I need to get this off my chest. I am very interested in the debate in the US between private health care and public health care. I am a Canadian and have lived under a socialized system for my entire life. I am tired of reading blogs and forum posts that continue to perpetuate complete myths about socialized health care. These are the main ones I hear that I would like to dispel: 

1. You will no longer have any choice over your doctor or what hospital you can go to. The government assigns doctors to you! 

Ok, I honestly don’t know where this comes from! Doctors are never assigned to people in this country!

Here’s how you get a doctor in my city: first, you go onto the website for my city and click on the link entitled, “Doctors that are accepting patients,” secondly, you choose the area of the city you live or work in…or whatever part of the city you want to travel to to see a doctor. Thirdly, you look at the list of doctors and choose one. In order to help you choose the doctor you can look at comments provided by patients of these doctors on how they rate their services. This process of choice is the same whether you are homeless or a millionaire.

As for choosing a hospital, well, they are all run by the same executives and follow the same policies. Choosing different hospitals won’t get you better care. In fact, each hospital strives to give equally great care. Choice is based on location and availability of beds. 

2. The government controls what the doctor can and cannot do!

Please! The government wishes they were this powerful!

Plain and simply, doctors do not work for the government. They are self employed. The only difference is that they send the bill for their services (as do the hospitals) to the government as opposed to the patient or their insurance company.

Doctors answer only to their licensing body, as do nurses and all health care professionals.

In fact, I think there’s much more freedom for doctors. They don’t need approval from insurance companies for procedures. The doctor is in control of what is necessary and it is more likely to be based on the patient’s needs than profit margins. 

3. You have to wait months to get into the hospital or go for procedures!  

Sometimes this is true! But only for minor surgeries that are being done for comfort reasons. For example, if someone needs a knee or hip replacement because it’s painful to walk they may have to wait a little while (but not the exaggerated amounts of time that you hear).

And no, patients don’t walk around with broken hips. If you are in trouble and you need help right away, you get it right away! I’m tired of hearing ridiculous stories of patients who have to wait months for emergency bypass surgery, or years to get their ruptured appendix dealt with. 

Sure, you hear about people going to the states for procedures. However, this is for the extremely wealthy. If someone said to me, “you can pay $20,000 and have your knee replaced tomorrow, or wait a couple months and have it done for free,” well, I’ll wait! Going to the US for procedures is absolutely NOT as common as people think

4. The US has the absolute best health care in the world! People flock from all over the world to have procedures done here.

I hate to break it to everyone, but (brace yourself) all that technology that you have is miraculously available in the rest of the world as well!!!   

*gasp!*

Don’t flatter yourself. All the things you can do in the US can be done everywhere else. In fact, on my particular unit, the doctors specialize in a particular cutting edge procedure. Patients flock here from the US and all over the world to have it done. 

5. If the government runs the health care system, the bureaucracy will run the hospitals into the ground!

Are you kidding? The government is the only place billed. There’s no paperwork to fill out, just a healthcare number to keep on the chart. There’s no billing department to send out itemized bills to patients, insurance companies, etc. The administrative side of public healthcare is incredibly streamlined.

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OK, that’s all I can think of for now. I’m sorry if I offend. I simply am tired of people telling me all about this crappy system I work in when really they are completely misinformed about how this system works.