
There are two things at work here ... the public insurance is very
wide in what it will cover, as the amortization is also universal.
No private plan can boast of a plan that fits a Gaussian curve ...
and as our private sector has discovered, they're better off not
offering insurance coverage that their customers are going to use.
(-;


The alternative to the system is no system at all (patients opted out,
doctors opted out, or both).  But that only for insurance ... and you
can't force a private insurance company to sell you a plan that they
will not offer.  And remember that the actual health care is delivered
by private entities who collect from the public insurance voluntarily.
Again, they can't force a private entity to spring to life to pay them.

Plus, there is the matter of culture and values ... I'm basically
anti-tax and anti-government, by Canadian standards ... yet I can't
bring myself to make the same arguments as you do, despite that I
understand where you're coming from.  Up north, you're so much more
likely to find someone protesting taxes going to defence than health
insurance premiums to only one fund for basic coverage ...


Yes, primarily in Quebec and in Alberta.  Sorry, I musta lost you in
that verbose blurb ...


In Canada and Germany, it's not mandatory.  However, it is negative
option in that you must request the exemption.  That the private
sector will not provide private basic coverage if offered the option
(as in the Quebec case) tells me something about what they know ...


Yes, but part of the reason is that our most of our markets are
too small to sustain many specialists, sometimes not even one, so
you pretty well have to be a GP to get paid.  And if you do get
the training, the doctors monopoly might block your getting of a
licence because there is already someone in the business and who
cannot fill his/her appointment book.  That we have a CMA doctors
monopoly is something that the American AMA-oriented medical lobby
NEVER tells you down here ...


No, I respect people who do specialties (okay, all of my MD friends
are (-;) but there's the question of our small market dynamics up
north ... if anything, that our private doctors and hospitals sell
their services to Americans to generate more business will inflate
their effective population served, and thus make some specialties
finally viable (i.e., there will be enough customers).  We just do
not have enough sick Canadians in absolute numbers otherwise.


Uh ... Germany basically uses our method, with their many sickness
funds.  The competition is fake if it exists at all, because they're
all interlinked.  Look in Der Spiegel or Stern (my girlfriend is in
our German department  and her uncle is a private practicioner in
Saarbrucken) ... no ads for health insurance.  While Canada organizes
by province, Germany organizes the paperwork around big corporations
and regional offices.   But remember that we have provinces that have
the same population as some major German corporations.  Germans have
public health insurance, just that it is brokered by smaller entities
(actually, brokerage of basic by private firms who'll sell extra
insurance to fill out their policies, sort of a voucher system,
was one of the first ideas floated in Canada, too).

Remember, the Germans don't have HMO's ... a telling sign, 'cos
Rochester does and they're also a company town.


I'll have to let a Canadian MD jump in to verify that claim, but
I've come to learn to suspect anything in the American press about
our "system".  If much or some of it were true, you'd have to take
us for idiots for tolerating it.  And given that our insurance was
installed during a period when there were only Liberal and Tory
governments federally and provincially, and the socialists are still
chafing, they would've pressed for real socialized medicine to fix
things ... think about it.  After all, we are using the U.S. as a
metric to make comparison ... both for keeping-up-with-the-Joneses
as for confirming that we did something right.

gld