By Clark Newhall
The Charlottetown Guardian, Prince Edward Island, Canada
August 26th, 2010
I live in the U.S. 10 months of the year and in P.E.I. two months. From the election of Obama to the present, I have strongly advocated for medical care financed like Canada’s medicare. We have your system in the U.S. and we, too, call it Medicare — but we Americans only have the right to decent health care if we are over 65. Our last best chance to achieve what you have achieved — person-based health care instead of money-maker medicine — disappeared when Obama could not or would not stand up to bottom-feeders like Limbaugh, Beck and the Drudge Report.
Now the U.S. is on the way to a completely ‘market’ driven form of health care — if you are worth little in the ‘market’, then your health and your life is also worth little.
During our 10 years here, we have been in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital ER and in Souris hospital several times with our epileptic child. The experiences we have had are typical of ER’s everywhere — sometimes we wait, sometimes not — sometimes we get frustrated, sometimes not. Obviously, as non-citizens here in Canada, we don’t have the right to health care that you take for granted. But never in Canada — repeat, never — have we had the demeaning denigrating humiliating experience, so common in the U.S., of being treated as a second (or lower) class citizen because we don’t have health insurance.
I am a lawyer and an ER doctor. Nearly every person who comes to me with an injury caused by medical care is also a person who did not have insurance. In other words, your way of providing health care to everyone is also the reason that your health care is healthy and safe. When doctors know that everyone is equal, then everyone is treated with equal skill and attention. It works that way here, as it should. Despite what you may hear from wingnuts who read Drudge and other smudges, it does not work that way in the U.S., and it will never work that way as long as the ‘market’ rules medicine.
Count yourselves blessed for the medicare that you have. When we return to the U.S. in a few days, I will wish we had what you take for granted.
Clark Newhall MD JD is a physician and attorney in Salt Lake City, UT and a summer resident of Monticello, P.E.I. He founded HealthJustice.org which, along with Mike Farrell of TV’s M*A*S*H, produced a national TV campaign in 2009 explaining Medicare For All to Americans.