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Good thing PEI has SEVEN hospitals for 145K people. Obviously helping them a lot.
Delay of service or Denial of service, whats the difference.
Our “betters’ will continue to maintain exclusive treatment centres, while pillaging the funds needed for the public system.
Take BC, where you wait nearly half a year to finally get treated by a specialist.
That is what we get for ** $17 billion ** in health care tax dollars per year.
No surprise. Just got called by ENT specialist for appointment in Feb. 2014. This is for a second opinion as the first ENT has the personality of a fencepost, with the curiosity of a doormat. Oh, and good luck finding a GP. Emerg. is the new family practice. Ain’t socialized medicine grand?
I notice that orthopaedic surgery has the second longest wait times. This April I mentioned to my GP that my shoulder is bothering me 10 years post surgery (which was 32 months after the accident). I was called in late June to tell me I have an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon on Nov 4th 2014. That appointment has since been pushed back to Nov 18th 2014.
Whatever you do, don’t hurt your knees or your hip, you’ll be on crutches for a long time while waiting for a replacement.
The health care culture is no longer one of compassion. It’s all business. Whether anyone is treated or not or lives or dies is irrelevant. Waiting times are a device to extract more cash for the system. Several years ago Alberta increased health care spending by 13 % and the wait times got worse. It is legal organized crime.
Emergency room waits are a political statement. Our local hospital seems to have a 2 hour mandatory wait time with the doctor diddly-boppin around avoiding patients. You phone the clinic for an appointment and are told it will be 2 weeks and are told to go to the hospital. You go to the hospital, wait 2 hours and get told by a bovine hag nurse that you should have went to the clinic.
Recently I had an inch long slice in my hand that was bleeding quite well given anti-coagulants and all. After 2 hours, about 1 1/2 hours after being told the doctor was in and should see me soon (the nurse screwed up) , the bleeding had stopped and I went home and put a big band-aid on it. The guy with the concussion was there long before me and probably left long after me. And no, there was no emergency. I was in the emergency treatment room and would have noticed.
Great – thanks for posting that graph – now we’ll have to deal with the bragging Ontario Lieberals in 3…2…1…
Possibly related ….
Legal Insurrection … Death Panels Eh!
Are you a drain on the health care system’s resources?
You could be arbitrarily removed.
Delay and denial of care is the first step. Then comes the end of life decisions. First a non-responsive patient gets unplugged. Then a hard to treat patient gets cut off.
Right now thousands of cancer patients are put into a time wasting loop of tests and evaluations that are going to allow their disease to progress to the point of no return. Many are told that they have untreatable conditions even while treatments do exist and are available.
WE are on the slippery slope already.
RN,
There is no way that those Ontario numbers are correct, absolutely no way…..
I wonder if the Fraser Institute got the Ontario numbers from the Ontario government. They wouldn’t lie, would they?
It’s possible to get people in faster, but it requires work on the part of the GP. I prioritize all of my patients that need specialist referrals and, if I think they need to be seen, I’ll call up the specialist and talk to them. That gets results. Surgeons are hard to get hold of and so I’ll keep a list of people I need seen in my head and talk to surgeons between cases on the surgical wards. Amazing how fast one can get a patient in when I look at a patients CT with a neurosurgeon and they are amazed that the person is still walking with that degree of spinal stenosis. In that case, 2 weeks later the patient had surgery whereas the wait time he was quoted was 6-12 months for the initial neurosurgical appointment.
A lot of GP’s are lazy and just send a short note to the specialist which gives the specialist absolutely no indication of how serious the situation is. Recently had a patient with rectal bleeding which I was worried about, she saw a surgeon for a colonoscopy within a month, which showed a large sigmoid cancer and 2 days later she had a laparoscopic resection of the cancer.
It helps to be in a small center as I know all of the specialists personally and they’re happy to have additional information about whether a case really is urgent or whether it’s a case of an anxious patient wanting a third opinion even though 2 previous specialists have been in agreement. It also helps if one manages ones own patients in hospital as the last thing surgeons want to do is to deal with all of the other medical problems a patient has. Increasingly, GP’s are not getting hospital privileges and patients are being managed by hospitalists who don’t know the patient as well as their GP.
