Dr. Robert Cihak, a former president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, rips apart the Canadian universal health care system:
If the government says it provides a medical service, it’s illegal for a Canadian citizen to pay for and get the service privately. In practice, this means a patient must linger in line for hospital treatment – an average of 17.7 weeks in 2003, according to an annual survey on hospital waiting list published by the Fraser Institute.
In 1999, Richard F. Davies, MD, described how delays affected Ontario heart patients scheduled for coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. In a single year, for this one operation, 71 patients died before surgery and another “121 were removed from the list permanently because they had become medically unfit for surgery;” 44 left Ontario and had their CABG elsewhere, such as in the USA. In other words, 192 people either died or were too sick to have surgery before they worked their way to the front of the waiting line.
Of course, we don’t need a doctor to diagnose all the problems with the Canadian system — they are obvious to anyone with common sense.
