What about all the Americans that go to India for cheap surgeries or to South America for plastic surgeries for price and superior results. At one point in time anyone who could afford it went to France to get treated for Aids. People travel for medical reasons all the time; some how i don't think the theory holds water.
Canadian politician travels to U.S. for surgery
- Thread starter B_starinvestor
- Start date
I had the same issues with seeking out a dermatologist (8 month wait even for an appt.) Although the issue wasn't serious as it were.
Or - said differently - if people from other countries are visiting the U.S. so they can 'jump in line' - will the ability to get expedient treatment for life threatening procedures go away with the passage of a healthcare bill?
And I'm not belittling shoulder surgery in any way - but I'm particularly interested in the lag time relating to cardio or other potentially life threatening procedures. I know they have serious issues with this in England as well.
It does if you're trying to demonize Canadian health care. Take one meaningless example and run with it. Works all the time with the gullible. Like Iraq and aluminum tubes as PROOF Sadaam was seeking WMD's.
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American Wait Times
Here's a fun puzzle. Fill in the blanks in the statement below:
EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect
Waiting times in U.S. hospitals and clinics are becoming so lengthy that even one of the nation's biggest insurers, Aetna, has admitted to its investors that the U.S. healthcare system is "not timely" and patients diagnosed with cancer wait "over a month" for needed medical care, said two leading organizations of doctors and nurses recently.
Lost in the recent flurry of attacks on Canada and other nations with publicly funded healthcare systems, spurred by the popularity of Michael Moore's "SiCKO," is the reality of the huge hurdles faced by many American patients, said the Physicians for a National Health Program and the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/76295.php
Here's a fun puzzle. Fill in the blanks in the statement below:
In his talk, __________ conceded that "the ___ healthcare system is not timely." He cited "recent statistics from the Institution of Healthcare Improvement… that people are waiting an average of about 70 days to try to see a provider. And in many circumstances people initially diagnosed with cancer are waiting over a month."
If you said "Troy Brennan, CEO of Aetna," and "United States," you'd be right! If you said Canada, or Britain, you'd be wrong. The article goes on: EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect
Waiting times in U.S. hospitals and clinics are becoming so lengthy that even one of the nation's biggest insurers, Aetna, has admitted to its investors that the U.S. healthcare system is "not timely" and patients diagnosed with cancer wait "over a month" for needed medical care, said two leading organizations of doctors and nurses recently.
Lost in the recent flurry of attacks on Canada and other nations with publicly funded healthcare systems, spurred by the popularity of Michael Moore's "SiCKO," is the reality of the huge hurdles faced by many American patients, said the Physicians for a National Health Program and the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/76295.php
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You're still missing the point, purposely, I suspect.
Mr. Williams was not being denied timely access to treatment, as I believe you very well know. He was simply not as highly prioritized as he would have liked, there being others in more dire need than him. He is a wealthy man who used his resources to leapfrog ahead of those who had been assessed and given a higher priority than he. Good for him. But since our system is largely set up to prevent precisely that, he had to "flee", as you put it, elsewhere to get it. To infer from this that there is therefore something "wrong" with Canadian health care is more than a stretch, it is bordering on obtuse.
Yes, Canadian health care is rationed - on the basis of medical necessity. US health care is also rationed - on the basis of financial ability.
B_VinylBoy
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Nicely stated! What's even sadder is that some people really think that it's perfectly fine for basic health needs in our country to be decided on the basis of one's bank account.
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B_talltpaguy
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People want to talk about insurance companies withholding necessary care and fucking people over???
