For reasons I've never understood, more than a few Washingtonians look north for health care inspiration. Froma Harrop, a syndicated columnist carried by the Seattle Times, provides a timely reminder of why that's a bad idea. Today's column is a must read.
Many of my left-leaning friends ... worship at the altar of "Canadian-style single-payer." (I once belonged to the cult.) That's too bad because there are better universal-access systems to parade through a PowerPoint presentation. A health-care system that tolerates an average 10-week wait to use an MRI machine is not to be copied.
The Fraser Institute in Vancouver recently compared Canada's health-care system to about two dozen others — and found Canada's highly wanting. Yes, the Fraser Institute has an agenda: It promotes privatization and in the Canadian context is economically conservative. But its analyses of Canadian health care are sophisticated and honest. Unlike many conservatives in this country, Fraser starts with the premise that universal coverage would be a basic requirement of a modern health-care system.
Here's the Fraser Institute study.
Harrop sums it up in several sharp paragraphs.
First off, don't go the single-payer route, where the government picks up all the bills. Americans often confuse "universal coverage" with "single-payer." The great majority of universal health-care systems are not single-payer. They allow private coverage into the mix.
Why is that better? For one thing, patients who use private medical services reduce the load on the public system. ...
Private competition also helps assure quality. Without an alternative, the monopolistic system becomes an "uncontested standard" that may be inferior.
...
Canada and a few others take pride in not asking patients to pay a cent of their health-care costs, but it's a mistake not to charge user fees. ...
Canada's medical free ride leads to overuse of services. And that may add to the long waiting times — for which Canada is the worst, except for Britain's dismal National Health Service.
It's a good column. She goes a lot further than I would in encouraging a look at other models for universal coverage. I continue to believe we have a system that works extremely well for most Americans. We don't need to scrap it - better to make incremental improvements that allow more people to find affordable comprehensive coverage.
