Marcel on Health Care

Marcel Berridge (of the My Left Wing Girlfriend weblog) talks about the stunning differences between two healthcare systems right here in Canada.

Go read his article before reading the extended entry below.

It boggles the mind to think that it is possible for pets to receive faster, better-organized, more personalized, and more friendly healthcare than their human owners are able to get. And it's absolutely true.

My wife works in a vet clinic. I know how much the staff at the clinic care about their patients and the families of their patients. They do their very best to ensure that the cats are properly diagnosed and treated. But they are paid for their work . . . by the families of the patients.

One of the comments on Marcel's original post talks about "the Vet's next Porsche purchase". That by itself shows the utter ignorance of the commentator: you do not go into veterinary medicine to get rich. For the length of academic study, it's probably the worst-paid bio-science field there is. The veterinarians, vet assistants, and vet technicians could all earn significantly higher wages in other fields for the same investment of time and money in training.

Medicine, whether for humans or for other animals, is an expensive field: typical Canadians don't really know this, as a rule, because we don't pay for it directly. Vets, as a rule, don't have the latest and greatest equipment because they are running private businesses which have to finance equipment purchases out of their own funds. They generally have the best compromise they can manage between what's available and what's affordable.

Treatment for patients must be decided with an eye to costs: Fluffy may need treatment X, but if it's going to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, Fluffy's owner is left with an unwelcome decision to make. We never think of this in terms of our own healthcare: instead of rationing by dollars, we ration by time. The resources are still scarce, but we pretend that delaying surgery for a painful ailment is better than paying extra to get the surgery done sooner; in fact, in Canada, there's no choice involved at all.

The other pernicious effect of hiding the actual costs is to increase the demand for relatively trivial treatments (which could often be taken care of by family doctors, walk-in clinics, or even pharmacists). If you never see a bill, you never feel any reason to limit your personal demand on the system. It's rational for you to extract as much personal benefit from the system as possible: you paid taxes to support it, right?