Paying For Health Care Second Most Important Driver of Canadians’ Financial Planning
Dundee Goodman, a Canadian wealth-management firm, surveyed clients with over C$100,000 in investable assets. Investing for retirement income was their most important goal. The second was health care.
While investors under 50 (34 percent) are least likely to identify health care as a priority, the overall average was 46 percent…And even among respondents with $1 million+ to invest, 41 percent identify “health-care needs” as an important investment objective.
This may come as a surprise to those who believed President Obama when he said that expanded health insurance would prevent people from going bankrupt because of ill health. Even in Canada, with a single-payer, government-monopoly health system that is the envy of central planners in the U.S., illness seems to threaten financial security.
As we have previously reported, the expansion of health insurance does not seem to have much impact on personal finance:
The Canadian-based Fraser Institute finds that bankruptcy rates in Canada are very similar — if not slightly higher — than rates found in the United States and there is no difference between bankruptcy rates in Massachusetts and the United States as a whole.
The risk of depleting one’s assets due to adverse health outcomes in retirement are not overcome by a managed system. In fact, the command markets just make the risk greater.
Seems to me the same dynamic would be present even with a market-based approach, but the impact would be less in a real healthcare market.
“This may come as a surprise to those who believed President Obama when he said that expanded health insurance would prevent people from going bankrupt because of ill health.”
I think most of the state of health care today must come as a surprise to those who believed anything the president said about Obamacare.
This must really say something about the state of Canadian health care as well.
Interesting that even in the Canadian single payer healthcare system, healthcare cost is still a fear for many.
“Even in Canada… illness seems to threaten financial security.”
Cost is still a factor regardless of how a particular country’s health care system is run. For the U.S. to model Canada as the best healthcare system should show that there is no perfect, cost free system.
“the expansion of health insurance does not seem to have much impact on personal finance.”
If it doesn’t improve personal finance by incurring less cost, and if it doesn’t improve access to care and quality of care, then what is the point?
To expand big government
And increase government spending with money we don’t have.
I wish the federal government would realize that regulating something and throwing lots of money at a problem is not a viable solution.
So Obamacare in a nutshell?
It is also the second most important task for a graduate student…
That’s why the young people were rushing the online health insurance marketplace…
I don’t think that the main reason why Canadians save for healthcare is their concern about not being able to pay the medical bills. I believe that what worries them is the potential income they will lose if they fall ill and unable to work for an extended period. We cannot focus solely on the monetary cost of the health care itself, we have to consider the additional cost illnesses bring, and when we take those into account, we will realize why Canadians save for healthcare.
A simple example, imagine if you have a cold in Canada during the winter and you increase the temperature of your heater. The cost for the health services will be extremely low, but the additional heat will cost a significant amount.
I live in Canada. It is convenient not to have to pay for my health care on a piecemeal basis. But my taxes are significantly higher than US taxes. It is difficult to find a primary care physician due to deliberate doctor shortages by government policy, and because of low reimbursement rates to family doctors. Specialists must be accessed through a primary care physician, there are long waits for initial appointments, and long waits for surgeries, MRIs, and many other procedures. Long-term care is not covered. Over the years, government has cut back on what procedures it will cover also, so there are more expenses we must pay for. Employer health insurance helps, but it is variable regarding what is covered. The system is not consumer-friendly because every doctor has more business than he/she can handle, so there is no downside to being hard to get or just plain rude. It can take hours just to get through to the office by phone. The per capita costs are held down by government decisions about what to pay, and by simple inaccessibility to expensive procedures. Health outcomes are generally no better than the US and sometimes worse. I could go on….
I wish there were a deeper dive into the answers. However, the way to solve that problem is through short-term and long-term disability insurance. There’s nothing that can be done about it through the health-care “system”.
I believe (through my own experience” that those insurance markets are similar in both countries, i.e.private, usually employer-based markets for disability insurance, as well as Social Security or Canada Pension Plan disability.
Even with their national health insurance, Canadians are exposed to drug costs if they need a rare and expensive medication. Also I think they are exposed to the cost of long term care.
That being said, the “health care and bankruptcy” argument used by the single payer advocates here in America was always one of their weaker arguments.
a. No distinction was made between those persons who went bankrupt WITH health care bills versus those who went bankrupt BECAUSE of health care bills. Without conducting thousands of individual audits, I am not sure that any researcher could determine this issue.
b. Bankruptcy after health care is not the worst thing in the world even when it does occur. Which is better: to get your cancer in remission and then go to court and file a lot of papers and find it hard to get credit……or to go on a waiting list with your credit intact but being racked by pain in a country with free health care?
There are some instances of greedy hospitals almost hounding uninsured patients into bankruptcies. But these cases are correctable and in fact have been corrected in several states.