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re: The Case for Medicare for All: Congress passes an inflation bill but is it enough?

Posted on 8/17/22 at 10:00 am to
Posted by Bard
Definitely NOT an admin
Member since Oct 2008
51822 posts
Posted on 8/17/22 at 10:00 am to
The reason this will never work is due to the most simply economic principle there is: The Law of Supply and Demand.

A person, an individual, can be smart; but people, as a group, are dumb.

If something like healthcare becomes free due to subsidizing from government, demand for it rises well beyond supply.

That looks like long wait times for surgeries in Ontario.

quote:

THE RAW NUMBERS IN FULL:
Number of patients who died while waiting for surgery:
2021-22: 1,417
2020-21: 1,096
2019-20: 986
2018-19: 1,039
2017-18: 1,138
2016-17: 1,045

Number of patients who died while waiting for a CT scan:
2021-22: 5,404
2020-21: 4,624
2019-20: 3,924
2018-19: 3,991
2017-18: 3,346
2016-17: 2,838

Number of patients who died while waiting for an MRI scan:
2021-22: 1,993
2020-21: 1,867
2019-20: 1,610
2018-19: 1,363
2017-18: 1,171
2016-17: 1,058


To put this in perspective, in the United States, 70 percent of patients are able to be seen by specialists less than four weeks after a referral. In Canada, less than 40 percent were seen inside of four weeks.

and long wait times in being admitted to the hospital from the ER


quote:

Wait times at several major Toronto hospitals are high — and trending upwards at some sites — as Ontario’s health-care system buckles under pressure.


July was marked across the province by emergency room closures driven by staff shortages — particularly among nurses.

The Ontario Nurses’ Association (ONA) recently said it was “outraged about the severe nursing and health-care staffing shortages that are plaguing hospitals.”

“The shortages are being reported in emergency departments, ICUs, medical units, surgery, and more.”

quote:


Wait times to be admitted from the emergency room at St. Josheph’s Health Centre and St. Michael’s Hospital — both run by Unity Health — were 25 hours in May and 23.3 hours in June.

In May, the average wait time to be admitted at St. Joseph’s was 32.9 hours.

The target time for hospitals to admit patients from the emergency room is eight hours, according to Health Quality Ontario, part of Public Health Ontario.


By contrast, the average wait time in the U.S. is around an hour and a half.

And, of course, ER wait times

quote:

The average waiting time for patients in Canadian EDs (Emergency Departments) ranges from three to four hours (Hildebrandt, 2014). More preposterously, this “average” accounts for only a minority of the population. When asked up front, most patients claimed that they’d had to wait for at least five hours before consulting a physician.


Meanwhile, the average wait time in the US is about 40 minutes.

Making the decision to move to a Medicare For All system is to advocate for overloading the system with demand, to the point where the Canadian wait times listed above look like a pleasant dream.
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