Health care

[james_davis_nicoll]

Readers may remember my voyage into the Stalinist Hell of Canadian Emergency Care.

Here's an account of the benefits offered by the American approach.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

From network: your first link, it is broked.

[elegantelbow.livejournal.com]

The link to the Stalinist Hell of Canadian Emergency Care is completely broken.

[vass]

Your first link seems to be broken.

[julesjones]

I think when I went to my local A&E in the Stalinist hell of the UK back in March because I had suddenly realised that I'd been walking around for a couple of weeks with symptoms that could have been deep vein thrombosis, I was seen after about an hour, certainly less than two. This after having been triaged to the lowest priority on the grounds that it almost certainly wasn't if I'd had it for a couple of weeks and I was in the right place if something did suddenly break loose, but it still needed to be checked just in case.

[nicosian.livejournal.com]

every stalinist hell of healthcare I've had to deal with in NL or canada has been overall good. One place was really abysmal once, but overall, we get treated and not shuffled off to wait.

The waits do vary by region, and by location within the city and day of the week,( ie, st pauls downtown: use monday to friday. Use VGH outside the downtown, on weekends, halifax infirmary, well, weekends? bring a GRRM book its the only trauma center for the maritimes.

But consistently, time and time again, I have much shorter waits across the board from GP to specialist and surgery and CT, than my us counterparts, who, with insurance, have to beg the company or fight post care for coverage that was in their plan, without, hope and pray and scrounge or go without.

I get that they have the most top of the line care, if you can afford the plan or access, but it seems to me at this point, most people just want Good competent care that won't put them in the poorhouse further. my hospital shows its age, and how! but I've always gotten excellent care despite it not looking like the hilton.

( ok there IS a chandelier and faux fireplace and wingback chairs in the day surg waiting lounge, which is cool).

My friend's a Locum GP in nunavut right now. her tales are pretty amazing, from there, and her work in Nepal and Vietnam too. They don't have the utter newest cutting edge, but what they have, seems to be better access at some points than low income/average americans.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

To get health care in an American hospital, say you have chest pains. You'll be in a bed with monitors hooked up to you within minutes.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I found walking into ER saying I took an antibiotic 30 minutes about and my head is swelling and bright red, "help!" got me through triage and full of epinephrine in a very short amount of time too.

The guy who worked for me who went down with something nasty in Vegas waited 5 hours....

[katfeete.livejournal.com]

Our healthcare system is utterly borked. No argument there. I will say, though, that of the three countries where I have lived with socialized medicine, the two with small populations (Canada and NZ) were lovely and the one with a large population (the UK) was pretty awful.

It makes me wary of adopting a purely "we should be like Canada! Only bigger!" position. And the temptation to say, "well, it could hardly be worse than what we have" is tempered by looking at my Thai friend's Cesarean scar and realizing that yes. Yes, it really could.

[actsofminortreason.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

I don't know if that's necessarily a good reason to suggest that Commonwealth-style UHC (I know there's not one single Commonwealth style of UHC, but work with me here) would work in the US; the United Kingdom's population is slightly less than twice Canada's (62 million vs. 34 million), while Canada's population is nearly ten times that of New Zealand. If population was a factor, shouldn't New Zealand's health care be accordingly leagues beyond Canada's?

[schizmatic.livejournal.com]

I've been to ER's in both Canada and the capitalist dystopia that is Texas, and there's really been almost no difference in wait times. And as Burke notes, his own health care back in PA is fine. (OTOH, there is something particularly special about telling a right-wing American that one's visit to a Canadian hospital went off without a hitch.)

One a more technocratic note, one of the things that ACA is meant to fix is the number of people using the ER as their primary care. There are provisions for more Medicaid clinics, and the idea of forcing employer coverage or subsidizing people's insurance is to clear out the number of people using the ER as their primary care.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

My HMO has two 24-hour Urgent Care clinics and a lot of things can be taken care of there. However, in 2009, two ERs weren't able to diagnose what turned out to be a very rare stroke. On the third night, when I was helicoptered from the smaller ER to the bigger one, I lost consciousness. Then they called in a neurologist (I'd been saying my head was exploding) who looked at all the images, knew what it was, and had them call a rheumatologist. It was an autoimmue stroke, which surprised me, too, when I woke up and became competent.

[traviswells.livejournal.com]

It's not always that bad. I showed up at an off-peak time and only had to wait 2-3 hours for my "being slightly stabbed" issue to be addressed.