From: gld@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Gary L Dare)
Subject: Re: Death of Canada (Was: Death of America)
Reply-To: gld@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Gary L Dare)
Organization: The Bates Motel
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 21:30:39 GMT

cmk@athena.mit.edu (Charles M Kozierok) writes:
>gld@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Gary L Dare) writes:
>>Humana comes up all the time, and are usually just looking for
>>hospital administrators not real practicioners.  It's all a game.
>
>why should i be surprised that you believe this? 

It was told to me by my best friend from high school in Winnipeg, now
a doctor in Whitby (east of Toronto) private practice (junior partner,
as they say in law firms).  He had a clerking rotation at the Mayo
Clinic before graduating, and wanted to see what Humana was about. To
his surprise, the senior partners of the practice were also going, and
they explained why ... a show of force to the Rae government not to
screw with OHIP, and be nice when the doctors present their new fee
schedule requests (I don't know if it's happened yet, it's usually a
protracted process).

>you also believe that the GST is a replacement for an older, much 
>smaller tax, and that it is being used to write down the deficit...

The former hidden wholesale tax was in the area of 13% ...

>since you are conveniently dropping all the tax and policy questions
>from our debate and concentrating on the medical side, ...

It's all a matter of time ... I'll try to get to them later (I've
bundled the previous two replies in case the leave my news buffer;
I'm on lunch but gotta get back soon).

>i don't know anything about "monopoly mechanisms like the college of
>physicians and surgeons". i do know that your argument above is still
>tantamount to saying "the US system is bad". i still don't see an
>argument saying "the canadian system is good".

No, I'm just saying that the Canadian "system" works because the
presence of the government is limited ... universal risk in basic
medical care which the private sector cannot support.  It happens 
to go well in Canada because of the small size of our population
(dividing each insurance by province), I have hesitations about 
doing so in the U.S. since their population is massive and many
states/regions are larger than Canada (the Germans and French 
have a compact geography, despite larger populations than Canada).

While I advocate universal coverage, I happen to like the original
proposal for Canada ... private insurance brokers out of a universal
risk pool (non-market basic health) backing policies that include all
the amenities that they offer in their current plans.  The privates
backed out 'cos they can just concentrate on providing the plans for
private rooms, etc. to companies and individuals and just make their
money there, period.  I don't know what the Americans will do, that's
not my business ... they realize that they need some change, though.
Propoganda distorting the realities elsewhere don't help matters in
making up their minds, and both insurance and the medical lobby have
backed off since they've been changing their planks (besides, if the
knocks against Canada are true, where are the corresponding figures
for France and Germany, with the same system?  What about celebrities
to come out against health insurance because of what happened back at
home?  Getting Vancouver's Jason Priestley from 90210 as spokesperson
could go a long way to nuking any thought of that ...)

>>>you've avoided the point though. the government still decides.
>>>and there is NOTHING to prevent them from drastically reducing
>>>coverage in the future. 
>>
>>You mean like private insurance is now weaselling people all over
>>the United States?  I've read in the Times recently that 100,000
>>Americans a month are getting booted for using the insurance that
>>they paid for when they were healthy ...
>
>more poor reasoning. so you would rather have the government do it?

In the end, what's the difference?  And so far, it's not being done ...

I realize the angle that you're coming from, and I'm loathe to defend
any government, but in the case of our insurance it's been hands off
(screw with it, you'll get burned like Harcourt) and it doesn't look
to change ... everybody watches that issue like a hawk, you know that.
If people did that on every issue, anywhere, it'd be grand ...

>again, just because it is bad down here, that doesn't mean going to
>something worse is the solution.

So far, you've not demonstrated that things are worse up north.
You have repeated some rhetoric that Americans are familiar with
but that the originators (the AMA, the HIAA) are moving away from
in their health industry lobbying poker game.

>>Annually, there is a
>>Canadian EE/CS type who was traditionally apolitical and usually very
>>healthy as to have not ever dealt with medical care up north, and
>
>and your implicit comments again show your bias: why should someone
>who has been very healthy and not had to deal with medical care NOT
>be annoyed at being forced to pay for others' medical care?

If they're careless and shortsighted enough to think that there are
identifiable correlations for every know illness and they are free
from it.  Let me tell you about a friend who recently found out that
she has pituitary cancer: vegetarian w/some dairy since age 16 (she
is now 29), part-time aerobics teacher, semi-body builder, former
marathon runner.  Free-lance architect with an M.A.  What'd she do
wrong?  If you can figure out an algorithm to explain why, found a
start-up company and market it ...

