Thursday, January 27, 2011

The Joys of Private Healthcare - Not

Vietnam vet, Ron Flanagan of Colorado, has been in the fight of his life - against cancer - the past two years.   Last week he was getting prepped for a bone biopsy when his wife called.   His insurance company had just dropped him.

It seems Ron's wife, Frances, goofed when paying  a previous month's premium online.  She hit the 7 key instead of the 9, leaving the payment two cents short.  The insurer, Ceridian Cobra Services (never buy insurance from a company that names itself after a venomous snake), is sticking to its guns.

Only in America?  Not if our conservatives get a chance to shoehorn private healthcare into Canada.

4 comments:

Sixth Estate said...

I really don't understand the growing acceptance of private-payer systems. It's well established in healthcare (even if nowhere else) that public systems are cheaper to run that private, insurance-based systems.

We spend about half what the Americans do on healthcare, per person, and we cover a higher percentage of our population (all of it) with that smaller pool of money. Almost every problem in Canadian healthcare comes down to that.

We can fix that problem by either investing more publicly (resulting in a cheaper and more equitable system) or in a private one (resulting in a more expensive and less equitable one).

The Mound of Sound said...

There's a lot of money to be made by privatizing healthcare. That lone is powerful enough to keep the campaign rolling.

Beijing York said...

Just like there's lots of money to be made by privatizing the Canada Pension Plan as the CONservatives have proposed.

But what never gets mentioned is that money is only going to a very small minority of people.

Beijing York said...
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