Another misguided effort: Blogger dismiss Canadian health care system

I just don’t know why they keep on doing this, but one of those respected blogger: Mark Perry here decided to go after the Canadian healthcare system by saying that it took some guy six years to find a family doctor.  First off, he didn’t look very hard because there are many “family doctor like” options in Canada.  

Once again the idea was to show how superior the American model was to Canada’s because some guy could not find a family doctor.  Now as a Canadian the last thing I want to discuss is the relative of the two systems, we got ours and we don’t care about yours.  

What was fascinating were the comments to the blog.  All kind of justification why “Merica” is so great, how medical tourists are coming in drove (not true) you want medical tourists go to Mexico… I suspect that this behavior comes from “America is #1” view of the world.  I cannot blame them for this reaction.  It must be infuriating when virtually all metrics show that America’s health care system is inferior to Canada (also France, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy) or that its education system is terrible ranked 39^th in the world.  

BTW in neither of these sectors is money the problem.  America spends more than anyone in the world on healthcare and almost more than anyone on education.  Money is not the issue; something else is at work, an inability by government to take on vested interest – pharma, doctors, teachers union! to name but the most obvious players.  So at the end we are back at Government’s failure to legislate for the good of the country.  Personally I blame the lobby system that has for years controlled America’s legislative process.  The reason is money, each politician in Congress is responsible for raising all his own campaign financing, and running in America is expensive. Politicians are directly influenced by their biggest donors – what other reason is there for Wall Street to get away with “murder” after the absolute failure of the banking system in America?

Now I don’t want to imply that Canada’s health system is the best in the world, in fact I suspect that Germany’s and France both have better outcome than does Canada (with a mix of private and public money), but America’s inability to even discuss what needs to be done with its runaway health care cost is puzzeling..