Being without health insurance, she is a financial menace to society.
If she had something that was contagious and couldn't get it treated
except at an ER (and that's if she could make it that far), she is a
physical menace to people around her, too.  I think that physical and
financial endangerment to others are two things that Libertarians do 
stand against ...

>>getting a job in Silicon Valley is exposed to Libertarianism by his
>>(so far, no hers (-;) colleagues ... in a vacuum, there isn't a lot to
>>go on so they get caught repeating things that they should know better
>>is not true.  Obviously, from articles that I've read since that one,
>
>or maybe they had never stopped to think about them before because
>they spent their whole lives being told "well, we pay a lot more to
>live in canada but it's worth it because everything is rotten in the 
>US", and then they moved to the US and found out that it's a load of 
>bull?

I for one, have come to realize that any kind of chauvinism is bull.
Since I've not participated in any kind of anti-American paranoia, nor
do I ever intend to, I'll just add that most of those Canadian newbie
libertarians back off in a hurry to figure out what they said and what
went wrong ...

>>(then again, those are things that ordinary Canadians don't pay
>>much mind to --- I certainly didn't 'til I got bombarded by
>>questions from people here at Columbia and had to remember, fast).
>
>the fact that "ordinary canadians don't pay much mind" to these issues
>is one of the reasons i don't want to go back. i believe i stated that
>in my first post. if people don't even want to think about problems,
>there is no hope. and it is still a bit better here, although as i said
>in my first post which started all this, it is disappointing to see
>what is going on even here.

I can think of very few places where the entire citizenry takes an
active posture constantly.  Switzerland with their heirarchical
democracy (had another referendum last week; rejected the EC ...)
comes close to it.  Everywhere else, people just live their lives.

>i also don't see many other canadians running to oppose my statements
>against canada's outrageous taxes and social spending, nor the 
>morally-bankrupt fundamentals which underly them (though that may
>change after *this* paragraph).

I found your thread while making system backups on a late saturday
night (had a long day, waited for the tapes to stop spinning).  It
is hard to think that a lot of people have been logged on in the
past 12 or more hours ...  yer right, you just tossed out a nice
piece of bait there! (-;  Maybe a few will come ...

[By the way, that was one reason for my changing the topic line ...
the other was so that Americans and others falling asleep could bail
out of a Canada discussion! (-;]

>for just one more example, would you care to defend canada's
>wonderful equalization programs? 

Since I prefer the alternative of economic development, which is quite
doable by taking the challenge of global competition under freer trade
rather than suffocating behind tariff barriers erected by the running
dogs of the Canadian Establishment (e.g., Labatt and Molson re: beer)
to save their monopolies, I guess that I won't.  Since Sears Canada
has set up a telemarketing phone bank in (cheap) Regina a la those
used by the Americans in Utah and Oklahoma, etc. (or, Lands' End in
Wisconson(?)), that's a much better way to go.

>want to tell me how it is not socialistic to spend over 22% of the
>national budget (excluding interest on the debt, which was *28%* of
>the budget in 1990, for those who care), on transferring wealth from
>the provider provinces to the consumer ones?

As a western Canadian, here's my angle: not socialism, but a keep-em-
poor strategy by (again) the running dogs of the Canadian Establishment.
The next time you're up north, take a look at some history books about
Nova Scotia -- it used to be a very wealthy place until manufacturing
got consolidated in central Canada with Establishment maneuvering and
subsequent buyouts and dismantling of its industrial and finacial base.
The novel "Barometer Rising", which takes place around WW I, gives a
very different view of the welfare-dependant Maritimes we see now ...
my eyes popped while reading the first chapters (the story takes place
around an massive ammunition ship explosion in Halifax Harbour).

Canada has had a history of being a captive corporatocracy and it's
only been since the 60's that people have been calling it socialism
(I hate buzzwords, and that has led me away to other analysis) ...
this stuff was going on long before people even knew Marx -- Groucho,
that is ... (-;

gld
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Je me souviens ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gary L. Dare
> gld@cunixd.cc.columbia.EDU 		Support NAFTA
> gld@cunixc.BITNET			 Eat Mexican  (El Teddy's ad)
Xref: sparky talk.politics.misc:63871 ca.politics:10282 ba.politics:7674