From: gld@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Gary L Dare)
Subject: Re: health care industry woes
Reply-To: gld@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Gary L Dare)
Organization: The Bates Motel
Distribution: usa
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 16:50:32 GMT

starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu (Tim Starr) writes:
>gld@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Gary L Dare) writes:
>
>}Also, erroneous assumption that government is involved in the 
>}Canadian health care provision process.
>
>Then my Canadian friends who tell me about the government regulating 
>private hospitals out of existence so that they don't make the 
>government hospitals look bad are wrong?

This now becomes a matter of definitions ... while we have no hospital
corporations like Humana, all or most hospitals have great autonomy.
Like universities, they get a basic operating budget and collect fees
for services rendered.  Their endowments, though, are their own to
spend and many hospitals that have large and powerful privately-run
philanthropies connected to them look and function like pure private
hospitals here in NYC; examples are Mount Sinai Toronto, Davis Jewish
General and Cote St-Luc in Montreal, St. Boniface (one that my family
regularly gives to, our family friend and lawyer and a Manitoba Tory
biggie heads their cancer research philanthropy) and Grace Hospital
(run by the Salvation Army) in my home town of Winnipeg, Manitoba.  In
the same way that U. of Toronto and McGill wield their big purses and
can act like Ivy League colleges 'cos they spend as they please, our
hospitals control their own endowment and build their facilities.  If
our "private" hospital, St. Boniface, is actually run by government
bureaucrats, I should tell my father so Cam can it raise during their
next board meeting ...

There is a private aspect to Canadian hospitals; almost all of them
have their own fundraising wings and local names that go to their
events, donate money, buy souvenir sweatshirts, etc. (every one of our
universities are public, too, but their raised endowment funds are
their own to use).  As for pull, knowing somebody is no better or
worse than here in America or overseas.  My mother had probably seen a
day here and a day there cut from her liver cancer treatment by one of
my father's high school buddies being an M.D.  affiliated with
Winnipeg's most private-like hospital, along with boosts from a
retired lawyer friend being on the hospital board raising funds for
the small-scale cancer research unit there (our family's restaurant
was part of a pool that donated food to caterers hired to serve at
hospital fundraisers).  This isn't too different from what my
fiancee's father did in New Jersey when she had to have a back
condition treated two summers ago ...

>}Waiting lists have been debunked by Vancouver's conservative Fraser
>}Institute, and CNN could not find any convincing ones during their
>}June focus series on the health care system in Canada.  It was also
>}one of the first times in the U.S. that I've seen the distinction that
>}we have private doctors in Canada, and that the only public portion is
>}centered on provincial (not federal - surprise! (-;) health insurance.
>
>I'd like to know the reference for this, please, as I seem to recall the
>opposite conclusion coming from Fraser.  I'll check a book of theirs
>tomorrow.

"The President also spoke of long delays needed to get treatment in
Canada, saying, for instance, that British Columbians wait six months
for coronary by-pass surgery.  But since 1990, when that estimate was
compiled, the wait has fallen by more than half, to 14 weeks,
according to the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-based public policy
research institute.

"There have been reductions in other centers as well, helped by
such developments as a new central registry for cardiovascular
surgical candidates in Ontario.

"While there are waiting lists for elective surgery, doctors here
caution against exaggerating the impact.  They say there are no
delays for those who are seriously ill, or injured."

(New York Times, Feb. 17/92)

Consumers Reports has noted that American critics often take long
queueing transients and misrepresent them as the status quo.  The fact
that doctors are able to move people into facilities at much faster
rates than the maximum congestion conforms to models that I have seen
for telecommunications (a secondary VLSI area in my real work (-;).

Also, please note that the population of metro Vancouver is 1.5 Million;
unlike San Francisco, there is no heavily populated Bay Area surrounding
it.

gld
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Je me souviens ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gary L. Dare				Jesus Saves!
> gld@cunixd.cc.columbia.EDU 		Gretzky gets the rebound -
> gld@cunixc.BITNET			he shoots, he scores!