Elective surgery is still problematic in that there just isn’t enough OR time and, for joint replacement surgery, there need to be private hospitals where people are allowed to determine whether they want to be immobile and in severe pain with an arthritic hip, or whether they’d rather spend their own money for a hip replacement to give them a higher quality of life for the few years they have left. Since I’ve left Vancouver, I find that the wait times for my patients are considerably less than the numbers given, but then I spend a lot of time talking to the specialists. Once they know that you’re appropriately prioritizing patients, they can get a sick patient in the next day. In Vancouver, such people would be waiting for months because there wasn’t the same personal interaction with specialists.
Scar, I suspect that you hit the nail on the head, these are McGuilty’s people supplying the data. I know people who have waited three years for knee replacement surgery and I know a woman who has a splintered hip joint due to an auto accident who waited 9 months to see a surgeon and is on an 8 month wait for surgery. Meantime she can barely walk with crutches and can’t work, even sitting on a stool at the cash register is too painful.
There is no positive net present value in a non-suffering patient under any health care system that has little or no potential for profit generation for the providers of the service. Third party (particularly single payer) pay systems squeeze out much of the profit potential and or ration the resources and effort. IOW, if someone can make a buck treating someone, it happens in a timely fashion based on supply and demand, whereas under a monopoly rationed system, the patient suffers despite availability of resources. The common expectation is blind faith in the compassion of nameless cost-controlling bureaucrats and the politicized union work environment due to the resulting monopoly delivery leviathan.
Loki, what you’re saying is that it helps if your family doctor:
A)has a clue,
B)gives a sh1t, and
C)isn’t buried under three people’s workload.
Getting a positive on A,B and C all at the same time is a more and more rare situation these days. I find it helps to have family in the biz. At some point it will become normal and system wide for doctors to accept “gratuities” shall we say, to get “friends” to the front of the line. Those “gratuities” will end up being most of a doctor’s income, as the government inevitably cuts them back over and over.
I hasten to add that this is not currently the case. I merely contend that it will inevitably come to pass no matter what anyone wants and no matter what any politician says. You cut back pay and services far enough, corruption will set in. Corruption is what happens when governments would normally go bankrupt if they were private companies. As the day follows the night, it will happen.
Compassion of nameless bureaucrats.. Closely followed by the ethics, honesty and competence of these same..
Not.
Everyone knows how to make the system work but no-one has the guts to try it. Hospitals should be separately managed and be paid fees for services. Then they would compete for your business to build their individual empires. Block funding of hospitals makes the patient the enemy that wastes resources. Fees for services makes the patient a revenue source. Too simple. And throw private surgical clinics into the mix.
Yup. That sucks. Let’s fix it. But know this… it will cost money. You can’t get something for nothing. Once again for those who don’t realize it… here’s a simple to understand infographic which depicts healthcare spending around the world.
http://i.bnet.com/blogs/visual_economics_worldhealthcare.jpg?tag=content;siu-container
See how much the Americans spend? It’s a lot more than we do. I bet we could eliminate those wait times if we invested more in the system, and STILL spend less than the Americans do by a long shot. I won’t hold my breath for you guys to grasp this concept though. You’re such ideologues, you’ll insist that the Market will not only deliver superior service, it will do so at a better price, even though it very clearly cannot.
Any statistic provided by the government is probably a lie. When I worked for a government service, we regularly lied, and the best of the liars got promoted. That was a fact of life.
The “Surgery Wait List” is lying honed to a very keen edge. My GP referred me to the specialist In April. The specialist saw me in June, 8 weeks later. Surgery was indicated. I heard nothing, until I called in September, and was advised there had been a spate of “emergencies” and a new timetable was in preparation. I have now waited in considerable discomfort for 26 weeks, and still do not have a surgery date. But the Official Government Ministry of Health website proudly shows that 90% of cases similar to mine are treated within 7 weeks, and that there are fewer than five cases waiting.
Lies.
Just to make you Canadians envious. I live near Boise, not exactly a major medical center. I was struck down by a kidney stone. The E/R told me to call a urologist the next day — and the day after the E/R visit, I was in to the urologist’s office. The day after the office visit with the urologist, I was in the hospital for outpatient surgery. The urologist played Space Invaders inside my kidney, blasting the stone apart with a laser.
