Yes we can!

Well, that video presents a very important point that we should all take from the American health care system. The testimonial from Shona was in stark contrast to Michael Moore’s documentary where he shows relatives of his who are scared to go to the U.S. for even one day without Canadian health insurance. One should always suspect that there are two sides to every story and this video proves that. First of all, we should keep in mind that singular experiences are an invalid way for judging anything (they are great for propaganda purposes) and evaluation should be done on the basis of statistics. Statistics shows that Canadian wait times are quite high but U.S. wait times are not the lowest either. The biggest point with this testimonial is that although Shona survived, she will probably be in debt for the rest of her life. While the Canadian system may have people that fall through the cracks, the American system has large gorges where millions of people are falling through. In other words the American system needs to move towards the Canadian system if we are to take care of the millions of uninsured and underinsured.

That is not to say that there is nothing to be learned from this testimonial. The consumer idea of American healthcare is quite interesting, that is to say instead of taking the healthcare provided, in America the person is in a position of being able to demand services like a “consumer” and demand the services he or she wants. This works great for those who can afford it, but fails miserably for those in no position to demand anything. To answer the blog question more fully, the U.S. should step away from the consumer mentality towards a more public provision and financing of healthcare in order to cover more people. Since we elected those in government we can find politicians directly accountable for poor healthcare provision so in that respect we can demand services be provided. Now, one may argue that in order to bake a cake you need to break a few eggs and Shona was one of those eggs. I would tend to reject this argument in case of healthcare – no government or organization should be able to calculate people’s lives as chips to gain or lose, and zero tolerance is required. Thus, cases like Shona’s should be carefully considered and used to amend the system to avoid such cases in the future. Though unfortunate her case may merely be a symptom of the balancing act the Canadian government is undergoing to try and cover the largest population with the most health care access.