Small Cabin

I’d rather see companies sticking to their knitting and just paying higher salaries and workers compensation for work related injuries.

Canada as some fake news from south of the border has yelled, it can *feel* like rationing when you're waiting 9 months for a specialist appointment, and some treatment that might work is not available since some bureaucrats have said it's "only

So in the Ontario model, his care was rationed, in BC it was not.

Coronavirus Exposes the Sickness of Our Shoddy Safety Net

“ For the moment though, these concessions to the reality that (contrary to libertarian dogma) human beings aren’t wholly autonomous individuals — but rather, inescapably interdependent social animals — remain merely hypothetical. ”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/coronavirus-paid-leave-health-care-trump.html

$100M to go to moving, merging and upgrading Alberta’s operating rooms to cut wait times | Edmonton Journal

“Private clinics currently perform 15 per cent of Alberta’s surgeries, but the province hopes to increase that to 30 per cent by 2022-23”

https://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/100m-to-go-to-moving-merging-and-upgrading- albertas-operating-rooms-to-cut-wait-times

Province to spend $100M on operating rooms to shorten wait times | CBC News


The government had already announced in last week's budget it intends to double the number of surgeries performed in private clinics. By 2023, 30 per cent of Alberta surgeries would be done outside of hospitals, if the government achieves this goal.

In its 2019 election platform, the United Conservative Party pledged to reduce surgery wait times to no more than four months within four years of taking office. Its goal was to reduce the number of people waiting more than three months by 75 per cent by the end of government's first term.“ ...

According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, wait times for non-emergency coronary bypass surgery, hip replacements, knee replacements and cataract repair all rose between 2014 and 2018. For cataract repair, in 2014, 71 per cent of Alberta patients had surgery within 112 days of referral. By 2018, only 49 per cent were in the operating room within that 112-day goal.

Alberta did improve access to urgent hip fracture repair surgeries during that time. In 2018, 94 per cent of patients were under the knife within 48 hours.

Critics question privatization plan

...”

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/surgery-kenney-shandro-hospitals-health-care- 1.5485367

UCP government shifts focus of Alberta’s addictions treatment to recovery - The Globe and Mail

Despite demand and Alberta’s growing addictions crisis, about 50 of Thorpe’s 72 beds have been sitting empty, said Ms. Krueckl, the non-profit’s chief executive officer. Chunks of the accredited facility are essentially shuttered; Thorpe turned down the heat and shut off the lights in dead zones.

“We do have a whole wing that we don’t utilize,” Ms. Krueckl said. “The beds are there, ready to be made."

...
“ There are 1,396 treatment beds in Alberta, according to Marshall Smith, the chief of staff for the Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions. Of those, Alberta Health Services directly funds 228 beds. Another 500 beds are funded under AHS contracts, 309 are supported through other government programs, 114 are on reserves and an additional 245 are not financed by the government. The government does not know how many treatment spaces all of those beds amount to.

In the unfunded beds, the costs are covered by patients, insurance companies or non-profit organizations. The government, however, says ...”


https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/alberta/article-ucp-government-shifts-focus-of -albertas-addictions-treatment-to/

Health Care Crisis

KC
Join Date: Mar 2006 Posts: 19879

#30
07-11-2009, 08:59 AM

Funny how we always whine about the lack of planning - after the fact. Read on...

Jeremy Grantham, who manages over $100 billion, wrote this about the financial crisis but I think it speaks to a lot of the problems we seem to have these days... Blame it on HR departments I guess


"Why is it that several dozen people saw this crisis coming for years? I described it as being like watching a train wreck in very slow motion. It seemed so inevitable and so merciless, and yet the bosses..., none of them seemed to see it coming."

Our government and banking leaders are "management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget are somewhat impatient." However, "seeing these things requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained, but we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers. So it's more or less guaranteed that every time we get an outlying, obscure event," a Black Swan, "that has never happened before in history, they are always going to miss it. And the three or four dozen odd characters screaming about it are always going to be ignored."

- GMO Quarterly Letter Fall 2008 Part I



What's also fascinating to note is how few people participated in the thread discussion below (started before anyone had even heard of the Mexican swine flu). Compare that to all those participating in this thread... Successful planning involves thinking about specific threats and senarios not traditional fuzzy policy level stuff that can never be translated into real action and all this capitalism vs socialism dogma and mumbo jumbo where the "system" solves all problems.

Also, about 10 yrs ago - before SARS - on another forum I suggested "wash stations" to be installed at hospital and care facility entries and exits to prevent anyone from entering or leaving without washing their hands. That thread too died a miserable lonely death like these 'planning' threads... (I've got lots more too.)

Pandemic Planning - Jan 2009
http://www.connect2edmonton.ca/forum...ad.php?t=10675

Strategy for next Recession/Depression - June 2006
http://www.connect2edmonton.ca/forum...read.php?t=480
Last edited by KC; 07-11-2009, 09:08 AM.


Health Care Crisis
https://www.connect2edmonton.ca/forum/regional-issues/alberta-provincial-politics/148 16-health-care-crisis/page2

That is a comment on how it went from story du jour to a non event.

I wouldn't be surprised if this sentiment may soon apply to this ebola outbreak. Still, note my first posting on ebola in this thread. Each outbreak has done more and more damage over the past 40 or so years. That just doesn't seem very encouraging.

