Everyone is talking about Health Care lately, with strong opinions on either side of the question about whether or not the United States should have universal health care. Like the rest of the developed world has. I know that the debate is very complex, and there is much that I do not understand.
I am old enough to remember when Canada made the switch to universal health care. Although Saskatchewan had been doing something about universal health care in their province since 1946, it wasn't until 1966 that the Canada-wide Medical Care Act came into effect. I was nine years old. I can remember that my parents and other relatives were concerned about the ramifications of this act, but it actually worked out to be just fine, and I know that my parents grew to love Alberta Health Care.
I think something that worked in Canada was that the Medical Care Act just required the provinces to do something about universal health care, but didn't dictate a whole program, allowing the provinces some latitude to create something that would work for them. So, if you move from province to province in Canada, the health care that is covered won't be exactly the same. And provinces can "opt out" of participating, too, but if they do, they relinquish federal funding. So they all have opted to participate. I think that maybe part of the problem in the US is that they are trying to create one big behemoth of a national system for this huge country, and maybe some of the decisions would be better made at the state level. Just my opinion.
About the time that the Medical Care Act was passed, I was sick. We lived in the country, and usually when we were sick, our first order of business was to be checked out by my Auntie Beulah, who lived a quarter of a mile away and who was a nurse. If she didn't know what to do for us, then we would call the doctor. Auntie Beulah thought that I had the measles, so my mom called our family doctor, Dr. Campbell. And he was on his way to Vauxhall, the community just up the highway, so he stopped in at our house on his way to the Vauxhall clinic to check me out, and sure enough, I had the measles. That was pretty ordinary. Dr. Campbell made house calls before the Medical Care Act, and he made house calls after, at least to our house, which was literally right on his way between hospitals. So nothing really changed.
When we lived in British Columbia in the late '80s and early '90s, house calls were normal, too. If our kids were spiking a fever at 9 pm, we just called the emergency number, and a visiting doctor would drop by. These were usually young people just out of medical school, but they could take temperatures and write prescriptions as well as any other doctor, and it sure beat bundling the sick kid into the car and driving to the hospital emergency room.
Now, when Kelli swallowed the pencil, I did drive her to the hospital emergency room. And they took us right in. There was no long wait, maybe a half hour. Same thing for when Nancy cut her chin open ice skating. And when David fell off the monkey bars onto his head at school, and I wasn't even the one who took him to the hospital. I just know they took him right in. And all of these were in the Greater Vancouver area, the Port Moody hospital to be exact. A large metropolitan area. No extreme wait like I hear doomsayers talking about.
Speaking of emergencies, when my dad had his stroke in 1978, out on the farm, the medical personnel in Taber wasted no time at all getting him not just to a hospital, but to Calgary for the superior care that he would get there. That is a lot of miles to cover, and I know that my parents were grateful for the excellent and prompt care given to my dad and covered by Alberta Health Care.
When we lived in Alberta post-1994, we had to make a few trips to the emergency room, usually because Josie fell on her head or broke her arm or something like that. There was never a long wait; I have had longer waits at InstaCare here in Utah than I ever had in an emergency room in Canada.
So...enough about Canada...now about the U.S. and why I think universal health care is needed here. Three points, basically:
1. Insurance companies haggling. I read a great book about eight years ago, written by the former editor of JAMA, a doctor himself: Severed Trust: Why American Medicine Hasn't Been Fixed -- And What We Can Do About It, by George D. Lundberg. So basically--if you are a person like my husband, and you have an old injury from a Worker's Comp Claim, and then you get a new injury--the new Worker's Comp says "It's an old injury" and they are probably right, because without the old injury, his shoulder wouldn't be in its weakened state. And the old Worker's Comp says "It's a new injury" and they are probably right, too, because it is new. And our family health insurance says, we don't want to pay because it should be paid by Worker's Comp. So, at this point, a few months down the road...no one has paid for it yet. And that is just dumb. If there was universal health care, it would just be paid for without all this stupid fighting and all this stupid red tape.
2. Which would you like--your house or your health? Nevermind that you have paid your mortgage on time for years, a really big health crisis can put you out of your home, cause bankruptcies and basically ruin your financial future. We were so fortunate to have good insurance that covered my husband's open-heart surgery. But one of our neighbors had to have a heart transplant, and just the medicine to keep his body from rejecting the new heart put them in the position of having to decide--my life or my house? Which one can I afford to keep? And it is all well and fine to say you would choose life, but families do need basic necessities like shelter, too. In Canada, for example, you can have both. And lest you think I only know of ONE family this happened to--I can also point you to the blog of the InMOMniac. Only in her case it was a gall bladder that got them thrown out in the street.
3. Kids just want to have fun--and in Canada, they could. You want to jump on the trampoline? So go jump. You want to jump off the bridge into the river? So jump. You want to go swimiming, hiking, river rafting on church activities? So do it. That was what our kids did in Canada. Then in the US -- PARANOIA. Everyone is so worried that kids will get hurt. Permission slips, activities that you can't even do because they are "dangerous." I don't even think it is about danger. It is about "Who will pay if someone gets hurt?" With universal health care, injuries just are treated when they happen, just like everything else is treated.
And just to end with, one more comment (paragraph?) about the whole "long waiting period" worry. "We would have to wait so long to see a specialist!" "By the time I would see a specialist, it would be too late!" I already wrote earlier that my experience and that of my family-- long waits were pretty much just NOT a part of our experience with socialized medicine. Well, my friend Krista's husband is waiting a month to see a specialist right here in the US, right now. Not because of socialized medicine, of course, but just because this kind of specialist is pretty rare and hard to get an appointment with. Really special specialists are just hard to get in to see, no matter who is paying the bill. We once needed that kind of specialist to see our daughter Nancy when she was little, because she couldn't learn to walk. For some reason, she couldn't put weight on one leg. Our family doctor in Raymond made an appointment with the specialist in Calgary, and we waited for a month or two. We never went to the specialist because Nancy...
nope! she didn't die! sorry to ruin the whole paragraph for you. You thought that socialized medicine failed. Actually, Nancy just was fine. She started to walk. She started to be able to stand on the formerly bad leg. And now, twenty-four years later, she is still fine. She walks and runs and swims and climbs pyramids just fine. I guess we could have kept that appointment with the specialist to find out why she COULDN'T use her leg before, but we just figured if we didn't go, someone else who had been waiting would get in sooner. Our family doctor was fine with that. We were fine with that. Nancy, are you fine with that?
Oh, that brings me to another paragraph. Because I could talk about how in this insurance-driven, make-as-much-money-out-of-this-patient medical system in the US, I think that often too much medical intervention takes place too quickly. But that is a blog for another day.
