And Still #CanadaWAITS
There are still rumblings up north about the wait times for patients. The hashtag in this blog’s title is the new Twitter theme in Canada. This article in the Huffington Post (Canada edition) talked about more stories being offered by patients:
Patients and physicians started tweeting out stories of ridiculously long wait times. Do you have lung trouble? You could wait a year to see a respirologist. Have a child with autism? Eight months seems to be the minimum to get services. Live in Nothern Ontario? One community has been waiting 12 YEARS for a new family doctor to arrive, another tweet suggests.
Yup, TWELVE YEARS FOR A FAMILY DOC!!
The politicians there are ignoring this crisis so the people are trying to get social media involved. The article goes on to explain the problems in more detail and I recommend you read that. They conclude that “we deserve much better healthcare that we are getting”.
Interestingly, I searched my own Authentic Medicine blog and found this entry I wrote FOUR YEARS AGO and it was titled…….you guessed……Canada Waits! It sure seems that I deserve credit for this hashtag! I won’t get it but I have the proof and I am proud that we are usually years ahead of others in pointing out the bullsh%t in healthcare.
The only reason I care about Canada’s politics or healthcare system is to point out how they don’t have it so great either. Their cost is very high, though not as high as ours, but at least our patients can be seen in a much more reasonable time period. Their government-run system is not the fix for us but neither is our insurance controlled monopoly that we have now. We need a true free market system. One where a direct primary care doctor is paired with a cheap high deductible plan or health sharing plan. This will allow patients to shop for lower prices and attract an Amazon or Amazon “lookalike”, which will make things easier, cheaper and more transparent.
My dentist found a lump and within a week I had an FNA, and within 3 weeks I’ll have had a CT, US, and US guided biopsy. Not sure if I’m getting the priority cancer patients get, because pleomorphic adenomas in the parotid are benign but not very. Canada, not bad. It often depends what you’re waiting for. Main problem is shortage of long term care beds, because they’re heavily subsidized, which backs up the inpatients which back up the ERs, as well as ORs for orthos, and payment for comprehensive continuous care not being subsidized by those who benefit from the tests we order. All quite fixable if we spent what the States spends. Oh and the parking fees for all these tests are pretty bad. And we spend to much on death denying stuff and bureaucrats and silo programs.
If you still like government -run health systems check out the NHS in the UK where hospitals have been ordered to stop all routine surgeries (cataracts, knee & hip replacements, etc.) for at least one month because hospital beds are full of patients with flu’.