Canadian Wait Times
August 10, 2009
– Comments (15)
In Canada there is a company called Timely Medical Alternatives. They supply the service of delivering Canadians, who are dissapointed with the time they wait for medical treatment to a hospital in the USA.
In order to get their business off the ground they petitioned Gov't run healthcare to pass a law that requires Canadian single payer system to deliver every covered medical procedure within one year.
In Canada if you are put on a waitlist and the expected wait exceeds one year you can go to any hospital in the world and get that treatment and Canadian Single Payer will cover the cost.
Every Canadian who waits more than one year does so by choice. Not financial neccessity.
In 4 years TMA served less than twenty thousand customers, possibly less than ten. That is five thousand Canadians each year that were so unhappy with waiting that they actually did something about it at their Governments expense.
In America, we might not have coverage at the nearest hospital to our accident location if it is not "in network" because our system of paying for healthcare is better. With this method we could incure bills that could easily be double our health insurance payments. One solution is to pay more to our insurer than we already do, to be covered at any hospital without the unknown restrictions of our chosen plan. Of course this means increasing what we pay, which is already 50% more than Canadians pay.
Regardless of the checking we need to do to go to the nearest hospital lets see how many Canadians took advantage of TMA's service. At the larger amount of twenty thousand Canadians over 4 years, it comes to five thousand each year or .015% of their thirty million population each year.
In the USA our private insurance companies refuse coverage to .05% of their paying customers each year. The CEO of United Healthcare said so. If their customer base equaled the Canadian population of thirty million, that would be one million, five hundred thousand refusals annually.
So all by themselves, they refuse coverage to three hundred times more paying customers than there are Canadians desperate not to wait. And we pay more, which proves the way we pay for healthcare is better.
Will your private health inusrer cover you? Canda's public system will cover them. And their wait times are less than forever, and less than waiting for some charitable instution to come along.
There are wait times in the USA too. We wait six months without coverage when we get a new employer. We wait while we check with our private insurer to see if we are covered.
In Canada less than five thousand people waited so long they took advantage of TMA's service.
In the rural American town of Wise, West Virginia, five thousand got on a line after waiting a year for healthcare to come back to their town. And some had private insurance.
Remote Area Medical will be going to Inglewood Ca next, and then Utah, Tennessee and Kentucky, because our system of paying for healthcare is better than Canada's.
Perhaps you will be laid off in time for their visit to your town.
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