Saturday 28 March 2009

Canadian doctors respond to idiotic claim.

A number of scurrilous schlock news outlet and tabloids are slagging our medical services and repeating one US doctor's speculative claim that Canada's health care system failed Natasha Richardson.

Meanwhile Canadian physicians kept their calm and responded rationally to the ill-founded opinion piece.

The implication “is totally unjustified,” said Paul Saba, an emergency room doctor at Lachine Hospital and co-president of the Coalition of Physicians for Social Justice. He flatly rejected the notion that a lack of funding for overall public health care contributes to fatal head injuries like the one that claimed the life of Richardson ... Saba stressed he was not commenting specifically about Richardson, but “any patient’s refusal of treatment is crucial” to the outcome. ...

Paul Brunet, president of the Council for the protection of patients, said ... “And with all due to respect to the Americans, we don’t need any lessons from them about health care,” Brunet added. Canada doesn’t “have 50 million people without health care like they do.”

4 comments:

THE OLD FELLOW said...

All I can say is we don't have people die on the steps of a hospital for lack of money.
The only thing that would have been different in the US is if Richardson had wanted care, in the US she would have had to prove she had the money to pay.

Anonymous said...

Let's talk about the masses of walking ill in the United States - the ones who die too young from preventable causes such as poverty, diabetes, malnutrition obesity, liver and heart disease. And gun-related deaths....
(Silly me, none of those lives really matter.)

That guy said...

Apparently human beings would not be mortal if only Canada were to privatize its health care system. Who knew?

deBeauxOs said...

Dr Dawg blogs about this, with updates from other US publications.

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