It literally took my insurance company TWO FUCKING YEARS to approve surgery to repair my neck, which was injured in a wreck that was 100% the other guy's fault. They kept saying I merely had 'spasms', needed to take some painkillers and get over it.... basically their way of saying, we have your money and don't care how excruciating the pain is or how badly compressed your spinal cord shows up on MRI after MRI. We ain't paying jack shit. (why? Because I was dealing with THREE different insurance companies, who were all giving me the run around, blaming each other)
Finally one day, the pain was so acute, I gave up and just went through the emergency room and lied and said that I had no insurance (I swear on my daughter this is true). Now that I was dealing with a doctor who wasn't being bossed around by my insurance company, well voila! they reported that I had 3 ruptured discs and that my spinal cord was 40% compressed. I was in surgery by 2pm the next day.
And the end of that story was I had to get a lawyer to fight their BS (because then they all tried to get out of paying that emergency room visit), over 2 years of being needlessly disabled (I should have been approved for surgery within 30 days, not have to go to an emergency room after almost 700), and at the end of the day, I still had to go through a medical bankruptcy to discharge over $150k in trumped up medical 'bills'. (that's how much was left over after 'insurance' paid what scraps they were somehow forced to pay)
And this is what someone went through who had THREE insurance companies who had been paid to cover the costs of exactly this sort of event!!! (Progressive, State Farm and Humana)
And for anyone who doubts my story or that I'm somehow exaggerating, shoot me a PM. I have extensive paperwork, pictures and can name names.
(oh and yes, this was quite a life changing event for me... Being needlessly disabled and having the bankruptcy destroy my credit killed my original career path, which was into real estate finance... It also cost me many friends who were out living life, while I was stuck in bed or on the couch if it was a good day... This is how someone can grow up a Republican and sound as reflexively rightwing as the kooks you read here, and then one day reality hits you in the head, and you get a different perspective on how the world really works for most people)
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I'm sorry to read this.
I wish you had shared this earlier - instead of redirecting your anger to people on this site just because they don't share your political views.
You see, there is some phenomena in which a large group of people think that all people that are conservative or right-leaning simply don't care about the type of struggle that you endured.
And that is completely untrue. There may be a tiny, insignificant fringe group that is not concerned with anyone's well being. But I do not fall into that group, nor do my peers that I know very well and that are very conscientious and concerned/thoughtful about these very issues.
Again, I am sorry to hear that you suffered through such an atrocious scenario.
B_talltpaguy
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^It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but it was also far and away the best thing that ever happened to me... Being forced to sit on my ass (I was very much an outdoorsman/athlete before that) got me online for the first time, where I got involved with moderating a few large web forums relating to my hobbies at the time. That led to the people I met later and started our own online community, which has now grown to be one of the most heavily trafficked 'topical' communities on the internet. (our members generally discuss a certain broad topic that will remain unnamed, with some of them (a few thousand) participating in local politics to achieve that end... and no, I don't know anyone here well enough yet to trust them not to go to that site and start shit, so I'm not naming it, even in PM)
Three sites I like to name that we get more annual traffic than... the official American Idol site... WebMD... All US federal government websites, combined.
:banana:
Three sites I like to name that we get more annual traffic than... the official American Idol site... WebMD... All US federal government websites, combined.
:banana:
Star, I visited my doctor Sept 20, 2001 because I was having intestinal pains. She ordered a ultra sound scan which was done the next day, at the lab in her building. The following Monday her office called and asked me to come in after lunch. She said she saw some kind of a shadow on the scan and want me to have another scan and sent me off to Lion's Gate Hospital in North Vancouver. I got there a 3 o'clock waited about an hour the scan. I don't remember if it was a CAT or an MRI, but there was a big tube and the bed moved though it. An hour later a surgeon came out to the waiting room and sat with my wife and I and told us I had a growth the size of a women fist in there and they wanted to cut it out ASAP. ASAP turned out to be the next morning. That's right... my waiting time in a public hospital was about 18 hours. I stayed in there for 4 days, then had a nurse visit at the house every day for another week or so. Lucky for me it was a non malignant tumor and all is ok.
My total out of pocket cost was $0.00. I even got paid some percentage of my salary from UI. I was back at work in six weeks. My insurance at the time for a family of three was less than 50 dollars a month.
