By Selwyn Duke

Writing at American Thinker, Ethel Fenig has a little piece about how some Canadians must come to the United States for medical treatment because of the nation’s "overwhelmed and underfunded socialist health care system."  Fenig quotes the Toronto Globe and Mail:

More than 150 critically ill Canadians – many with life-threatening cerebral hemorrhages – have been rushed to the United States since the spring of 2006 because they could not obtain intensive-care beds here.

Before patients with bleeding in or outside the brain have been whisked through U.S. operating-room doors, some have languished for as long as eight hours in Canadian emergency wards while health-care workers scrambled to locate care. 

The problems include: limited access to teleradiology; limited operating-room time; too few intensive-care beds; a short supply of neurosurgically trained intensive-care nurses to staff them, and too few neurosurgeons.

In some cases, neurosurgeons are available to operate, but with intensive-care beds full, there simply is nowhere to put them afterward.

Even the method of funding neurosurgical services is an enormous disincentive. Neurosurgery is funded out of fixed, global hospital budgets and is viewed as a financial drain. Orthopedic surgeons, by comparison, are seen as money makers: The more operations they do, the more their hospitals are reimbursed.

I’ve said before that, by walking this road toward socialized medicine, we’re killing the goose that laid the golden egg.  And this will continue until we mature, dispense with our spirit of entitlement and understand that we can’t have everything we want at exactly the price we want it.  Some things just don’t come cheap. 

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