Canadian Health Care

My experience with Canadian health care is certainly different from Adolf Blackburn’s (“Canadian System better than others” April 1, 2010). My experience suggests that the health care system there is a classic example of how badly governments manage enterprises of any kind, primarily because health decisions get all mixed up with other political issues. One minor example: a town on Vancouver Island lost its saw mill and, although all the hospitals have brilliantly equipped laundry facilities, the health ministry makes all of them send their laundry to this somewhat inaccessible west island town to provide work for its inhabitants. Political decisions like that are made all across Canada. Patient care takes second chair.
My husband was a scaler who suffered a logging accident in 1985, breaking his back. He lay on the floor of his house living on heavy doses of narcotics for 3 months before they could free up the proper surgeon to attend him. You might suggest that that was ancient history and that BC has cleaned up its act since then, but two years ago my best friend, an osteoporosis victim, snapped her back and lay on a gurney in the hallway of the emergency room of the Nanaimo, BC hospital for 8 days before she was attended to.

More recently my husband suffered some stomach discomfort. The doctor suspected cancer, but my husband would have had to wait 3 months for a colonoscopy and knew that he would probably have to wait another 3 months at least to schedule the operation if he did indeed have cancer. Because a local surgeon had had a cancellation and could do surgery immediately, he opted to trust the diagnosis and they cut out three feet of his colon. He died of complications. Had he had the colonoscopy, they would have discovered that he had a ½ inch tumor that was very slow growing. He could have lived to 90 before it would have caused him any problem. His real problem: Diverticulitis.

And the problem is wide spread across Canada. When there is no more room in critical care units in Canadian hospitals, really critically ill patents, those with severe brain injuries, for example, bleeding in the brain, are whisked to operating rooms in the US. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail about 150 patients a year are sent to hospitals in Washington, Oregon, Michigan, and New York. “Some have languished for as long as eight hours in Canadian emergency wards while health-care workers scrambled to locate care.” Recently there was no room in neonatal center anywhere in Canada for the mother of quadruplets.

On my last trip south at the end of May, I stayed over in Victora, BC, in order to catch an early boat. In my hotel room I watched a piece the evening news had video of a kid, head in a halo, heck in a brace, left leg bandaged and elevated. According to the reporter, he would have to wait 15 months for an MRI as everything in Canada was booked. I have since Googled, trying to find out how it was resolved, but I get no hits.

No one knows what the consequences of these delays are because no one has the right to review the evidence. I tried to get copies of my medical records as well as my husband’s, but was told that if my American doctors had any questions they could telephone. And the evidence is even more tightly held for patients treated out of country. When asked if any patients transported to the United States had died, Mr. Jensen, spokesman for the Ontario Health Ministry, said the “ministry does not specifically record the outcomes of health services provided out of country.” The consequences of critically ill patents waiting that long for care are obvious, aren’t they?
Canada is a very wealthy country of under 40 million, rich in natural recorces. Can you imagine the complications for a country of more nearly 400,000,000?”