We have a friend going under the knife to have 2/3 of her intestinal tract removed this week. She'll be staying in the guest house for a week afterwards so she can be close to the hospital. (They live on an island). She was diagnosed 2 weeks ago and they had to weigh the options about what to do. They decided on Tuesday to go ahead and the operation will be tomorrow.
Don't believe the propaganda. The system up north isn't perfect and it never will be. In fact it is impossible for it to be. Mistakes are made and people fall through the cracks because we are human and humans fuck up. But don't believe those who will take a small number of problems and scare you into thinking that those problems are the norm. They aren't. I personally don't know of anyone that suffered for a long time in Canada waiting for a treatment. It DOES happen. We have all read it in the news. But it is not even close to the norm.
The rest of the developed world isn't more clever then Americans. But you guys sure have been hornswoggled into a deal where you individually pay through the nose for treatment, or blood sucking insurance rates, and still have one of the worst overall health rankings in the developed world. It's astounding really that the cradle of free enterprise tolerates such a spendthrift system.
My parents are retired, and live in Florida. They have full Medicare and still spend $5,000 a year on health insurance! WTF?
My total out of pocket cost was $0.00. I even got paid some percentage of my salary from UI. I was back at work in six weeks. My insurance at the time for a family of three was less than 50 dollars a month.
We have a friend going under the knife to have 2/3 of her intestinal tract removed this week. She'll be staying in the guest house for a week afterwards so she can be close to the hospital. (They live on an island). She was diagnosed 2 weeks ago and they had to weigh the options about what to do. They decided on Tuesday to go ahead and the operation will be tomorrow.
Don't believe the propaganda. The system up north isn't perfect and it never will be. In fact it is impossible for it to be. Mistakes are made and people fall through the cracks because we are human and humans fuck up. But don't believe those who will take a small number of problems and scare you into thinking that those problems are the norm. They aren't. I personally don't know of anyone that suffered for a long time in Canada waiting for a treatment. It DOES happen. We have all read it in the news. But it is not even close to the norm.
The rest of the developed world isn't more clever then Americans. But you guys sure have been hornswoggled into a deal where you individually pay through the nose for treatment, or blood sucking insurance rates, and still have one of the worst overall health rankings in the developed world. It's astounding really that the cradle of free enterprise tolerates such a spendthrift system.
My parents are retired, and live in Florida. They have full Medicare and still spend $5,000 a year on health insurance! WTF?
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Vince, I wish that there was a simple manner to fix this. There was a time when I would have agreed with many more conservative individuals. The "free enterprise system" depends on honest competition. If there is no honest competition, "free enterprise" becomes financial enslavement because the "bad guys" get together and quietly begin "price fixing". They do this with absolute impunity and have, by the creation of extremely strong lobbies proven very successful at "short circuiting" what was at one time one of the best medical systems in the world. There are numerous examples, all of which had the best intentions.
Here are a few: Most States in the United States have enacted mandatory laws requiring motorists to carry automobile insurance. The statements when the laws were enacted to sell both the motoring public and the elected officials was that requiring insurance on all vehicles would reduce costs. What happened was just the opposite. Within two years of a state enacting these laws, motor vehicle insurance rates escalated a great deal. What we now have is a legislative act that requires a person to purchase a specific product or service under mandate at their own expense. Once this went through, the Insurance Companies knew well that they would easily be able to hang on to it by creating a verbal "smoke screen".
In many locations electric utility rates were fixed under government regulation requiring an approval by a given governing board before a utility cost could be raised. In California and several other locations the privately owned utility companies fought and poured millions of dollars into campaigns to give themselves the gift of "deregulation". Under the specifications of "deregulation" we had the creation of companies such as Enron. Remember that Enron did not generate or create one single watt of electricity. What Enron did was to "mark-up" and broker energy manipulating the market, creating shortages and generating multi-billion dollar profits for a company that in truth did nothing but manipulate. California was particularly hard hit and in the end something that was supposed to save the average consumer a ton of money when "competition" was opened up, instead became a series of outrageous rate hikes. This had ripples nationwide with many power generation companies.
