Canuck prof's inspiring op-ed: Canada’s universal health-care system makes us live democratically

[hunter]

2. Let me be the first to recommend this!

Historically here in California (and much of the USA I'd guess) we'd have three tiers of hospitals in every large community. There was the hospital that treated the white well insured people, the hospital that treated the insured working class (often Kaiser), and the hospital that treated everyone else.

Sadly, not much has changed today except that the country club hospitals don't overtly exclude people who are not white and also accept a limited number of patients they know can't pay.

A fourth tier of medical services is also expanding -- these are the prison hospitals.

What's interesting is that the outcomes one might expect at any of these hospitals was often random. A working class hospital, or even a county hospital often had better outcomes than the country club hospital because they were concentrating on getting the job done and paying much less attention to the latest fashions in expensive technologies, surgeries, or pharmaceuticals.

The major attraction of the country club hospitals was that a racist white person wouldn't ever end up sharing a room with a "colored" person.