Doing Some Health Care Math

By BJ

A couple of weeks ago, Fester posted a story about a 7-month old infant being denied health insurance. In the comments, I remarked how glad I was that my great-grandparents had the good sense to move north into Canada. The kind of situation described in Fester's post is practically incomprehensible to most Canadians, (and pretty much every other part of the developed world). On Sunday, my sister got me to watch Michael Moore's Sicko, (I intended to watch it eventually, honest!), and again I was struck by the fact that for the most part, Canadians have lost the ability to truly appreciate what a private, profit-driven health care system really means.

The problem with this is that there are those looking to use that ignorance to remake the Canadian health care industry to their own advantage. There is, after all, very good money to be made in the health care industry. People will pay a great deal not to die or live in pain.

The incoming head of the Canadian Medical Association is advocating a mixed public-private health system for Canadians. Over at The Galloping Beaver, Noni Mausa gets out a pencil and rips through Dr. Ouellet's argument that opening some private clinics will in any way help Canadians, using the example of knee surgeries. The post needs to be read in full, but I'll give you the conclusion:

By reducing the load on the public system by 100 knees, we have increased the public users' waiting time by three months, and increased the overall cost for all 1,000 knees to $3 million from the original $2 million, of which $600,000 goes to �profit�, i.e., is wasted, at least from the surgeon�s and patient�s point of view.

So who wins in the for-profit scenario? Well, for a modest cost to Canadians of an extra $1 million, Health Canada can cut $200,000 from their knee budget. Profiteers can make a profit previously not available to them. Some surgeons, perhaps the cream of the surgeons, can benefit from smaller workloads and/or larger incomes. Some patients can get immediate care without the bother of driving to the Mayo Clinic or flying to India.

Who loses? People who cannot afford the private costs get to wait even longer than they are now. In addition, we would expect to see the overall pressure on the public system to be slightly increased because although the private clinics will be happy to lick off the cupcake frosting of knee surgery profits, I doubt they will be interested in scraping out the burnt muffin pan of follow-up care.

Doing the math always helps, and it certainly shows just how disingenuous the greedy can be when pushing their agendas.