Canada's overlooked health care problem...
Scraped knees and other nonsensical reasons to visit a hospital.
If you've been to a hospital in the past year, and had to wait in long lines to get the privilege of seeing a doctor, you know that there is something wrong in Canada's wondrous State-provided health system. It is not only systemic disarray, or a crippling lack of doctors. Nor is it solely due to power-hungry unions and hospital staff eager to get rid of you. It is at the same time all these things, but hiding under the surface is something even more sinister... hospital misuse at the hands of the citizens who use them.
Imagine for a moment you are sitting in a hospital waiting room, vomiting into a plastic bag, speaking incoherently, and suffering from an extreme headache. The doctors are concerned enough that they ask you to stay, but you are forced to wait in the line behind some irresponsible parent who brought their little boy in because he fell and scraped his knee. The knee has stopped bleeding and the boy is alright, even cheerfully playing with a toy his parents brought for him. The doctor patches it up reluctantly, and he escorts the family out. That kid got a lollipop for the traumatic experience, and all you get is a cat scan and a spinal tap.
You would be pretty upset at those people wouldn't you? And you know that doctor is... he has better things to do with his time than patch up frivolous wounds that are best left to polysporin and a band-aid; like ensure that you don't have spinal meningitis, or an aneurysm, or any other multitude of potentially life threatening afflictions.
These types of occurrences happen on a daily basis, and you can verify that with any front line medical workers you may happen to know. The reality is that these types of ridiculous hospital visits are exacerbating the wait-time problems that exist in hospital emergency rooms. They are encouraging doctors and nurses to push people out the door instead of ensuring that they are cared for properly. In addition to the above experience in the 90's, I was forced to insist on an ultrasound last summer because I visited an Ottawa-area hospital after having been vomiting for over 72 hours straight. I had sharp pains in my stomach that had radiated to my lower-right quadrant. An immediate relative of mine had undergone a similar set of events and I had read up on the problems with the help of google; and I had diagnosed myself with appendicitis. The doctor figured I was just another case of "not that sick", and attempted to usher me out with a prescription for antibiotics. It was my insistence that he conduct the proper test that may have very well saved my life.
And you may be saying that this is a rare circumstance. Well, I'm here to tell you that it is not. Many people I know can tell you similar stories, some with much worse outcomes. Now, far be it for me to suggest that this is caused simply by frivolous hospital visits. Doctors need to be responsible for their diagnosis of health problems, or at the very least the attempt to find the causes before dismissing patients. One cannot, however, overlook the added stress that these patients put on the already ailing health system.
This topic came up most recently(and inspired me to write this long-winded affair) in the Blogging Tories Forums, and I set down a proposal for reducing this. I am sure that others have made similar (possibly even identical) proposals; but that is simply because the system makes sense. It may not be the nice thing to do, but it is the right thing to do. The betterment of the many is superior to the betterment of the few.
The proposal is simple; start charging user-fees (say $20-$25) for hospital emergency visits that do not result in hospitalization. Hospitals can offer pre-pay service through an account at the hospital if they so desire, ensuring that those who need the hospital services will be able to obtain them. In addition, the fee would be waived with a referral note from a physician.
There are real benefits to this aside from the obvious reduction in wasted hospital visits. The economic side of this is positive, in that unlike publicly run hospitals, most physicians offices and walk-in clinics are privately operated. This means that the amounts earned here are directly taxed by the government, so the government can recover some of the tax money that was spent for service delivery. Secondly, this provides these doctors with opportunities to make additional revenue; something that could have a profound effect on keeping them from jumping south.
Regardless of whether you agree with the proposal, something needs to be done about the wait-times and substandard service Canadians are receiving across the country. This is a provincial problem and it needs provincial solutions. The federal government cannot keep dumping money down the drain into a health care system that is fundamentally broken, and getting worse year after year. With the baby boom generation reaching retirement age, the strains on our health care system are bound only to increase; while the collective input to the tax system is going to only decrease. This may be a drop in the pot when it comes to the overall problem, but it is something that can help nonetheless. If you disagree, don't just troll my comments section; tell me your solution.
