Quote:
Originally Posted by Libertine
Isn't that a good thing, though?
If you could pay extra for better treatment, it would take little time for a high-priced, alternative healthcare circuit to arise. With higher prices, it could afford to offer better pay to doctors, thus draining disproportionately many well-trained and talented doctors from the public system. Basically, the quality of public healthcare would decrease, even though the quality of private healthcare might rise to levels public healthcare could never achieve. In other words, the child of poor parents would get significantly worse healthcare than the child of rich parents would.
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There are many European countries with parallel public and private systems that provide good healthcare to everyone. In most cases all doctors are required to provide a set amount of time to the public system but then are still free to run their private systems on the side for those who are willing to pay. It ends up being a win-win for everyone.
We have huge wait times for many diagnostic and surgical procedures here in Canada because the government won't let private operations provide services to meet the excess demand. Many of our doctors go to the US so we suffer doctor shortages. Most of our hospitals are controlled by unions to the point where almost all new money put into the healthcare system goes to cover negotiated wage increases and hardly any goes toward new equipment, more nurses or more doctors.
I know the American system has problems, but don't look to Canada as an example of how to make it better. We rank just as low on global healthcare as the US. There are better models in the world to follow and they all include parallel public/private systems.