Both the E/R and the anesthesiologist who knocked me out for surgery said that i had a weird noise from my heart. Because I was going on vacation, I had to wait two weeks to see the cardiologist. (If not for the vacation, I might have gone in the following week.)
The cardiologist did an echocardiogram a few days after the office visit. Two weeks after that, I was in the hospital for an angiogram, on a Wednesday. They concluded that I needed my aortic valve replaced, sometime in the next few months, for fear of doing permanent damage to my heart. The cardiologist walked out into the hall, grabbed the heart surgeon, and we scheduled my heart surgery for Friday. Monday I was out of the hospital (and trust me, aortic valve replacement is not something that you will ever look forward to).
Rationing health care by delay is a bad idea — a sign that liberals care more about money than people.
The only reason America’s healthcare system is so costly is because of various government subsidies. The government pays for over half of health spending and does so in a bizarre manner that inflates cost. That, and bysantine laws at all levels ex Virginia tried to stop a guy from selling CT scans because it would hurt his competition. I’d explain further but it would be a waste to try and educate someone so ignorant that they think that America’s healthcare system is ‘free market’.
I wonder if QC’s superior wait times has anything to do with the Chauolli decision? I hope so and I hope that decision is replicated in Alberta (there’s a court case).
“…I bet we could eliminate those wait times if we invested more in the system, and STILL spend less than the Americans do by a long shot…”
Sure. I betcha you’re right!
But things like wind turbines, solar panels, and gas plant cancellations just keep eating up all that investment money.
I was diagnosed with spinal stenosis over a year ago after waiting almost 10 years for someone to tell me what the hell was wrong with my neck. After the diagnosis, I was told I needed to see a specialist for a second opinion…..but that appointment will be in Toronto but I’ll have to wait another 18 months. After that, I will need to see a neurosurgeon, and the wait is about the same. Finally, I was told that due to the wait times, the surgery I require could be as much as 4 – 6 YEARS down the road, but even then no guarantees. Apparently, the situation is so bad, that surgeons are only seeing folks who have lost motor control, or who have lost control of their bladder or bowels.
In effect….Canada’s health care “Is there for you…but not until you are disabled, or shitting your pants”
Yeah….and Obama wants to foist that on Americans.
Canada’s health care is a fuc>ing joke.
The two most common fixes I hear for the cost of private medical care in the US are tort reform (capping damages for “pain and suffering” reduces the cost of malpractice insurance and de-incentivizes costly diagnostic test just to CYA) and allowing insurance companies to compete across state liens, which would eliminate the oligopoly currently in place in most states.
Texas instated tort reform for malpractice by capping pain and suffering damages at $250,000, and not only did the cost of medical care drop by almost 25% but GPs started moving out to smaller underserved areas because they could afford to self-insure rather than needing to work out of a large hospital with group liability coverage.
I have heard anecdotal reports that the hospital charges insurance companies and HMOs significantly more than they do a private individual because they’re padding the bill (and the subsidies mean the HMOs can absorb it).
I have mixed feeling regarding tort reform. 250,000 is an arbitrary number-what if what the doctor did warrants more damage than that? There is a right way and a wrong way to tort reform. America badly needs ‘loser pays’ legislation which is a huge advantage for Canada.
Good news for you: America’s Indians may have casinos but Canada’s have casinos AND private medicine!
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/09/19/b-c-first-nation-poised-to-build-luxury-private-hospital-to-serve-medical-tourists-and-wealthy-canadians/
Contra popular belief, private medicine isn’t banned federally-the CHA states the feds may stop transfer funds if a province requires people to pay. Indian reserves are not in this jurisdiction! Indian reserves are indispensable tools for freedom.
I would think Ontario probably stops counting people who give up waiting. My old football knee injury
causes me chronic pain, but since I can still walk, they won’t touch it. I finally got
an MRI after waiting a year, but the surgeon basically said if you’re still mobile, too bad.
The intersection of statism through “public” healthcare and “battling climate change” interests me.