There are others, but these are the two most glaring examples of how much the American people can now trust Corporate America. Again, this is the history of the old "Robber Barons" repeating itself. The main difference is that they now have Government Help.
Most Countries now covering their populations with socialized medicine did not start out this way. What they found was that there were places where corporate greed caused more problems and that basic corporate structure and needs was counterproductive to the services the populations need.
I do not remember which one, but there is one country in South America which has coverage so extensive that they even cover cosmetic surgery.
Not being a resident of any of the countries functioning under socialized medicine I cannot speak from personal experience. I however do have friends in the U.K. and I have friends in Canada.
In all cases those I know who live under socialized medical programs they are basically satisfied especially with average health care. There are some questions and problems when exotic procedures are required simply because the systems are not set up as a whole do deal with things that happen rarely by statistic. The socialized systems are best when the problems are under the heading of routine care and routine "maintenance". As time has gone on, the socialized systems have improved when more "esoteric" things come into the need category.
Interesting Observation:
I have a friend living in Palm Springs, California who is a kidney transplant patient. That friend is about 12 years into his transplant and is doing well. However, his carrier is cutting back on all the medications he is required to take including cyclosporine which is the main anti-rejection drug he has to take to keep the transplanted kidney alive. He had been on dialysis for years before the transplant and developed renal osteoporosis from that treatment to keep him alive. He has numerous health problems from the years on dialysis and now it almost looks like his own insurance carrier wants him dead. If he loses the kidney his insurance carrier has told him that he will not get another one. They spend over six figures years ago transplanting a kidney, then they cut back on the coverage to keep that patient alive and healthy, where is the common sense in this one?
When Lyndon Johnson was in Office Medicare was the disaster. The arguments by conservatives were exactly the same as they are with universal health care (read socialized medicine). The one interesting thing is that the Medicare System already in place gives us a framework and basic structure for our own "Universal Health Care" system. If it was done well the United States would NOT be starting from "scratch" like many others before us.
We have the ability to do something that is good. Our problem is that it would basically place Insurance Companies making incredible profits in jeopardy and they are spending billions of dollars which are removed from the health care pool to see to it that they can go on indefinitely doing exactly what they are doing right now.
We will never win this until we expose the whole mess and the politicians come clean with the truth. I don't see much hope for this happening.
Here are a few: Most States in the United States have enacted mandatory laws requiring motorists to carry automobile insurance. The statements when the laws were enacted to sell both the motoring public and the elected officials was that requiring insurance on all vehicles would reduce costs. What happened was just the opposite. Within two years of a state enacting these laws, motor vehicle insurance rates escalated a great deal. What we now have is a legislative act that requires a person to purchase a specific product or service under mandate at their own expense. Once this went through, the Insurance Companies knew well that they would easily be able to hang on to it by creating a verbal "smoke screen".
In many locations electric utility rates were fixed under government regulation requiring an approval by a given governing board before a utility cost could be raised. In California and several other locations the privately owned utility companies fought and poured millions of dollars into campaigns to give themselves the gift of "deregulation". Under the specifications of "deregulation" we had the creation of companies such as Enron. Remember that Enron did not generate or create one single watt of electricity. What Enron did was to "mark-up" and broker energy manipulating the market, creating shortages and generating multi-billion dollar profits for a company that in truth did nothing but manipulate. California was particularly hard hit and in the end something that was supposed to save the average consumer a ton of money when "competition" was opened up, instead became a series of outrageous rate hikes. This had ripples nationwide with many power generation companies.
There are others, but these are the two most glaring examples of how much the American people can now trust Corporate America. Again, this is the history of the old "Robber Barons" repeating itself. The main difference is that they now have Government Help.
