It would also require doctors to pay 2 percent and hospitals 4 percent of their revenues to help cover higher reimbursements for those who treat patients enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.
California Plan for Health Care Would Cover All - New York Times
Interesting…using revenues from a private system to fund a public system. I’ve heard that idea before….oh yes! I’d been suggesting it for years in Canada, only to have people tell me I was crazy.
Of course, the situation in Canada is exactly the opposite. They have a die-hard communist-like publicly funded system. Even attempts to privatize the administration of a hospital (as opposed to the medical care), as occured a few years ago with the Royal Ottawa Hospital, are met with fierce opposition and rhetoric. Many supporters of the current status don’t even care if the exclusively public system receive bad care, as long as everyone receives the same bad care.
So call me a capitalist. In Canada, that can be an insult (well, less so now that the Tories finally won).
The thing is that for quite a while in the late 90s as the situation degraded I watched as politicians faced the taboo of even mentioning the words “private healthcare”. It was a career-ending subject. The irony is that I recall sometime in 2000-2001 I heard an interview on the radio in which a former MP who was involved in drafting the Canadian Healthcare Act said that the current system is not what they envisaged. They intended the law to ensure that “everyone would have access to healthcare”. What occured in practice is that the law has been hijacked to essentially require that “everyone would have the same access to healthcare”. That last addition is very significant.
Around the same time I became a good armchair quarterback and started debating the issue with friends and co-workers. I tried in vain to point out that Canada already had a 2-tier system. Anyone who could afford a trip to the US and private care there didn’t have to put up with the delays in Canada. All I was advocating in effect was to lower the bar. Of course, being a socialist country, most that I spoke with were opposed. “It would never work”, they would say. Some said it would bankrupt the public system. The thought that all of the money to private care would somehow cause doctors to run from the public system, leaving it without anyone to staff it.
Even though I don’t believe this would occur, I did some brainstorming and suggested a few ideas. Doctors serving private care could be required to work a certain number of hours per month in the public system. I suggested that rather than decreasing funding, having a parallel private system would increase the funding to the public system and therefore actually improve the service. How? By taking a percentage of revenues (not profit) from private care facilities and using it to fund the public system. Of course, the socialists all said this was rediculous, impossible and simply unworkable. Ok. Sure. Whatever.
So now is Canada going to wait to see this work in California before getting off its butt and implementing a full private system to improve care?
[tags]healthcare, canada, california, medicare[/tags]
