The great doctors at the Mayo Clinic didn’t tell her that she was in no danger and could safely wait for her free procedure in Canada. They also didn’t forward her test results to her Canadian doctors—which would have been reasonable if they thought that her surgery should have been bumped up. Instead, they accepted her $100,000 payment and performed the surgery themselves.United States President Barack Obama is spearheading a campaign to reform the American health care system, and the radical right is biting back as usual. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the neo-cons are getting a little help from Canada.
Ontario resident Shona Holmes appears in an advertisement for an ultra-conservative lobby group, claiming that she survived a brain tumour in spite of the Canadian government’s effort to have her die on the waiting list. Check it out:
The problem with this video is that it is blatantly incorrect. According to the Mayo Clinic’s website, Ms. Holmes had a Rathke's cleft cyst. As unsettling as it must be to hear that there is something growing in your brain, Ms. Holmes’s “tumour” was just a sack of fluid that had been there since she was a fetus. She wasn’t dying, she was just scared. Unfortunately, her specialist was too busy treating people whose lives were in jeopardy, so the evil Canadian health care system asked her to take Advil twice a day for six months until there was space in the schedule.
People often freak out over minor medical things. When this happens, they abandon their doctors and seek out snake-oil cures, looking for that miracle procedure that will sweep their problems away in an instant. Ms. Holmes is a case in point, as she says: “I knew in my gut that I had to see someone and could not wait five to six months.” (Emphasis added.) Notice that her doctor didn’t tell her that she would be dead in six months—she came up with that idea on her own. So she mortgaged her house and took a vacation to Arizona, where she visited one of the most expensive hospitals in the world, an institution reknown for treating business magnates, A-list Hollywood celebrities, former Presidents, and Mr. Burns.
The great doctors at the Mayo Clinic didn’t tell her that she was in no danger and could safely wait for her free procedure in Canada. They also didn’t forward her test results to her Canadian doctors—which would have been reasonable if they thought that her appointment should have been bumped forward. Instead, they accepted her $100,000 payment and performed the surgery themselves.
Once healed up, Ms. Holmes made a triumphant return to Canada and promptly sued OHIP for the cost of her treatment at the Mayo Clinic. She became a darling of the right in Canada, and has now moved on to muddy American waters.
To the Americans reading, I do not mean to say that the Canadian health care system is perfect. (Even if it were, it is very different from what Obama’s plan proposes.) We do have waiting lists, and sometimes they're long. Most of the doctors are still using handwritten paper records and snail-mailing x-rays to one another—they don’t like change. Hypochondriacs (usually richer people) waste time and resources with their frivolous visits. There is a shortage of GPs because everyone wants to specialize. Doctors need to do a better job at communicating with their patients. The lower-skilled staff in hospitals (porters, cafeteria, maintenance, etc…) are paid much more than their counterparts in other sectors due to union pressure. And finally, perhaps the biggest problem is that it is easier for a health insurance company to raise premiums than it is for a government to raise taxes.
The Canadian system is far from perfect, and change is needed. But in comparison to the United States, we are getting a pretty good bang for our buck. No system can solve every problem. Americans have waiting times too, you see—just ask Esmin Green how long she waited in the NYC Emergency room:
