The devil in Health Care: Free: Anything is better than nothing ?

Free: Anything is better than nothing ?

Our health care systems have become nothing more than 'parasites'
feeding off disease, and not promoting good health; we can change that.

Duncan Patton...

Our health care system, like a good deal of our civil servic, has
been starved and misdirected by recent political fashion into a
kind of torpor that decreases it's visible value. Health care
is not free and neither is anything else, but we get better for
less than most places, and it hardly warrants calling it "parasitic".

Having read Dr. Brian Days interview in Macleans, I am certainly glad
that we are finally comparing Canada's Health Care system to France.
France was ranked 1st in the world, and Italy 2nd by Wyatt/Watson 2000
report. The important details that I believe are key to the two
systems is that in France, patients must pay for doctor visist and
treatments out of pocket and then are re-inbursed by the government.
This detail sets into motion a continual audit of services and billings
by the patient. Italy's system pays its family doctors a flat fee per
patient per year, a salary component that rewards effective and
efficient treatments.

A key problem with the health care system in Canada is the perceived
belief that it is free, gives one the belief that how can one complain,
even though you are put into waiting lines, referral lines, treatment
lines, and ineffective and inefficient treatments, that cost the
government billions.

The Toronto Star did a investigation of the College of Physicians and
Surgeons years ago and found that most all complaints were "pushed
under the carpet". However more importantly, the College sent very few
of the complaints they received to 'quality control' for review and
recommendations; this is the greatest error on their part.

Mr. Romanow missed one important detail our system is not a true public
system....merely publically funded....with most all services provided
by private corporations including most doctors who are in business to
maximize their revenue, by a system that rewards referrals, repeat
visits, testing, treating symptoms, and restricting the supply of
doctors; the real problem is a payment system that penalizes good
doctoring and quality time.

It is time the government established a quality control unit that is
independant of all possible conflicts of interest, and whose purpose is
to make the health care system more effective, efficient, to minimize
health costs and re-route these financial resources into another
program non-competing government programs, say education bursaries.

Caesar J. B. Squitti

Here is a link to some information dealing with a probable cause for a
variety of diseases from depression, MS, cancer, mental illness, that
is easy to treat, but overlooked because it is too simple, in a system
that rewards volume...