[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Rutuu

I live in a system with two tier health that is not the US. If you have some links can you please put them forward as I'm curious to see some data on the topic, especially for chronic disease.

Anecdotally the public system is fast and efficient here and delivers better care than what I experienced in Calgary when I lived there. Private health care costs a family for the top level $500/mo, and basic hospital cover for an individual is $100 / mo. You do have out of pocket costs to see a GP ($60 for telehealth and $80 for in person). After the initial cost the GP will bulk bill you (no out of pocket costs anymore) and there are refund codes under the public system that you submit your receipts into the app and get your refund direct to your bank account.

There is a reduction in taxes with health insurance to encourage those with means to hold private insurance and it's basically a 1 for 1 trade off until you get to the top brackets.

The cool thing that happens with a private system is that you have research, biotech and pharma sectors that pop up for investment and jobs.

As for doctors not being available, I always thought the two tier system encouraged more doctors. The stats here show that we have 4.1 physicians per 1000, to 2.4 physicians per 1000 for Canada, so there is some support for two tier creating more opportunities for smart people to enter the field.

The problem with your bottom few paragraphs is that the US spends more than double per capita, so if you want apples to apples, Canada would have to fund our system properly. It's setup to fail, so surprise surprise, it fails.

https://www.cihi.ca/en/national-heal...-2022-snapshot

Here's a recent article on privatization not working:

It showed that Ontario, which wants to follow the lead of other provinces, actually had the shortest waiting times in Canada for hip and knee replacement surgeries in 2021/2022 — 73 per cent of Ontario patients received knee replacement surgery within six months.

By comparison, patients in provinces outsourcing surgeries to for-profit clinics waited longer. In British Columbia, only 70 per cent of patients received knee replacements within six months, while in Alberta, it was 53 per cent and in Quebec, 48 per cent.

Public hospitals, according to Urbach, are funded to do a specific number of surgeries per year, and provincial governments could pay to schedule more surgeries at night or on the weekends. But when there are two parallel and competing systems, a bigger problem emerges: staffing.

"We need people," said Urbach. "The bottleneck right now is particularly nursing care."

Ultimately, it's about best outcomes. And studies of the U.K. and U.S, have shown that for-profit care is linked to slightly higher death rates.


In one study, which tracked seven years of outsourcing between 2013 and 2020 from Britain's National Health Service (NHS) to the private sector, researchers found that every one per cent increase in private for-profit services corresponded to deaths going up by 0.38 per cent per 100,000 people. Based on that data, the researchers believe for-profit care could have been responsible for 557 additional deaths from 2014 to 2019.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/priva...oney-1.6777470

I'm not going to go hunting, there is lots of info out there if people want the facts. Just please don't look at the Frasier Institute for reality. I just wish people would find this for themselves before using it as a reason for voting for the UCP's ideas. Is that really too much to ask?