctor in the hospital could approve it. My gastroenterologist called it the equivalent of "pouring gold dust into your veins". I wasted away, and at one point was under 90 lbs. I often joke that I was old young: I've used a walker, crutches and cane. The ultimate point of this is simple: I got the care I needed, when I needed it, and I never paid a single red cent. Which is good, because I couldn't have afforded it. I was young, and had very little money. Care such as that, even back then, would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the US. What that would have meant is that my parents would have either had to pay, or I would have died. I would have urged them not to pay, since they were both old, and it would have wiped out their savings entirely and thrown them into bankruptcy, and frankly, I don't know how they could have supported themselves. My life, at that cost, would have had too high a price. I wonder how many Americans have had to make that calculation? But I survived, and neither I, nor my parents, was bankrupted. In similar circumstances I doubt all of those things would be true if for an American 25-year old trying to survive the same medical condition in America's health care industry. Ms. Holmes is the poster-woman for people who take 5% more out of GDP to run an inferior health care system which bankrupts people and which produces medical results that are no better, and in most cases worse, than every other Western country. I have had two American friends die in the last 5 years who would have survived if they had had fully covered health care.
|
