Canadian Health Care: Free But Unavailable
So I used the Health Care Options Directory on the same government website. This allows you to plug in your postal code and find all family doctors listed within a certain radius. It is a particularly soul-destroying experience.
The opening page lists no names or phone numbers, just the number of doctors at each address. It takes more clicks to get the contact information. And after you go through those steps and make the calls, you find that none of the doctors are accepting patients.
I phoned all 84 doctors who were listed as practising within 10 kilometres of my home. Some of their receptionists were polite. Some were surly. All rejected me.
But for $3,000 you can find a doctor at the drop of a hat! Editorial here. HT: David Henderson.
Great post. Needs to be read and re-read by socialists everywhere.
I agree with Thom H.
So this is what “free health care” really means.
This would be funny if it were not so sad.
This makes perfect sense. Of course care that is unavailable can be provided for free. The marginal cost is zero! It’s like the really good loss leader sales on Black Friday after Thanksgiving. Invariable there are stores that advertise an incredible price on plasma televisions with the fine print… 10 available at this price. The first 10 people in line (those that got up at mid-night and camped out in front of store until 6:00 am) got a great price on an plasma TV. The other 1,000 people who came later were disappointed.
Some things sound really good in theory. Practice is a different story.
Who’d have thunk it?
Very telling article/blog post.
I would have liked to learn what would they have said had you offered them money for their services? It would be interesting to learn if they would’ve accommodated you then.
Uh-huh…
Approximately 5% of Canadians who actually try to find one can’t find a regular family doctor.
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/040615/dq040615b-eng.htm
You have read an anecdotal editorial from one of those 5% and generalized it to the entire national health care system.
You neglect to mention I notice that depending on which study you reference between 25% and 40% of Americans have inadequate or zero access to a regular family doctor. Puts things in a *slightly* different light when you include that information now doesn’t it?
And that’s with the Canadian system costing half as much to run. Let’s not overlook that little detail.