On 1/9/07, Christian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > From what I read, health care might be free up North, but "better" is > debatable. Why do we always hear about so many people coming here for > diagnosis? As for guns... yeah, ok, no guns in Canada? With what do > you guys shoot all the bears, moose, elk, caribou, deer, etc, etc.? (I > believe the stat is more guns in Canada per capita than in the US)
I was, of course, being (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek. However: Certainly our healthcare system is far from perfect, but it's universal and much simpler to administrate than the American multi-level system. It's true that there are some inordinant waiting times, and that due to those, some (mostly rich people) decide to pay and seek treatment in the US. There have also been some instances where, for various reasons, usually involving funding, our public insurer has paid for some Canadians to obtain those services in the US. Generally that happens as we ramp up funding so that those services will be provided in a more timely fashion here. A particular example is MRI's. Several years ago we didn't have proper funding for sufficient operators, so waiting time was so long that it affected mortality rates. In that case Canadians were sent Down South while funding was put in place to train more MRI technicians so that we could get our service up to acceptable levels. I tend to think that many of the stories you hear about (while obviously true) are reports from a right-wing rabidly pro-free-market media, who knows how much funding they get from advertisers in the health insurance industry. You may see a couple of dozen stories a year, you never hear about the ~millions~ of Canadians who get top-notch service up here North of the Border. As for guns, well, yeah, we do own a lot of them. Not so many handguns, though, as they're very tightly restricted. Almost all handguns used in crimes are illegal ones. Yes, gun violence in cities (particularly Toronto) has escalated over the past few years, but it's nowhere American levels. We still have far fewer than 100 murders a year here: in 2005 out of 78 murders there were 52 handgun deaths. The murder rate went down in 2006 and the amount of gun deaths dropped in Toronto by some 46%. So much for reports that gun murders are out of control. The media was more than happy to scream to the world how violent Toronto and Canada are becoming; they seem oddly silent WRT 2006 stats. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
