Here is an interesting little study about the health practises of Canadians with our pinko-commie socialist single-payer system. And it turns out, that we Canucks aren't jumping the border all the time to get access to your private system's "shorter waiting lists". Or at least not in any meaningful numbers.
More below...
For a long time Insurance Industry defenders have dragged we Canadians into your health care reform battles, normally using our well loved system as a scare tactic. "You don't want single payer", they'll say. "Canadians have it and they come here all the time to get access to our super-care" Well some people up here decided to test that theory and here are their findings.
This study was undertaken to quantify the nature and extent of use by Canadians of medical services provided in the United States. It is frequently claimed, by critics of single-payer public health insurance on both sides of the border, that such use is large and that it reflects Canadian patients’ dissatisfaction with their inadequate health care system. All of the evidence we have, however, indicates that the anecdotal reports of Medicare refugees from Canada are not the tip of a southbound iceberg but a small number of scattered cubes. The cross-border flow of care-seeking patients appears to be very small.
Our telephone survey of likely U.S. providers of wait-listed services such as advanced imaging and eye procedures strongly suggested that very few Canadians sought care for these services south of the border. Relative to the large volume of these procedures provided to Canadians within adjacent provinces, the numbers are almost indetectable. Hospital administrative data from states bordering Canadian population centers reinforce this picture. State inpatient discharge data show that most Canadian admissions to these hospitals were unrelated to waiting time or to leading-edge-technology scenarios commonly associated with cross-border care-seeking arguments. The vast majority of services provided to Canadians were emergency or urgent care, presumably coincidental with travel to the United States for other purposes. They were clearly unrelated either to advanced technologies or to waiting times north of the border.
So talking point should be dead then. Study comes out, negates previous conventional wisdom, misinformation should die shortly thereafter, hey? Well, not so fast. Unfortunately the study ends with this reminder
Despite the evidence presented in our study, the Canadian border-crossing claims will probably persist. The tension between payers and providers is real, inevitable, and permanent, and claims that serve the interests of either party will continue to be independent of the evidentiary base. Debates over health policy furnish a number of examples of these "zombies"—ideas that, on logic or evidence, are intellectually dead—that can never be laid to rest because they are useful to some powerful interests. The phantom hordes of Canadian medical refugees are likely to remain among them.
As a Canuck, I am pulling hard for you guys. A competitive public option is an absolute must for your country. I don't know a single Canadian that would give up our single payer system without a massive fight. It won't be an easy time, and expect lots of misinformation to get thrown around. I hope you all continue to use the powers of the Interwebs to cut through the crap and find out the real facts for yourselves. Don't give up this fight. Single payer is 100% worth it.
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