"Canadian socialized medicine sends baby to US for care"

[krister]

Ugh. the healthy Americans against reforming medicine are going to be all over this.
A right winger posted this article elsewhere with the above subject as the title.

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http://cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20090626/090626_BABY_PASSPORTS/20090626/?hub=CP24Home

HAMILTON — A critically-ill premature-born baby from Hamilton is all alone in a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital after she was turned away for treatment at local facility and transferred across the border without her parents, who don't have passports.

Ava Stinson was born Thursday at St. Joseph's Hospital, 14 weeks premature.

A provincewide search for an open neonatal intensive care unit bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two pound, four ounce baby to Buffalo.

Her parents Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson couldn't follow their child because as of June 1, a passport is required to cross the border into the United States.

They're having to approve medical procedures over the phone and are terrified something will happen to their baby before they get there.

The Canadian Consulate in Buffalo is providing advice and guidance to the first-time parents, and their local MP, New Democrat David Christopherson, is working to arrange emergency passports.

But that will take until at least Monday afternoon and the situation is complicated by the fact the baby's dad has a criminal record.

"I just want to be with her," said Paquette.

"She only knows my heartbeat, my voice and her daddy's voice. It's all I can think about. I feel so helpless."

[RandomThoughts]

1. I hope the baby is alright and the parents can be with her soon.

But thinking this is an argument is broken logic.

The argument is care for everyone will lead to not enough care and not enough hospital beds, which means some people will not get heath care.

But we already have that but it is based on money, where the bottom percentage gets little care.

The only difference is care is not based on money but 'need' in a system with a public medicine plan.

And the fix to the problem is not leaving millions without care, it would be to expand the pool of health care workers and clinics. Something that has actually gone the other way, as universities have lowered the amount of doctors they allow into medical school. Then again, having more doctors does not mean more profit, only better health care.

[PeaceNikki]

2. Anecdotes are not data

http://www.bspcn.com/2009/06/27/debunking-canadian-health-care-myths/

[jeff30997]

7. Thanks for the link.

A lot of debunking on that site.:)

[and-justice-for-all]

3. Ok.....and......nt

[Historic NY]

4. Parents separated from baby after transfer to US hospital because they lack passports..

of course if one checks there are many cases of cross border arrangements that have had problems since this law went into effect.

[annabanana]

5. Rich sick babies get to travel.. . .. . .n/t

[zbdent]

10. the only illegal immigrant the Repukes wanted was Elian Gonzales ...

and that was so that they could embarrass Clinton and thus Gore ... despite the fact that it was international law, and Repukes had gone on and on for decades saying that a child needs the influence of his or her father in life ... and the father was in Cuba ...

[merwin]

6. So the Canadian govt is footing the bill to send the child to the US for care.

Sounds like they made the right call there. The disconnect happened when OUR government didn't let their family in.

We're the fucked up ones in this story, not them.

Would my health care provider pay for my child to travel to Canada for care if somehow there wasn't enough room in the USA? Nope! Probably wouldn't cover a dime of it. And the worst part is that even if I did manage to get my child to Canada for care, they would most likely do everything they could to expedite the process of getting me in along with my child.

[geckosfeet]

8. The baby was sent out of country for care - and not left to die. The parents

will no doubt get some kind of passport soon.

I see this as triumph for health care. Services were provided and a life was saved.

It is however, unfortunate that there were no facilities nearer to the parents able to care for the baby. Hamilton where the baby was born is about an hours drive from Buffalo. Toronto is a little closer but apparently there were no open beds.

I'd say the system worked.

[DrDan]

9. sean inSanity will be all over this story

[baldguy]

11. Five yrs ago Kaleida Health wanted to close the Women and Children's Hospital of Buffalo

Supposedly too old, too small & not "suburban" enough - and not profitable enough. Other hospitals could provide the same service more efficiently. Thankfully, the public outcry was enough to enough to scuttle that idea.

For several Canadian communities, Buffalo has to closest emergency care facilities. You could throw a rock from Fort Erie, Ont and hit Buffalo, but Toronto is an hour away.

[YewNork]

15. Toronto is an 90 minutes away - IF there's no traffic. That trip took me 4 hours once.

[iverglas]

12. comments here have it right

- The baby's care will be paid for by the Ontario provincial health plan, 100%.

- The decision not to allow the parents to accompany the baby was made by the US government.

I have no doubt that the parents will be issued a passport virtually immediately, and possibly already, by the Canadian government.


There is a forever tradition of cooperation across the US-Canada border in all sorts of things, and border communities on both sides have always exchanged goods and services almost as if there were no border. "Cross-border shopping" was practised across the frozen St. Lawrence River during the War of 1812, in fact.

There is not huge excess capacity in the Canadian health care system. Remember that we have a population 1/9 the size of the US, far more scattered across a larger area (even not counting all the essentially uninhabitable land mass).

Do people in US communities not have to travel to other communities for medical services on occasion?

We occasionally have to obtain services south of the border, whether because of specific capacity problems or because of a lack of very specialized expertise arising out of the rarity of a particular service. (For instance, provincial plans have paid for women to have late-term abortions in the US in pregnancies with serious fetal defects discovered late in the pregnancy, because the procedures were not familiar to physicians here.)

And you get oil and gas and electricity from us.

We are, after all, each other's biggest trading partner!

[SidDithers]

13. See how well single-payer works?...

The governmnet will pay for treatment wherever it is available. This story is not an example of the failure of the Canadian system, but an example of how well universal single-payer health care works.

Sid

[YewNork]

14. Notice however that the insurance system in Canada will be paying for the full cost

The medical system in Ontario sent the baby to the nearest hospital that had available space,
in this case, Buffalo. To some, this is viewed upon as being a failure of Canada's system
- that they had to send a Canadian abroad for treatment. I view it as a strength of that
system. The system had a patient, and they did whatever it took for that patient to
be treated. Cost was not one of the variables in the equation.