On one hand statists want to extinguish a existing market for one product (private health care), while creating a market for a non-existent product (carbon pricing).
It’s probably pure coincidence that both ideas coincide with their political thought and growth of their bank account – good thing they’re working for us, eh?
Bill padding, as you describe it, is actually cost-shifting. U.S. law requires all hospitals that have received federal funds (which is essentially all hospitals) to provide emergency care without question and without a guarantee of payment. The result is that people without health insurance often delay medical care until the problem is truly an emergency, or at least they perceive it as such. Hospitals have to pick up this cost, and they do it by charging paying patients (usually those with insurance) a lot more money.
On the other hand, large insurers are quite capable of negotiating fees down dramatically because of the scale. My nominal fees for this aortic valve replacement were about $130,000. But because Blue Cross of Idaho has a contractural arrangement, the actual costs were a fraction of that (and probably about what it would have cost if I had written them a check up front).
Yes, the anticompetitive aspects of both state and federal law are a big factor. Idaho prohibits insurance companies from offering policies here unless they have offices… which effectively creates a limited competition situation. In addition, federal law has some odd rules that effectively prohibit non-profits and trade associations from operating interstate insurance pools, driving up health insurance costs by reducing competition. Also, this means that small businesses are limited to the size of pools that they and other small businesses can form within each state. The Bush Administration tried to get Congress to fix this problem in 2005, but the unholy combination of health insurers (who do not want competition across state lines), big businesses (who do not want small business to be able to offer affordable health insurance to employees), and labor unions (who have their own interstate insurance pools) killed this proposal in Congress.
Another flaw of U.S. law that makes health insurance hard to get is that federal regulation requires an employer to pay at least half the cost of health insurance for employees. (In some states, it is even higher.) What this practically means is that a small, not terribly profitable business that would like to offer health insurance to its employees either has to pay most of the cost, or offer nothing at all. Many employees who might be able to justify coughing up $150 a month for a high deductible health insurance plan are thus completely prohibited from participating in a plan through their employer. An employer with 15 employees would be able to get a better rate than each employee individually buying health insurance. You could argue that the federal government is intentionally preventing small businesses and low profit businesses from offering health insurance.
One more irritation: U.S. income tax law is set up to punish employees who work for small businesses. A business can deduct the cost of employee and dependent health insurance from their gross profit, thus subsidizing coverage through group health insurance plans. A person who is self-employed is allowed to deduct the costs of employee and dependent health insurance from the profits of the business, as long as it does cause the business to produce a net loss. (Example: If your sole proprietorship business has a net profit of $60,000, and your health insurance premiums are $25,000 a year, no problem. If your net profit is $24,000 a year, and your premiums exceed that profit, you can’t deduct it from the gross profit of the business.)
The net effect is to penalize those who are self-employed in low profit businesses, and those who are employees of businesses that have no health insurance.
Clayton – it is probably good they found out about your heart condition. But, kidney stones often respond to an at-home method. I had a kidney stone several month ago; it was confirmed by a very through and long physical exam at a local walk-in clinic.
A friend told me that a friend of her’s got over a KS using Apple Cider Vinegar – ACV. It seems to dissolve the kidney stones.
I checked the internet for dosages and settled for one tablespoon of ACV with one tablespoon of water.
I could not sleep the night before because of the pain; which prescription pain killers did nothing for. I took my first shot at 7:30 pm; around 10:30 pm, I noticed the pain was reduced. So, I took another shot, I could sleep that night, and the next morning I had no pain – NONE. I was lucky to have some ACV at home that night. I now make sure that I always have ACV on hand. Apparently once you get an KS, you are likely to get them again. I also take a few shots each week.
‘I bet we could eliminate those wait times if we invested more in the system…’
Always just need that little bit more to fix the ‘system’, eh? Never heard that one before. Not satisfied that families give more to the state than the spend on food, shelter and other needs, are you? So, just how much more, exactly, would you suggest?
“Clayton – it is probably good they found out about your heart condition. But, kidney stones often respond to an at-home method.”
This was a 7mm kidney stone.
My daughter had the water/acid approach work successfully (with the same urologist) a few months earlier.
