Quote Originally Posted by Kirkland Laing View Post
Here's something I read about Canadian healthcare recently. My favourite is point number two, in which the author notes that although Canadian doctors are paid less than their U.S. counterparts, there are also upsides to practicing in Canada:
First, as noted, they don't have to charge higher fees to cover the salary of a full-time staffer to deal with over a hundred different insurers, all of whom are bent on denying care whenever possible. In fact, most Canadian doctors get by quite nicely with just one assistant, who cheerfully handles the phones, mail, scheduling, patient reception, stocking, filing, and billing all by herself in the course of a standard workday.

Second, they don't have to spend several hours every day on the phone cajoling insurance company bean counters into doing the right thing by their patients. My doctor in California worked a 70-hour week: 35 hours seeing patients, and another 35 hours on the phone arguing with insurance companies. My Canadian doctor, on the other hand, works a 35-hour week, period. She files her invoices online, and the vast majority are simply paid — quietly, quickly, and without hassle. There is no runaround. There are no fights. Appointments aren't interrupted by vexing phone calls. Care is seldom denied (because everybody knows the rules). She gets her checks on time, sees her patients on schedule, takes Thursdays off, and gets home in time for dinner.




Mythbusting Canadian Health Care -- Part I | OurFuture.org
That's very interesting article, I would not have considered the overhead that U.S. doctors have to deal with nor would I have considered the man hours it would take to deal with all the different health-care providers. I know in my doctors office, its just him and a secretary, but it often feels quite frantic in there, its not uncommon for me to have a 2:00 appointment and not see the doctor until after 3. Also, a lot of doctors here have taken to only dealing with one problem per visit, so if your leg and your head are both fucked up, he's only going to deal with one of them, so you better figure out which needs more immediate attention.
One thing that they kind of gloss over is point #3, wait times here are fucking horrendous, and like I said, just wait until the baby boomers hit 65, they won't be contributing much in the way of taxes and will need a ton of medical care, especially as, just like in the States, we're all a bunch of fat, under-exercising pigs up here.
Also they talk about how taxes here are only about 10% more than in the U.S., but when you consider how much $$ the U.S. spends on other things, IE a functioning military, which Canada basically ignores, you've got to imagine taxes would skyrocket if the U.S. implimented national health care.