This is a huge problem in US health care financing: we have a fee-for-service model, no price transparency, and a consumer base (insulated from a lot of the costs of procedures by indirect payment through employer-provided insurance) conditioned to think procedures are inherently good. We waste billions annually on procedures that shouldn't be delivered at all.
I'm fond of pointing out the stat (true as of a year ago) that Massachusetts (I think it's MA?) has more MRI machines than the entire country of Canada.
I would posit this is more of a function of Canada having too few machines, with a median wait of 10 weeks for an MRI. [1]
To me it's crazy that people are waiting an average of nearly 3 months to get imaging. This is probably after waiting a couple months for their doctor's appointment to get the MRI scheduled in the first place.
One of the reasons I left Canada was it took me 6 months to get an MRI after a severe head injury in 2017. I have since gladly paid nearly 500k in taxes to other countries. Fuck Canada.
No, that's illegal. Thats what single payer means, only one payer is allowed [1].
Is meant to encourage rich people to support the health system since everyone's in it. But in reality the very wealthy go to Buffalo and immigrants visit their home countries.
It's also not lost on public policy experts that MAID has the potential of "solving" a lot of structural problems in Canadian health care and... long and behold MAID has expanded tremendously in ten years.
It's not meant to "encourage the rich to support" the health system, it's meant to avoid completely gutting the public health system by creating a parallel pay-for-play system where only the richest pay and subsequently suck up all of the already finite resources and talent.
Introducing parallel private health care is just accelerationism for privatization wonks who want to just see the death of universal healthcare by sucking it dry for those willing to pay.
There's no magic wand with the resources available for healthcare. Creating private systems so rich people can skip the line doesnt magically create that capability, it means taking that capability from someone who maybe needed it more in the public side of things.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
I'm fond of pointing out the stat (true as of a year ago) that Massachusetts (I think it's MA?) has more MRI machines than the entire country of Canada.
FlyingAvatar · · focus · HN ↗
To me it's crazy that people are waiting an average of nearly 3 months to get imaging. This is probably after waiting a couple months for their doctor's appointment to get the MRI scheduled in the first place.
[1] [<a href="https://getmrifast.ca/mri-wait-times" rel="nofollow">https://getmrifast.ca/mri-wait-times]
OsrsNeedsf2P · · focus · HN ↗
skylurk · · focus · HN ↗
excannuk · · focus · HN ↗
Is meant to encourage rich people to support the health system since everyone's in it. But in reality the very wealthy go to Buffalo and immigrants visit their home countries.
It's also not lost on public policy experts that MAID has the potential of "solving" a lot of structural problems in Canadian health care and... long and behold MAID has expanded tremendously in ten years.
[1] with some exceptions largely grandfathered in
gremlinunderway · · focus · HN ↗
Introducing parallel private health care is just accelerationism for privatization wonks who want to just see the death of universal healthcare by sucking it dry for those willing to pay.
There's no magic wand with the resources available for healthcare. Creating private systems so rich people can skip the line doesnt magically create that capability, it means taking that capability from someone who maybe needed it more in the public side of things.
excannuk · · focus · HN ↗
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