The point is to determine what rational steps should be taken well in advance for various pandemic scenarios where a pesky bug gets out of hand and then have criteria that automatically kick in and not have a lot of high level confusion and emotion driving the response. (Basically, we need 'an equipment and supplies are at the ready' provisioning scenario - even if the equipment leaves a lot to be desired. As things are now, hospitals alone would seize up with any significant problem. eg. Speading ebola geographically as a result of an airplane ride might be a luckier happenstance than spreading it in a tight geographic location with only say one hospital, possibly very ill equipped to handle more than one case at a time.)

Ebola is a really slow moving threat (time wise) but think back to SARS, H1N1, etc. where the threat spread much faster. In some future scenario people will be wasting time debating, protesting, witch hunting and appointing weirdly qualified czars rather than trying to anticipate needs and responses?

https://www.connect2edmonton.ca/forum/c2e-features/great-ideas-for-a-greater-edmonton /11081-pandemic-planning


Yes, we should take the Katrina response as our cue (for rare but predictable events). Anyway, since the risk of a spreading flu is in the news again with the Mexican deaths and risk posed by what's possibly swine flu, I'm wondering if people are thinking about what courses of action things might take.

Just as when I started this thread, my worry is that a pandemic might create unnecessary shortages and supply bottlenecks of key products because of a sudden, but of course very predictable demand with coincident supply chain failures. 'Naturally', the rich countries get the goods (food, fuel, vaccines, masks, cleaning supplies, bleach, oxygen, etc.) and the poor countries perish.

Actually, maybe I spoke to broadly. Say with surgical masks - these days I wouldn't be surprised if they are all made in China or somewhere so if the proper filter material starts to run short I could see them stopping or limiting exports to supply their own people first. We could also expect to receive substandard, fake and ineffective product.

My thinking may be flawed but wouldn't creating artificial demand and small stockpiles before a crisis, lessen the demand and at the time of an actual crisis. I can't see how production systems will have the capacity or supplies to ramp up fast enough to meet the peaks in demand.
Last edited by KC; 25-04-2009
https://www.connect2edmonton.ca/forum/c2e-features/great-ideas-for-a-greater-edmonton /11081-pandemic-planning

Canadians Increasingly Come to U.S. For Health Care | Best Countries | US News

“...Universal health care is a source of collective pride in Canada, which boasts one of the highest life expectancies and lowest infant mortality rates in the world.

However, the Canadian health-care system is far from perfect, and its shortcomings are a hot-button topic north of the 49th parallel.

Contrary to popular belief among Americans, health care is not entirely free for Canadians. Dental, ambulance and many other services as well as prescription medications must be paid for out of pocket or they're covered through a combination of public programs and private health insurance. About two-thirds of Canadians have such insurance.

...”

[url=https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2016-08-03/canadians-increasingly-come-to-us-for-health-care]

Canada succeeded on coronavirus where America failed. Why?

May 4, 2020


“...
Third, and finally, every expert I spoke emphasized the value of Canada’s single-payer health care system at this crucial moment, especially when compared to America’s extremely expensive and low-capacity system.

The reasons varied. Some pointed out that, in a single-payer system, the universality of care meant that everyone would go to a doctor if they needed a test or treatment. If care is affordable, poor and marginalized communities — like, say, undocumented migrants — are less likely to become hot spots than they are in the American system, where out-of-pocket costs can be prohibitive.

Others argued that a single-payer system gives Canadian authorities coordinating powers that their American counterparts lack.

When the government controls the system of payment for health care services, rather than leaving decisions up to hospitals and insurance companies, they have a huge amount of power to commandeer the health system for national goods. If a Canadian hospital is having a spike in cases and needs an emergency shipment of PPE, the government can work to get it shipped over from a less-needy hospital. If an American hospital is having the same problem, they’re going to have a tough time getting it from a competitor (absent a level of aggressive police intervention we haven’t seen here).

It’s a little tricky to say how much of the difference between these countries can be explained by the specific nature of Canada’s health care system. If you look across the world,...”


That’s as true on the coronavirus as it is on anything else. The Canadian experts I spoke to had no shortage of complaints about their country’s response.

The most striking such failure ...“It is profoundly troubling and deeply disturbing to me how broken this part of our health care system is,” Susan Bartlett, a professor of medicine at McGill University, told the New York Times’s Dan Bilefsky.

Canada’s indigenous population is another important problem area. These communities, some of which are so isolated that they can only typically be reached by aircraft, are chronically under-resourced and underprivileged.
...”



https://apple.news/An-tkS49wSsaQlq6D34nv5g

Why is the Canadian healthcare system faring better than its counterpart in the US? | openDemocracy


The Canadian single-payer system contributes an average of 2% of its spending to administrative costs, while the average American private insurance company will spendapproximately 18% of revenue generated on billing and administration. Limitations in the single-payer system, as well as savings on administrative costs, exist however, as only 70% of Canadian healthcare is funded publicly. The majority of the remaining 30% of healthcare costs is consolidated in the spheres of pharmacare, dentalcare and eyecare. All three are not covered by centralised provincial health insurance plans and require Canadians to obtain private insurance to supplement their coverage.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/why-canadian-healthcare-system-faring-bet ter-its-counterpart-us/

The Canadian single-payer system contributes an average of 2% of its spending to administrative costs, while the average American private insurance company will spendapproximately 18% of revenue generated on billing and administration.

I guess we should start by finding the top 10 or 15 healthiest populations in the world (by various measures) to see what systems they use.