Most Countries now covering their populations with socialized medicine did not start out this way. What they found was that there were places where corporate greed caused more problems and that basic corporate structure and needs was counterproductive to the services the populations need.
I do not remember which one, but there is one country in South America which has coverage so extensive that they even cover cosmetic surgery.
Not being a resident of any of the countries functioning under socialized medicine I cannot speak from personal experience. I however do have friends in the U.K. and I have friends in Canada.
In all cases those I know who live under socialized medical programs they are basically satisfied especially with average health care. There are some questions and problems when exotic procedures are required simply because the systems are not set up as a whole do deal with things that happen rarely by statistic. The socialized systems are best when the problems are under the heading of routine care and routine "maintenance". As time has gone on, the socialized systems have improved when more "esoteric" things come into the need category.
Interesting Observation:
I have a friend living in Palm Springs, California who is a kidney transplant patient. That friend is about 12 years into his transplant and is doing well. However, his carrier is cutting back on all the medications he is required to take including cyclosporine which is the main anti-rejection drug he has to take to keep the transplanted kidney alive. He had been on dialysis for years before the transplant and developed renal osteoporosis from that treatment to keep him alive. He has numerous health problems from the years on dialysis and now it almost looks like his own insurance carrier wants him dead. If he loses the kidney his insurance carrier has told him that he will not get another one. They spend over six figures years ago transplanting a kidney, then they cut back on the coverage to keep that patient alive and healthy, where is the common sense in this one?
When Lyndon Johnson was in Office Medicare was the disaster. The arguments by conservatives were exactly the same as they are with universal health care (read socialized medicine). The one interesting thing is that the Medicare System already in place gives us a framework and basic structure for our own "Universal Health Care" system. If it was done well the United States would NOT be starting from "scratch" like many others before us.
We have the ability to do something that is good. Our problem is that it would basically place Insurance Companies making incredible profits in jeopardy and they are spending billions of dollars which are removed from the health care pool to see to it that they can go on indefinitely doing exactly what they are doing right now.
We will never win this until we expose the whole mess and the politicians come clean with the truth. I don't see much hope for this happening.
midlifebear
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Vince: That's what keeps me in Barcelona -- well, that and my quality of life is so much better than anywhere I could live in the USA. Although, I would still move back to San Francisco where I spent 1966 to 1980 fucking my brains out. During an extended stay at my ranch in Nevada, I made an appointment with a pleasant, but very old, 'Mericuhn physician who graduated Stanford Medical school probably in the 1950s. He's the best point man one can find out in the wild and woolly if you need authorization for a prescription refill or break a bone. He talked me into having the usual blood workup (although I was visiting just to get a refill on my emergency stash of Valium).
$345 later (in just lab costs) he noted that everything was fine, except my PSA was almost 4.1 (it can go as high as 10 and you can still be prostate cancer free, but not too often). He told me to have it rechecked when I returned to Spain. I did. Total cost: 0. But the PSA had risen to 4.4? Anyway, high enough in a short period of time to be of concern. I had picked out a urologist from doing some on-line research. In Spain, it's common to find satisfaction ratings for the quality of care a physician provides. The guy I picked turned out to be very compassionate. Like me, he packs an unusually large tool. So, I immediately felt at ease knowing that someone who understands the problems of packing a long johnson would be advising me.
He stuck his fingers up my butt and remarked than my prostate gland felt "unusually small." He had me have both a PET and MRI, another scan with me juiced up with radioactive dye, and then a prostate biopsy. Of the 24 or so samples of my little man walnut, 18 of them were positive. But the cancer was still confined to just my prostate. He gave me a shot that stopped my body's production of testosterone for about 6 months and told me first of all, not take his advice regarding how to proceed with eradicating the cancer. He told me to read up on it. As long as my body didn't produce testosterone the cancer would not grow.
