Should Canada adopt Swedish Health Care?
- Thread starter Machjo
- Start date
Well, maybe you need to talk to some of the people from those countries to know for sure. My son and his wife take in students from Germany. They are all grade 11 students and most stay from Sept. through June. If they get caught drinking or using dope, they get sent home on the next plane. That said, in June, their parents take a trip to Canada to pick up the kids. I've never seen a parent yet that isn't totally in awe of our medical system. They are totally stunned by what we pay and speak of how expensive their own costs them. Maybe being 30th isn't so bad.
But there is always room for improvmeent, and that means learning from the successes of other countries.
First of all. Canada is the second largest country in the world in Land area. Our system works very well for most Canadians but when the population gets too thin in some areas, those areas suffer a bit.....In some areas they suffer a lot. The best solution would be to shore up those areas as best we can to solve what we can. It will probably end up that we throw a bit more money at these areas. One thing we have to realise is that Sweden's system will have the same problems that our system has in the areas we mentioned. There is no magic answer.
Machjo!
Don't you recognize a stab at the US debate?:roll:
I'd say more but #juan has covered it rather well.
I like some points of both the Swedish and Singapore models. We should incorporate those ideas into our our. Subsidized private care competing with public care and a nominal user fee to prevent abuse. Enforced health savings plan from the beginning.
Personally, I'm not for the extreme capitalist idea of just abandoning people to themselves when they need help. But I'm also not for helping those who won't help themselves; it must be a two-way street. One possibility I could see would be to distribute health-care funding on a per-capita basis. If that puts rural populations at a disadvantage, then let's offer to pay their moving expenses should they wish to move to more urban centres where they might get better health-care for cheaper. After all, you can't move to the middle of nowhere and then expect everyone to pay for the transport to get services to you or you to the services.
Again, I'm all for helping people, but they have to be willing to meet halfway. If a person doesn't like populous cities, there would always be the option of high-density low-population cities. Population density doesn't necessarily have to equate with a large population.
By the way, per-capita health-care might bring about positive results in urban areas too. With urban areas having such high real estate prices, it's likely many hospitals and clinics would want to move to the suburbs or poorer parts of town to benefit from lower real estate costs, which in turn would benefit urban development in poorer parts of town and suburbs, bringing more jobs into the suburbs too. And again, if health care in expensive cities ends up being too expensive, then that could give people an incentive to move to smaller towns too, thus promoting high-density yet low-populaiton towns where health-care can be delivered efficiently owing to the higher-density without too much spending on medical real estate owing to the greter availability of property.
Our health-care system isn't bad, by no means. On a world scale, 30th is a damn good showing. But 30th isn't first, which proves that there must still be something wrong with our health care system. Heck, France was first, and we can still pick out problems with its system. unless our ssytem is perfect, there is always room for improvement. I'm not saying that our system is suffering from insurmopuntable problems, by no means. I am saying that, though health care reform is by no means a priority in Canada right now, it still has, and always will have, room for improvement. To not be willing to come up with ideas on improving it, and pretending it's perfect, is the beginning of the apathy that will lead to it having serious problems 70 years down the road. Any good system must always advance to remain good, otehrwise it will only fall behind.
Why not just move everyone in BC to Kelowna, Kamloops, Prince George, and Vancouver. Hell, why not just move everyone to Vancouver. We can buy our food at Safeway, we don't need to grow it.:roll:
Now you say that people should move back out of the cities. Make up your mind. Definitely better pave over that farm and that ranch so we can house more and more people.
Not necessarily. What I'm saying is that if we divvied up health care spending on a per capita basis, people living in more isolated areas far from any town centre, etc. would suffer since physicians would also be charging for transport costs. Those living in high real estate areas would suffer too since physicians would be charging for the high real estate costs. This would affect mainly those in large urban areas such as Toronto, Vancouver, etc.
This would likely motivate people living far from any town to move into the towns, and those living in more expensive areas to move to less expensive areas. Essentially, it wold motivate people to move to less expensive higher-density areas. Chances are the ones that would benefit the most from this would be high-density but low-population towns.
Serious problems in 70 years? The last projection I saw was that by 2050, Canada will be spending at least 70% of its budget on healthcare at the present rate unless things change. It's already around $200 billion and will go up another 9% next year according to projections.
So instead of having 4 million people in Vancouver we should have 2000 people living on 20 acres in Salmo?
I don't see why it would not be possible for farmers to live on the outskirts of town, as is likely the case in most towns anyway. There's no need for farmers to live way, way out in the middle of nowhere. For example, why not encourage more urban development in agricultrual provinces like Saskatchewan while encouraging more agricultural development in the suburbs of Tornoto or Vancouver. Bring people closer together and it saves on transport costs, taxes on transport infrastructure building, etc. Why do we need to produce most of our wheat in Saskatchewan and then all live in Southern Ontario?