Phantom, you’re quite right on your 3 points. Also, it greatly helps to have family medical connections, although just having a personal connection to a physician is enough. Physicians get speedy medical care as professional courtesy mandates this.
One of the disturbing things I’ve noticed in large cities is that many GP’s just refer on everything and clog up the system. In Vancouver, 95% of low back pain was non-neurologic but these people wanted an MRI and a neurosurgical consultation which would provide them with no more information that I’d already given them. Where I currently practice, due to a blue collar and stoic population, probably about 75% of the people I see with low back pain actually have neurologic findings. They might come in when their leg finally starts to give out from weakness or their wives force them to see a doctor as they are tired of hearing about their pain.
Back pain is a consequence of effects of upright posture on the spine and GP’s should be the experts at sorting out back pain. In Vancouver, the vast majority of patients require the services of a good physiotherapist, not a neurosurgeon. Neurosurgeons should only see people in whom surgery is contemplated. To me the 10 years to get spinal stenosis diagnosed suggests medical incompetence; this is often a no-brainer diagnosis.
The interior of BC is under-serviced compared to Vancouver and Victoria, but I think the system functions better in the interior because:
(a) patients are often neighbors and there’s a lot more of a personal connection between doctors and patients. I suppose all of the moose and dear meat that I get every year could be considered a bribe, but it’s usually after I’ve gotten patients dealt with quickly.
(b) doctors that practice there tend to be non-conformist, dismissive of bureaucracy and know that they can’t be easily replaced
(c) the lack of specialist services makes the average GP far more competent out of necessity than the average big city GP. Big city GP’s can make a living specializing in treating bunions alone whereas the rural GP needs to know a little about every aspect of medicine and rural GP’s are very self-reliant.
(d) due to lack of subspecialty services, the average specialist in a small center has to perform the roles of multiple subspecialists and has a far more holistic understanding of medicine than the big city uber-specialist such as the cardiologist who has forgotten all their internal medicine as they are catheter technicians doing nothing but placing stents in coronary arteries. They’re nice to have around, though, when the local cath lab finds a case too difficult.
When I practiced in Vancouver, the orthopedic surgeons specialized in a single joint and one had to know who did knees, hips or ankles. Where I currently work, every orthopedic surgeon is a generalist and they do everything including spinal surgery at times.
A partial solution to the problem is to get rid of the idiotic “family practice” residency and bring back the rotating internship which, after a year, produced doctors who could practice and were far more prepared for rural practice than the timid progeny of the current “family practice” residency. A year away from a hospital will start causing atrophy in skills and, given that the bulk of city trained doctors have a peculiar need to stay in large cities, they end up seeing many worried well patients in walkin clinics resulting in further atrophy of their skills. The rotating internship system started off with generalists and, if the GP’s wanted to go into a specialty, they were far more knowledgeable of what the specialty entailed and they were then able to go into a residency. Right now medical students have to make a decision during their 3rd year of medical school about what specialty they’re going into and they can’t practice until they’ve finished their residency. Also, if they flunk out of the residency, there’s no longer the fallback GP role like there was in the days of the old rotating internship. In large centers, 16% of specialist physicians are now unemployed because, when one is a medical student, high billing specialties seem very attractive but what medical students don’t know is that there are only a finite number of such positions across the country.
We’ve gone from a self-organizing system which produced GP’s who then became specialists to fill existing needs to an overly bureaucratized system that has builtin inefficiencies. It’s no longer possible for a specialist to become a GP without undergoing extensive training as, in the view of the overinflated egos of “family practice” physicians, “family practice” is now a “specialty”.
John the liberal genius said: ” Let’s fix it. But know this… it will cost money. You can’t get something for nothing.”
No, but you can get nothing for something, and that is what socialized medicine delivers. Reassurance that you are “covered”, (meaning nothing) for half your income.
“Health Care” is not some holy manna that is visited upon us by the angels, it is not some natural resource that grows on trees. It is a SERVICE. Which is a JOB that some guy does for you, and that guy has to be PAID or he’s not going to do the job.
