Critics of the single-payer Canadian health care system insist that Canadians suffer intolerable waits for treatment and a shortage of technology that denies them the most advanced care. In educational materials created for Physicians for a National Health Program, doctors David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler respond:
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“In the United States excessive investment in high technology equipment sometimes worsens the quality of care. Research has shown that surgical teams must perform a minimum number of complex procedures each year in order to maintain their competence. . . . Yet, more than a third of California hospitals that perform open heart surgery have dangerously low volumes that raise both death rates and costs . . . ”
Himmelstein and Woolhandler report that “for virtually all cardiac-related diagnoses and interventions, Canadians receive care at rates comparable to insured [their emphasis] Americans.” Citing a study that compared elderly Americans covered by medicare with elderly Canadians, they note, “Hospital admission rates for both medical and surgical care were comparable with the single exception of coronary artery bypass graft surgery, which was substantially more common in the U.S. than in Canada. This procedure is almost certainly overused in the U.S.”
The GAO said long waiting lists sometimes exist for diagnostic services such as CAT scans and MRIs because the equipment is in short supply. Himmelstein responds that the U.S., however, has an overabundance of such machines and “is not likely to destroy them all if we were to convert to national health care.”
