On a recent vacation, my wife and I met the wife of a Canadian physician. We took the opportunity to find out more about the Canadian health-care system. We asked her if doctors in her country were happy with their treatment and compensation. She was very kind and proceeded to tell us that it is very much like it is here. She said that they lived on the coast in an $800,000 home that they are almost finished paying for. They travel extensively with their six kids, with the most recent trips being to Europe and South Africa. They own the building that her husband's office is in. All of their children attend a private school. Their lifestyle seemed to be pretty good, so we continued by asking how good the medical care was in her country. She told us that it was very good. Her husband, she said, was able to spend as much time as he deemed appropriate with each patient. She related one experience they had with their 12-year-old son. He had a neurological infection that was too complicated to treat in the remote part of the province where they lived. He was taken via a medical helicopter to a more specialized location two hours away, where he was kept in the neuro-ICU for three days with round-the-clock specialists.
After answering all of our questions, this kind lady posed a question for us: Why hasn't the United States switched to a similar health-care system? This, I thought, was a very good question. I am a computer programmer by trade, but I spent a portion of my career on a population-science research team at a nearby university. This led me to wonder why the Canadians are able to have a successful universal single-payer health-care system and we don't seem to be able to do so here in the United States. Are they more intelligent than us as a population, and if so, do they have a higher I.Q. than we do? Is this because they live farther north than we do? My theory is that they must have a higher I.Q. than we do because they live farther north than we do.
Whenever I talk about the Canadian health-care system, I am quickly told about an elusive group of Canadian citizens who have crossed our border to receive medical treatment that they couldn't receive in their own country. If this is true, it throws my theory out the window. However, I don't believe that it is. I have figured out a way to locate these hard-to-find visitors, if they exist. We need to look outside major hospitals in the northern part of the United States for a group of people in red-and-white track suits with a red maple leaf on the back. They will be running, maybe in a single-file line. How do I know all this? Some simple thought. If they are coming to America to receive medical treatment, then they must have health insurance. Gone are the days when you can receive medical care here in America without health insurance, due to the thousands of medical bankruptcies filed each week. They can't get health insurance here, though, because they obviously have a pre-existing condition. But here in America, they can't be refused medical care if they are experiencing a life-threatening emergency. So I think they are currently running laps around emergency-room parking lots in hopes that they will have a heart attack so they can't be refused. If they really do exist, it throws my whole theory out the window, but if not, I may have discovered something very interesting.
Chris Doherty is a resident of Bountiful.