You can pay him yourself, in which case -you- have some control over the costs and the service quality. Or, you can have some third party step in there (insurance company), in which case -they- control -their- costs by cutting back the quality of what you get. For which rationing you pay them handsomely, because they don’t work for free either. So -you- don’t save any money.
Or you can do what we did, and have the government control the whole thing. Which is the most expensive, least efficient possible method. Doctors have no incentive to control costs but do have a huge incentive to see as many patients as they possible can. Patients have a huge incentive to get as much service as they possibly can. Management doesn’t care because their budget and workforce expands every year. Nobody knows or cares how much things cost, because money is never discussed. Unions are the cherry on top, reducing workforce efficiency while raising labor costs, and ensuring bad employees can’t be fired.
It cannot be fixed because its unworkable by nature. There is literally no amount of money in the world which can “fix” Canada’s socialized healthcare system. Because there is no amount of money that cannot be siphoned off through a million bureaucratic side channels until virtually the entire workforce is employed delivering or regulating “health care”.
All so that poor little Johnny doesn’t have to pay his doctor bills. Boo hoo. My contempt for your discomfiture is considerable.
it helps if your family doctor:
A)has a clue,
B)gives a sh1t, and
C)isn’t buried under three people’s workload.
Getting a positive on A,B and C all at the same time is a more and more rare situation these days.
It all depends on where you live. If you choose to live in a big city you will be competing with far more people for all limited services, including health care.
Take care of your health and stop shoving toxins in your pie hole.
It’s your body, take responsibility for it and don’t expect the health care system to ‘fix’ your abuse.
Nasty socialist pricks don’t care if you’re in pain, you’re just the collateral damage of their ideology. Bastards.
The health care system is just another example how socialism destroys every thing it touches. Nothing is perfect. But add communism to it & watch a human sewer being born that penalizes people if not inflicts a magnitude of pain on them. Every time in every place its tries, or any program its headed. From education to welfare. It always ends in human tradagy
I’m puzzled by the graph. Every province except for Ontario shows longer wait times than the combined result for all of Canada. How can that be? I know that Ontario has a big population but would it be enough to weight the results so drastically? And like another who commented, I don’t believe the Ontario numbers.
See how much the Americans spend? It’s a lot more than we do. I bet we could eliminate those wait times if we invested more in the system, and STILL spend less than the Americans do by a long shot.
Of course we spend less, we ride on the coattails of US research and development.
Tommy Douglas, not nearly dead enough…
one thing that no one has mentioned yet, and that is in large cities (like TO)you get the LIVs who hwen they have a head ach and need asperin they go to the “clinic” and hope the good doctor will prescribe said assperin, which they can’t, sooooo, they go to the cabinet and give the poor dears a free sample, and bill for a visit. Friend of mine used to manage 2 Dr clinics and said that such ppl were about 40% of clients. So toilet (John) stick that bit in your pipe and smoke it, U see it ain’t just that more money is needed, your dear dumbwitts are a large part of the problem
Loki replied:
“Phantom, you’re quite right on your 3 points. Also, it greatly helps to have family medical connections, although just having a personal connection to a physician is enough. Physicians get speedy medical care as professional courtesy mandates this.”
My wife needs two new hips. One hip is in bad shape and one is completely shot. She is a Nurse/Manager and has been in the system for 45 years; 20 as a manager. Calling in every chip she could resulted in a wait time from referral to specialist of 23 weeks. She isn’t due to see the specialist for a couple more weeks so we don’t know how long it will be until she actually has the surgery. But she needs two hip replacements. This business could go on for a couple of years at this rate.
So, Loki, maybe it helps to have connections but I don’t see it.
blackfox, unfortunately joint replacement surgery is one of the exceptions to the usefulness of connections. I didn’t add that every time I get a patient expedited, usually it results in my taking on one of the specialist’s problem patients. The dirty little secret of the Canadian medical system is that joint replacement surgery is way down the list of priorities.
So, if you’ve got a cancer, it gets dealt with immediately. If you have blocked coronaries, equally fast access. Neurosurgical problems require personal appeals to neurosurgeons and fortunately I know all of the local ones well. Neurology consults are still 6 months down the road but the neurologist will order an MRI in the public system once I’ve convinced them that the patient needs this as part of their workup. In general, anything that is immediately life-threatening is dealt with as quickly as possible.