I talked with a urologist in Reno, NV, two urologists in Twin Falls, another urologist in Salt Lake City -- all highly recommended by 'Mericuhn physicians I respect. None of them were as impressive as my urologist in Spain. And ALL of the 'Mericuhn docs acted as if I had asked if I could fuck them until they bled when I inquired what their costs for various procedures would be. However, they were all so excited that that I had prostate cancer they probably would have been happy to have cut out my prostate gland with a Swiss Army knife on their office desks and charged me $70,000. All of them, by the way, recommended major surgery. All of them except my doc in Barcelona.
When I returned to Spain I asked my original urologist about brachytherapy, a rather successful procedure for folks like me with Stage 1 cancer. And then I asked if he would be willing to take me on as a patient and do the procedure. Fortunately, he was kind enough to take me on as a patient with Spanish residency. He didn't have to. He is a private urologist with a private practice. However, he also teaches part of each year at Hospital Austral, about 50 kilometers outside of Buenos Aires. So, if I wanted him to do the procedure, I'd have to fly to Buenos Aires. No problem. My husband is a porteño with an Italian passport. And his family has a guest house where we stay when we visit.
I actually had the procedure done at the urologist's clinic in down town Buenos Aires. Cost of the procedure: 0. Cost of all pre and post lab costs, including follow up: 0. Cost for his house calls -- remember them? -- : 0. The round-trip plane ticket from Barcelona to Buenos Aires: 0 (Delta Skymiles).
On the 16th of this month I go for my last PSA in test 4 years and major and followup blood work. I'm rather confident that I'll still be cancer-free. In fact, after 5 years I should not have to worry about having a PSA test. The procedure my Spanish urologist performed left me intact. I still have a prostate. I can still get it up (without erection enhancing pills). And for the last two years I've actually been producing a substantial amount of real sperm in my ejaculate.
None of this would be possible if I had gone under the knife in the USA. If I had listened to the "specialists" in the USA, I'd most likely be heavily invested in adult diapers by now.
Last summer I had to spend several months in Nevada. Again, I visited my go-to point doc in Elko. I asked him why 'Mericuhn docs are so gung ho about prostate surgery when it isn't necessary. His answer: money.
$345 later (in just lab costs) he noted that everything was fine, except my PSA was almost 4.1 (it can go as high as 10 and you can still be prostate cancer free, but not too often). He told me to have it rechecked when I returned to Spain. I did. Total cost: 0. But the PSA had risen to 4.4? Anyway, high enough in a short period of time to be of concern. I had picked out a urologist from doing some on-line research. In Spain, it's common to find satisfaction ratings for the quality of care a physician provides. The guy I picked turned out to be very compassionate. Like me, he packs an unusually large tool. So, I immediately felt at ease knowing that someone who understands the problems of packing a long johnson would be advising me.
He stuck his fingers up my butt and remarked than my prostate gland felt "unusually small." He had me have both a PET and MRI, another scan with me juiced up with radioactive dye, and then a prostate biopsy. Of the 24 or so samples of my little man walnut, 18 of them were positive. But the cancer was still confined to just my prostate. He gave me a shot that stopped my body's production of testosterone for about 6 months and told me first of all, not take his advice regarding how to proceed with eradicating the cancer. He told me to read up on it. As long as my body didn't produce testosterone the cancer would not grow.
I talked with a urologist in Reno, NV, two urologists in Twin Falls, another urologist in Salt Lake City -- all highly recommended by 'Mericuhn physicians I respect. None of them were as impressive as my urologist in Spain. And ALL of the 'Mericuhn docs acted as if I had asked if I could fuck them until they bled when I inquired what their costs for various procedures would be. However, they were all so excited that that I had prostate cancer they probably would have been happy to have cut out my prostate gland with a Swiss Army knife on their office desks and charged me $70,000. All of them, by the way, recommended major surgery. All of them except my doc in Barcelona.
