Deadly Canadian Care
An Illinois physician is arguing that actress Natasha Richardson might have survived her skiing accident if it had occurred in the United States rather than Canada. Explains Dr. Cory Franklin:
Canadian health care de-emphasizes widespread dissemination of technology like CT scanners and quick access to specialists like neurosurgeons. While all the facts of Richardson’s medical care haven’t been released, enough is known to pose questions with profound implications.
In the U.S. Richardson likely could have been both diagnosed locally and flown to emergency care in a nearby city. Adds Franklin:
What would have happened at a US ski resort? It obviously depends on the location and facts, but according to a colleague who has worked at two major Colorado ski resorts, the same distance from Denver as Mt. Tremblant is from Montreal, things would likely have proceeded differently.
Assuming Richardson initially declined medical care here as well, once she did present to caregivers that she was suffering from a possible head trauma, she would’ve been immediately transported by air, weather permitting, and arrived in Denver in less than an hour.
Deadly Canadian Health Care
Opponents of nationalize health care rightly warn about the negative impact of politicizing medical care, but it’s never easy to prove that someone who otherwise would have lived died as a result. Yet Canadians are asking whether that may be the case with actress Natasha Richardson. Reports the News & Observer (hat tip to Matthew Vadum at the American Spectator blog):
Questions are arising over whether a medical helicopter might have been able to save actress Natasha Richardson.
The province of Quebec lacks a medical helicopter system, common in the United States and other parts of Canada, to airlift stricken patients to major trauma centers. Montreal’s top head trauma doctor said Friday that may have played a role in Richardson’s death.
Richardson, 45, died Wednesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York after falling Monday on a ski slope at the Mont Tremblant resort in Quebec.
“It’s impossible for me to comment specifically about her case, but what I could say is … driving to Mont Tremblant from the city [Montreal] is a 2 1/2-hour trip, and the closest trauma center is in the city. Our system isn’t set up for traumas and doesn’t match what’s available in other Canadian cities, let alone in the States,” said Tarek Razek, director of trauma services for the McGill University Health Centre, which represents six of Montreal’s hospitals.
While Richardson’s initial refusal of medical treatment cost her two hours, she also had to be driven to two hospitals. She didn’t arrive at a specialized hospital in Montreal until about four hours after the second 911 call from her hotel room at the resort, according to a timeline published by Canada’s The Globe and Mail newspaper.
Because of the pervasiveness of both third party payment and government regulation, the American medical system spends more than it should. But it remains far more oriented towards meeting patient needs than does government-dominated health care. As policymakers debate various “reform” measures, they should keep Natasha Richardson’s tragic fate in mind.
Week in Review: A Health Care Summit, School Choice and Ayn Rand
Obama Holds White House Health Care Summit
President Obama hosted almost 150 elected officials, doctors, patients, business owners, and insurers on Thursday for a White House forum on health care reform. The Washington Post reports Obama “reiterated his intention to press for legislation this year that dramatically expands insurance coverage, improves health care quality and reins in skyrocketing medical costs.”
Cato senior fellow Michael D. Tanner responds:
The Obama administration and its allies mainly seek greater government control over one-seventh of the U.S. economy and some of our most important, personal, and private decisions. They favor individual and employer mandates, increased insurance regulation, middle-class subsidies, and a government-run system in competition with private insurance. On the other side are those who seek free market reforms and more consumer-centered health care.
These differences are profound and important. They cannot and should not be papered over by easy talk of bipartisanship.
In a new article, Tanner explains why universal health care is not the best option for Americans seeking a better system:
If there is a lesson which U.S. policymakers can take from national health care systems around the world, it is not to follow the road to government-run national health care, but to increase consumer incentives and control.
To find out how the free market system can increase health care security, read University of Chicago professor John H. Cochrane’s new policy analysis, which explains how markets can “provide life-long, portable health security, while enhancing consumer choice and competition.”
Battle Over Washington DC School Choice Program Continues
Congressional Democrats are considering cutting the funding for a pilot education program that sends low-income children in Washington, D.C., to private schools through vouchers. The program serves as an example of how helpful school choice programs can be to children who are born into families that cannot afford to send them to good schools.
Adam Schaeffer, policy analyst at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, says even the mainstream media is on the side of school choice this time.
In a recent study, Andrew J. Coulson, director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, demonstrates the superiority of market-based education over monopolies.
For comprehensive research on the effectiveness of charter schools, private schools, and voucher programs, read Herbert J. Walberg’s book, School Choice: The Findings.
Cato Celebrates Women’s History Month
The Cato Institute pays homage to three women during Women’s History Month who unabashedly defended individualism and free-market capitalism early in the 1940s — an age that widely considered American capitalism dead and socialism the future.
In 1943, Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand published three groundbreaking books, The God of the Machine, The Discovery of Freedom and The Fountainhead, that laid the foundations of the modern libertarian movement.
On Rand’s centennial, Cato executive vice president David Boaz highlighted the many contributions she made to liberty:
Although she did not like to acknowledge debts to other thinkers, Rand’s work rests squarely within the libertarian tradition, with roots going back to Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Jefferson, Paine, Bastiat, Spencer, Mill, and Mises. She infused her novels with the ideas of individualism, liberty, and limited government in ways that often changed the lives of her readers. The cultural values she championed — reason, science, individualism, achievement, and happiness — are spreading across the world.
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