What surprised me was that a meniscal tear resulting in a knee stuck in half extension is not considered an orthopedic emergency. Had a few words with the on-call orthopedic surgeon over such a case recently and he was intransigent and pointedly reminded me that I was very good at pain management and perhaps I should utilize those skills with that patient. In Vancouver there’s the Cambie clinic where patients with such debilitating meniscal tears can be operated on in a few days – at their own expense of course. One of the reasons I’ve gotten so good at pain management is dealing with the huge numbers of people with worn out joints that the Canadian medicare system is ill equipped to deal with.
The only way that the medicare system is going to deal with the epidemic of joint replacement surgery that will be required in the future is to allow for private clinics to perform joint replacement surgery. Currently, in BC, no overnight stays of patients are permitted at private clinics which essentially rules out joint replacement surgery. We’re doing way better with hip and knee replacements with hospital stays of sometimes only a few days (more as a result of extreme bed pressure rather than any major advances in surgery) but until private clinics are allowed to keep patients for a few days after their surgery, the system is just going to get worse. It’s a no brainer that those people who currently have the money to go to the US for joint replacement surgery would much rather have it done closer to home and thus they would free up slots for people in the public system. Such a concept is complete anathema to the defenders of medicare and one can only hope that they develop severe osteoarthritis of the hips and then have to personally deal with a system they’ve been so vocal in defending.
No, LAS, it’s because the people in a position to do anything about it would rather put off an unrepentant felquiste “patriote’s” date in Gehenna another 25 years and keep Montreal’s bomb factories in hijabs and Haitian puppy mills running around the clock than allow Albertans who work for a living and believe in God to spend their own money on their own children’s health care. The RAMQ is kept from complete collapse by money stolen from Protestants and Jews, like every other institution in Quebec.
If you’re not French, living like King Midas on usury or money stolen from the Queen, or both, nobody in charge of Canada’s health care system gives a wet fart if you live or die—unless someone like Jacques Parizeau is in need of a fresh young liver and you’re injured badly enough in that road accident that the doctors can tell your widow you were DOA.
blackfox said: “Calling in every chip she could resulted in a wait time from referral to specialist of 23 weeks.”
That’s why it pays to have -family- connections. Friends help you move. Family helps you move a body.
However I take your point, and I can say even with my connections a family member of mine was six months or more between diagnosis and surgery for a major joint complaint of the non-ignorable type. You don’t get to jump the line so much as people are more willing to squeeze you in over lunch. OR times are booked ahead, and don’t have much give in them.
Expect this to keep getting worse.
Loki said: “Back pain is a consequence of effects of upright posture on the spine and GP’s should be the experts at sorting out back pain. In Vancouver, the vast majority of patients require the services of a good physiotherapist, not a neurosurgeon.”
Absolutely. Its my professional opinion, based on research and also personal experience of having it, that “back pain” is almost always caused by -chairs-. Office work is about the worst possible thing that can be arranged for the human body, as is driving a vehicle for many hours every day. As a PT I’ve gotten excellent results with myofascial release, muscle energy stretching techniques, Tai Chi, plain old walking, and by modifying the patient’s habitual sitting position with different types of chairs and seat cushions.
For those interested in some of the research underpinnings, look up a book called “The Seated Man” by AC Mandal. A google will get you there.
For those interested in the results. As a boy I first “put my back out” as they say at age 14. Thereafter I’d put it out every year or so until I was around 41. Two days of being unable to walk, one week of pain, one week of being really careful, and then back to full function. I’ve put my back out picking up a kleenex off the floor.
Around 1993/94 one of the PTs I worked with was talking about myofascial scar releases. I have a big scar on my leg I got as a kid, so we released that. My back released with it, and I have not put my back out since.
Today I moved 3/4 ton of bagged concrete into and out of my truck. Not something I normally do. Zero back symptoms.
Odd things sometimes work.
Say Phantom I wonder if that would be similar to a system of pain release that Bonnie Prudden called Trigger Point Therapy and explained in her book Pain Erasure The Bonnie Prudden Way. The 1980 book has some very good methods for relieving chronic pain.