http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49102
The beginning of the end of socialist health care?
Posted: March 4, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern - WorldNetDaily.com
Canada's government-run national health system, often held before Americans as a model method of delivering medical care, has been gradually falling to pieces in recent years, and last week it received what many fear will prove the knock-out blow.
That blow came from Alberta where the provincial Conservative government of Premier Ralph Klein is defying federal laws intended to safeguard the system against private medical practice. Klein unveiled a plan to institute a controversial "two-tier system" in his province – meaning two levels of medical care, one run by the government and delivered without fee, the other delivered privately with a fee attached.
This would end in Alberta the utopian socialist vision that inspired the institution of state medicine in Canada four decades ago, wherein rich and poor alike were to get the same level of care. But it was a vision increasingly belied by reality, because the rich could acquire the best care simply by traveling to the United States.
This they have been doing in ever larger numbers because waiting times for surgical and other specialist services in Canada can run to as much as two years, and people sometimes die waiting for them. One of the central causes for this was the exodus of doctors to the U.S. where their income would wildly exceed what they could earn in Canada.
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