On Medical Tourism

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Do you have any evidence that you'd like to put forward to support these claims? Are you certain that Canadians and Germans and the French and Swedes and Norwegians flock to the United States for every medical procedure?


For every medical procedure? No, of course not. But many Canadians do cross the border for treatment.

It is no secret that the density of medical practitioners and facilities is much higher in US counties within fifty miles of the Canadian border than elsewhere in the US. That's because a significant portion of their revenue is derived from Canadians. This is especially true of diagnostic services (MRI, CAT scanners, PET machines, etc.) Until a few years ago there were more MRI machines in the city of Philadelphia alone than in the entire country of Canada. That may still be the case for all I know... that figure is from 2003 and I haven't seen more recent ones. When I was passing through the small town of Mineral Wells, Texas, in the summer of 2005, I saw three clinics on the main drag alone whose signage stated they did MRI scans. I think it highly unlikely those were the only three MRI machines in the entire town. It's not like I was searching the whole town or anything -- I was just passing through on my way to somewhere else and happened to notice this fact. How many more MRI machines were there in that one small town alone that I don't know about? How many are there in the capital city of Saskatchewan?

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I, personally, don't know a single person who has ever had to leave Canada for any sort of treatment whatsoever.


I personally know several. But you reject anecdotal evidence, so I won't go into a lot of detail except to say one of them flew not to the US but to Germany to have her procedure done. She says it saved her life.

Then of course there was the widely reported case that ended up in front of the Quebec Supreme Court, where some guy whose name escapes me at the moment tried to recover from the Canadian government the costs of his travel and treatment to England (I think it was) because he would have had to wait some absurd amount of time to have it done in Canada, and it was a condition where time was of the essence. One of the lady judges on the Court wrote in her opinion (paraphrasing now since I don't have the decision in front of me at the moment) "Access to a waiting list is not the same thing as access to health care".

I see a lot of arguing over "efficiency" here. In medicine, "efficiency" is not a cut and dried concept. Are we talking dollars and cents efficiency or timeliness efficiency? Because if it is the latter, the US system wins hands down.

And even if we are talking dollars and cents, don't forget that in Canada, prescription drugs are not covered. So someone waiting a year and a half for an "elective" surgery (a knee operation or hip operation, say) could burn through thousands of dollars of pain medication waiting for the surgery. In the meantime, they might also be disabled to the point they cannot work properly, or even at all, which means extra costs to other government redistribution programs such as workman's compensation or disabilty benefits or unemployment insurance or whatever.

Then of course there is the whole quality of life issue -- how do you assign a dollar value to that? It's no picnic being semi-crippled and suffering chronic pain for months (or in some cases a year or more) on end.

It is this last reason more than any other that leads so many Canadians to cross the border and get themselves treatment immediately. Sure, they could wait and eventually get it done for "free" in Canada. Did you ever stop to think WHY so many prefer to spend the money to get fixed up NOW rather than wait months and save a couple thousand bucks? Do you think it is because these people are stupid or something? Remember, the folks who get this work done outside Canada never get reimbursed for their expenses -- they still pay the same taxes as everyone else. Yet they dig into their own pockets regardless. These people get socked twice -- they are paying US prices for the medical care they actually receive AND they are paying Canadian prices for that same care which was never delivered. But to these folks, it's worth it.

That fact (and yes, Gnote, it is a FACT) speaks volumes about the relative merits of the two systems.



Phred