Sophie's Choice Case Study

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What if a child with a potentially fatal disease had only one option for a cure, a treatment that cost 100 million dollars. Would you expect our publicly funded medicare system in Canada or a private insurance company in the USA to pay for it, or to opt to let the child die under the theory that the 100 million dollars could be better spent saving many more lives?

It a decision worthy of Sophie's Choice, where saving one life means condemning others to certain death, a decision that no rational human would feel comfortable making.

But the reality is that these decisions are made every day by government bureaucrats here in Canada or nameless insurance actuaries in the United States and belies the truth that we cannot provide maximum healthcare …show more content…

Bureaucracy and low productivity are the Achilles heal of the single-payer system whereby layers and layers of administrators rob the system of valuable resources and where inefficiency due to poor management and oversight are the bane of the system.

This can be best illustrated by the administration of health services in Quebec versus the rest of Canada, whereby Quebec's infamous bureaucracy and abysmally low productivity rate demonstrate how two single-payer systems operating under the exact same rules can register different results.

Let us remember that 25% of Quebecers cannot find a family doctor despite the province paying for more doctors per capita than Ontario. It is illustrative of how bureaucracy, bad management and laziness makes Quebec's healthcare system so bad as compared to other Canadian provinces, despite having equal financial …show more content…

The problem here is the cost, wherein many cannot avail themselves of the services because they don't have the means to pay or the insurance to cover it.

This is the American version of rationing.

When people vaunt the benefits of the American system over the Canadian system they always point to the availability and quality services as compared to Canada, but always fail to include the crucial aspect of access, whereby too many Americans are locked out of this fantastic medical system.

In the end no system is perfect, but let us consider that Canada spends half of what the USA spends on healthcare and I can only imagine how much better our system would be versus Trumpcare or Obamacare if we had double the