Dear Judy,
I’m reading what you’ve written on health care reform — cannot believe it. So let me get this straight. You are FOR spending $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years to insure everybody?? This is what you want for your children and grandchildren?
I have friends from Canada who come here for treatment they can’t get at home! The US has the 3rd highest survival rate for cancer (say goodbye to THAT if they ram through health care reform…)
Over in Great Britain it’s delay and dilution. They delay your diagnosis and dilute your treatment (translation: You DIE)
There’s more. You think ERs are bad now? The average wait in an emergency room in Canada is five days!
Do you see lines on TV for the H1N1 flu vaccine?
The current standard of care for cancer in this country will be labeled a “treatment not proven effective” after we socialize medicine here.
Judy I am so disappointed in you!
Liz
Dear Liz,
Whew — that’s a lot of disappointment and more than enough to discuss.
First things first: there’s been a lot of myths perpetrated about Canadian health care, and I guess the first one to bust is the 5-days-in-the-emergency room: it’s simply untrue. No one waits 5 days in emergency rooms. The standard of care in Canada is very high — if it weren’t we’d see a stampede of sick refugees: the speed of care in Canada depends (as it does in emergency rooms in the US) on where you live.
Live in a high-crime urban area? You’re likely to wait a long while in your local hospital’s emergency room. Live in an upscale suburban or rural area? You’ll probably be seen to pretty quickly.
Now let’s get down to what’s going on in the US without universal health care coverage:
How your disease gets treated depends entirely on your insurance company — if you’re lucky enough and wealthy enough to pay the large premiums demanded. Or if you have a boss with deep pockets who helps with the cost.
Your insurance company has the perfect right to reject you or anyone in your family, children included, because of some “pre-existing condition.”
After years of receiving large premiums, your insurance company may quite abruptly decide to drop you or your family because of some late-date disenchantment with whatever ailment one of you may have contracted. Diabetes, cancer, broken bones, heart ailments – you name it — you could find yourself without coverage from one minute to the next. The company may not do this legally of course: but it’s being done more and more under various pretexts.
Your employer could decide to stop helping you defray the cost of insurance. Or go out of business. It’s happening today. It can happen tomorrow.
Oh — and by the way: the H1N1 lines which we don’t see on TV? That’s because most of us are still waiting to be told the vaccine is actually available! Unless of course you work for Goldman Sachs.
That’s the situation we face right now without universal health coverage.
But I agree with you in one important way: we have to make sure whatever comes next isn’t worse than what we have now.
