[lbo-talk] Modern medical "coverage"

Sheldon Baker humanist.observer at gmail.com
Fri Feb 27 09:05:18 PST 2009


On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 9:27 AM, ken hanly <northsunm at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>  One virtue of the Canadian system  is that co-pays are forbidden. Some private clinics manage to get around this somewhat by special charges such as tray fees for minor operations that are done in the clinic rather than a hospital. For example for a recent cystoscopy I paid 20 dollars but if I had insisted it be done in the hospital it would have cost nothing. The clinic is not re-imbursed by the govt. for costs of the equipment which would also be available at a hospital, so they naturally bill the patient. Of course many other doctors would just perform the operation at the hospital. In a small city such as Brandon there is only one specialist so you don't have much choice. It is just easier to get it done in the clinic rather than spending a bundle to travel to Winnipeg or argue with the specialist.
>
> Cheers, k hanly
>
> Blog:  http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html
> Blog:  http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html

Well copays are the least of our problems here. When I was arguing for single payer with a righty, he argued that if its totally free, then people will over-use the system, coming in for simple sniffles and such. I countered, primarily as a rhetorical strategy, that this could be controlled by charging moderate copays, perhaps wavable for the truly destitute. Shit, if we could get a single payer system like Canada, and all I would have to pay is a lousy $20 for an office visit, it would be a great leap forward. Its the additional charges that really hurt.



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