The Healthcare Debate, revisited

From the Washington Monthly comes this rather excellent interview/debate on private v.s. public health care. There’s not too much worth summarizing, so I’ll just give you a few teasers from the article itself.

For private care:

At that time there were something like, I think, five CAT scans in the Province of Ontario. Now, at the same moment in 1984, there were some hospitals in America that had five CAT scans. CAT scans were in doctors’ offices. And this is sort of a small thing but it tells you the cost. Canada has achieved a wonderful thing, which is universal health-care coverage, but it has achieved it at a price, and that is quality of care.

For public care:

My wife’s sister had a very premature baby born in Edmonton six years ago, the kind of baby who normally lives in about 20 percent of cases—and they had eight months of intensive care. I mean really intensive care. And the baby ended up living. It was a pound and a half at birth, the smallest baby that survived in western Canada in that year. The one thing they never thought about, the one thing they never considered, the one thing they never had to pay a moment’s attention to was: How much will this cost? When does our insurance run out? It simply was not in the agonizing equation of worry and concern that they had to face. That seems to me, in itself, the most powerful argument you can make for socialized medicine, to put it in the bluntest possible terms.

And then there are views not so easily categorized…

What a man wants from a health-care system is a system that is acutely oriented, not chronically oriented, that is much more interested in quality of care, much less interested in access. A man doesn’t need access to care until he’s very old. He wants a high end, super-specialized system that when he has something seriously wrong with him fixes it right away. A woman, on the other hand, wants a system that’s low tech, that sacrifices quality for a kind of presence. She can go to the doctor three times a month if she wants to and get a personal relationship with that doctor.

The Canadian health-care system is a health-care system for women. The American health-care system is a health-care system that is perfectly situated for men. This whole debate about what is better, the American system or the Canadian system, is essentially a variant on the gender war.