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US healthcare vs. Canadian single payer: Doctors Give Their View – Cortlandt Forum

30 September 2009 3,324 views 61 Comments

US healthcare vs. Canadian single payer: Doctors Give Their View – Cortlandt Forum

An article from some doctors who have worked on both sides of the border. They have no difficulty discussing problems with Canadian healthcare, such as some procedures that are less readily available than in the U.S. and some of the delays in some specialized services. But, overall, the lower systemic costs, the minimization of bureaucracy through streamlined billing, and the accessibility of all Canadians regardless of ability to pay are named as positives of the Canadian system. This is a good read for some thoughtful analysis of Doctors…

Overall, they indicated that although the Canadian model is not perfect, it is a good system in which patients generally receive timely and competent care and physicians have fewer practice hassles compared with their American counterparts.

“I think universal coverage works,” said Hesam Farivar-Mohseni, MD, of Ontario’s Brampton Civic Hospital, a Canadian citizen who spent nearly 11 years in the United States. Following a two-year fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, he spent time working in New York and at West Virginia University Hospitals in Morgantown.

“Patients in Canada are not being denied anything,” he said. “People in the U.S. think that patients here [in Canada] are waiting outside the hospital, they have no access to the hospital, and they’re dying because this is government-sponsored health care. That’s not true at all. If there’s a serious disease the family doctor calls a specialist and the person is seen right away. If a patient has a kidney stone or something similar, they may wait for eight hours, but that’s true in the States, too. Such patients don’t get seen in the emergency room there right away, either.

read the rest of the article…

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