When I returned to Spain I asked my original urologist about brachytherapy, a rather successful procedure for folks like me with Stage 1 cancer. And then I asked if he would be willing to take me on as a patient and do the procedure. Fortunately, he was kind enough to take me on as a patient with Spanish residency. He didn't have to. He is a private urologist with a private practice. However, he also teaches part of each year at Hospital Austral, about 50 kilometers outside of Buenos Aires. So, if I wanted him to do the procedure, I'd have to fly to Buenos Aires. No problem. My husband is a porteño with an Italian passport. And his family has a guest house where we stay when we visit.
I actually had the procedure done at the urologist's clinic in down town Buenos Aires. Cost of the procedure: 0. Cost of all pre and post lab costs, including follow up: 0. Cost for his house calls -- remember them? -- : 0. The round-trip plane ticket from Barcelona to Buenos Aires: 0 (Delta Skymiles).
On the 16th of this month I go for my last PSA in test 4 years and major and followup blood work. I'm rather confident that I'll still be cancer-free. In fact, after 5 years I should not have to worry about having a PSA test. The procedure my Spanish urologist performed left me intact. I still have a prostate. I can still get it up (without erection enhancing pills). And for the last two years I've actually been producing a substantial amount of real sperm in my ejaculate.
None of this would be possible if I had gone under the knife in the USA. If I had listened to the "specialists" in the USA, I'd most likely be heavily invested in adult diapers by now.
Last summer I had to spend several months in Nevada. Again, I visited my go-to point doc in Elko. I asked him why 'Mericuhn docs are so gung ho about prostate surgery when it isn't necessary. His answer: money.
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Smooth88
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Doesnt mean jackshit Star. If there's a highly acclaimed expert in some field of surgery you want to go for you will travel for his services. Doctors are available but experts like Dr. James Andrews are few and far between. Thats with ANY type of healthcare system.
Competence is not created because of a healthcare system. Suggesting that would be absurd.
midlifebear
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Smooth88: Thanks for trying. You'll no doubt discover that trying to reason with Starpooper is useless. He's our very own "speical needs" child in the political forums.
Oh, I believe it does.
If you read the link in the OP, you will see that Williams visited his cardiologists in Canada - who said that he had a valve issue, but was only a 'moderate' health risk.
Eight months later, he was examined again, and the cardiologists told him that the risk was 'severe' and required surgery immediately.
He then contacted a former Canadian who was practicing in New Jersey - who in turn, referred him to Dr. Lamelas.
It appears:
1. the initial diagnosis was suspect, at best
2. Williams didn't even consult with those doctors - he contacted a Canadian doctor that (for some reason) left the Canadian healthcare system and was now practicing in the U.S.
3. The skilled specialists seems to be (interestingly) all in the U.S.
Again - if the healthcare system doesn't matter in terms of expertise - then why are the world's leading experts all coincidentally in the U.S.??
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Palin Crossed Border For Canadian Health Care
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin -- who has gone to great lengths to hype the supposed dangers of a big government takeover of American health care -- admitted over the weekend that she used to get her treatment in Canada's single-payer system.
Palin Crossed Border For Canadian Health Care
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin -- who has gone to great lengths to hype the supposed dangers of a big government takeover of American health care -- admitted over the weekend that she used to get her treatment in Canada's single-payer system.
Palin Crossed Border For Canadian Health Care
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Now that's just plain UNTRUE. Did you ever hear of a continent called EUROPE? Believe it or not they have EXPERTS there to who do all that research kind of stuff.....
But she is such an idiot she is likely either:
1. Making this up, or
2. Doesn't even know where the border is.
B_VinylBoy
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That's even more proof that Palin shouldn't be talking about health care.
Evil, Socialized, Canadian Healthcare... bad for "real Americans", but not always bad for an American "like me". Gotta love the hypocrisy here! LOL!!
