Hosers to Detroit

Canada’s doctors know what they need to save the lives of their patients: capitalism!

Patients need to think about getting private medical insurance, says the head of the Canadian Medical Association.

It’s time for the country to start talking about non-profit insurance co-operatives that patients could use to pay for uninsured medical procedures, “upgrade” their care and cover de-listed services like optometry and physiotherapy, according to Dr. Albert Schumacher.

In a signal of where the organization may be headed, Schumacher called the Canada Health Act a “monolithic dinosaur” carved in stone.

“If this was the auto industry, we’d all be driving Yugos,” Schumacher, president of the 60,000-member association, said in an interview.

The Yugo comparison is a brilliant example.  If Canada had passed a law requiring the government to provide everyone with equal access to their own automobile, a Yugo is about the best everyone would get.  Sure it’s a cheap, disgusting car that nobody actually would choose to drive, but hey, everyone gets one and nobody’s is better than anyone else.  And ultimately, that’s what counts.

“We like the idea (of medicare) when we’re in a car accident at 2 a.m. and we don’t want to have to worry. But there’s a bunch of stuff on the fringe — increasingly on the fringe — and people think because the government doesn’t pay for it it’s not important. But that’s not the case, and we’ve got to start working to change that mentality.”

Schumacher, a family physician in Windsor, said his patients routinely go to Detroit for diagnostics like MRIs or PET scans. The wait for MRIs in his area is six months, but just six days in Detroit; PET scans aren’t covered under OHIP.

“That is money that our community is losing,” he said. “We need to find a way to repatriate that.”

Now this is a fascinating little coincidence.  In Bowling for Columbine Michael Moore took us to the crime-ridden cesspool of Detroit.  Then he pointed across the river to the shining, happy socialist Utopia of Windsor, Ontario, and questioned why we couldn’t be just like them, with their unlocked doors and unlimited, free health care.  But here we see that Canadians in Windsor, who don’t feel like waiting six months for an MRI, have to cross over into the evil, heartless, capitalist, for-profit system of their mongoloid American cousins to receive treatment within a reasonable timeframe.

Do you think that Mikey will be intellectually honest enough to show us this in Sicko?  Not on your life.