Sunday, October 21, 2007

Bogus "healthcare in canada sucks" story

When I was looking at the silliness that has followed the outing of Dumbledore I tripped across a particularly stupid blog story about health care in Canada.

Apparently a routine, if unnecessary, transfer between hospitals went awry because a driver missed an exit in Montreal (trust me, this isn't rare) and the wingnut writing the blog was in full roar that it was evidence of how terrible socialized healthcare was. the part that wasnt quoted from the story is this...
Ms. Robitaille said that what happened to Dany is a potential consequence of the region's two biggest health-care problems: underfunding and a lack of organization.

Bernard Chagnon, a spokesman for the Outaouais health and social services agency, said the agency is working with the regional health centres to better co-ordinate situations where patients need to be transferred. Though the practice has always occurred, it has traditionally been done in an informal way. Mr. Chagnon could not say when a more formal process would be put in place.


So to recap. The main reasons for the problem are that there isn't enough money being put into the system and there isn't enough coordination between the various regional health centers.

All this says to me is that if you spent a similar amount to what the US currently spends and had it centrally coordinated then you would have that particular problem fixed. Of course it wouldnt fix Montreal's roads but ...

Guess what people, there are things that you just cannot decentralize the organization of or it will result in weird incongruities of service levels. Acute Care Health Care is one of those things.

Full story is at the ottawa Citizen and the original pointer to the stupid blogger was from my friends at Sadly,No!

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