The Government Calls it ‘Elective Surgery’

This shouldn’t be news to anyone here, but nationalized health care isn’t the medical utopia you often hear its advocates proclaim, and it’s always worth revisiting some of the health-care stories that come out of those systems. Ladies and gents, I give you John Stossel:

Most Canadians like their free health care, but Canadian doctors tell us the system is cracking. More than a million Canadians cannot find a regular family doctor. One town holds a lottery. Once a week the town clerk gets a box out of the closet. Everyone who wants to have a family doctor puts his or her name in it. The clerk pulls out one slip to determine the winner. Others in town have to wait.

It’s driven some Canadians to private for-profit clinics. A new one opens somewhere in Canada almost every week. Although it’s not clear that such private clinics are legal, one is run by the president of the Canadian Medical Association, Dr. Brian Day, because under government care, he says, “We found ourselves in a situation where we were seeing sick patients and weren’t being allowed to treat them. That was something that we couldn’t tolerate.”

Canadians stuck on waiting lists often pay “medical travel agents” to get to America for treatment. Shirley Healey had a blocked artery that kept her from digesting food. So she hired a middleman to help her get to a hospital in Washington state.

“The doctor said that I would have only had a very few weeks to live,” Healey said.

Yet the Canadian government calls her surgery “elective.”

“The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live,” she said.

No health care system will be perfect. A market-based system will undoubtedly result in unfortunate stories as well. As with all commodities, there’s a supply and demand issue. In nationalized systems, care gets rationed by the government, a centralized body that decides who gets what care when. Market-based systems, with their individual, decentralized approach result in a more efficient allocating of medical resources–and thus, better care for those in need. No system, though, will ever deliver perfect medical care all the time, or even close; the question is simply what the best way is to manage the flaws inherent in the system.