Canadian Leaders Come to the U.S. for Health Care by Gregory Hilton

The Progressive Democrats of America are advocating “a Canada style health system.” Michael Moore and many House Democrats agree with them. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) brags that he has been advocating this for two decades. If the system is so great, why does a Canadian Premier have to come to the U.S. for heart surgery?… He is the second Premier to do this. Liberal MP Belinda Stronach travelled to California for breast cancer surgery, and MP Robert Bourassa was treated for malignant melanoma in Bethesda. All of these politicians are liberals.
Premier Danny Williams is now in Sarasota. He says “This was my heart, my choice and my health. I did not sign away my right to get the best possible health care for myself when I entered politics.” He is correct and we also do not want to sign away that right.
He also explained a key reason why he didn’t stay in Canada. He needed an immediate operation. Williams said, “I would’ve been criticized if I had stayed in Canada and had been perceived as jumping a line or a wait list. … I accept that. That’s public life.”
In the Canadian system everyone has access to care, but the quality is debatable. Everybody has access in the United States if they go to the emergency rooms. Canadians pay very high taxes and many people have extra supplemental insurance. Hillary Clinton was focusing on the Canadian system in 1993 but turned against it because of the waiting lines for surgery and border jumping.
We need to make practical changes such as lawsuit (tort) reforms, so that doctors don’t pay $150,000/year in insurance, and we need to make health insurance more affordable by making it legal to cross state lines to get it, and to offer the same tax deduction to private insureres that employers get and all those other little things. Our advanced science of medicine was expensive to develop, as were new and better drugs, and a medical education is also very expensive. So to obtain these state-of-the-art procedures costs money. My advice is to attack the smaller things first and see what develops from those changes.
The definition of insurance is that all pay in for the few who need benefits. Like any other large organization – there is a tremendous amount of waste, kickbacks, and mismanagement. The waste is because of the middle man brokers who are making more than anyone, as well as salesmen of medical equipment. There are also kickbacks from drug manufactures. A form of mismanagement is not allowing preventative and alternative (natural) remedies.
http://www.pdamerica.org/articles/chapters/wa-2010-01-20-09-18-58-chapters.php