KMAN wrote:
....snipsss...

My apologies for being unclear Tinkerntom.

Can I please try again?

Has rick PROVEN to you that Canadians are dying waiting for health
care?

If you will excuse and accept the following babble?

I have reviewed ricks evidence, and included some notes, and additional
links below. Since he encouraged you to look up additional links in
order to refute his claim, and claimed for himself that there were
other supporting links, I believe the links I have included would
represent a sample of some of the possible links for both of you. I did
not include links for organ donation since any donation represented the
death of the donator, and would have no meaning in this discussion. I
also did not include list of people on routine procedure list that
happened to die, but not as a result of the expected and waited for
procedure. Primarily this restricted me to cardiac and ontolgy list
where the procedure was a life saving procedure, and waiting could have
direct life changing ramifications.

Some of the links represent particular special interest groups with and
ax to grind, and any position they take on an issue should be
understood and interpreted accordingly. Various political, national,
and academic groups are represented. The first three represent ricks
links, and I would specifically point out the quote from #3 Univ of
Toronto regardings "claims can not be specifically confirmed or
denied", but this is due to lack of data. I do not know whether more
data has become available since that time, however there are now many
and various conclusions.

#7 specifically refers to Diane Gorsuch dying while waiting excessively
on a list. Which would support richs claim, and indicate that KMAN owes
rick an apology, since KMAN said "show me one person."

Lastly I would highlight #12 and echo the last comment, "I think people
can draw their own conclusions from the degree of difficulty we're
having in dealing with this particular problem right now." The format
of this forum is to present rudimentry ideas with minimal support, a
subject as complex as this one can only be hacked! Be careful not to
get caught on the chopping block!

To say that people have died because they are on the list, is different
from saying they they died while on the list. Some have definitely died
while on the list. No one seems to deny that there are problems in the
Canadian Medical System. These problems may be systemic of socialize
medicine, and there is a growing dissatisfaction with a call to
privatization, though that is not a panacea either. There are various
solutions offered, with various drawbacks. More money for medical. More
Doctors, or longer wait lists, which gets back to this thread. Longer
wait lists would likely result in more people dying while on those wait
lists. In the mean time there have been at least 1, and as many as 141
mortalities documented in a study for a particular year, and others
implied by study, so when do we hear your apology? TnT


1)
http://www.nupge.ca/news_2000/News%20May/n12my00a.htm

editorial by National Union of public and general employees "This
suggests that hundreds of people may be dying from what is quite simply
under-funding of the system,"


2)
http://www.cato.org/dailys/07-24-04.html

editorial by CATO Institute referring to Fraiser Inst. "Adding to
Canada's medical problems is the exodus of doctors. According to a
March 2003 story in Canada News, about 10,000 doctors left Canada in
the 1990s. Compounding that exodus is the drop in medical school
graduates. According to Miss Houston, Ontario has turned to nurses to
replace its bolting doctors. It is "creating" 369 new nurse
practitioner positions to take up the doctor shortage."


3)
http://www.utoronto.ca/hpme/dhr/pdf/Barer-Lewis.pdf

from Paper prepared for the Atkinson Foundation; from report prepared
for report to Health Canada in 1998. pg 8

"Claims about patients dying because of waiting too long cannot be
confirmed or denied from current research and information. This is a
part of the sorry state of wait list information in Canada. Even simple
statistics such as death from different procedures, or deaths of
patients on different lists, are simply not available."

4)
http://www.ices.on.ca/webpage.cfm?si...category_id=49

Analysis of deaths while waiting for cardiac surgery among 29,293
consecutive patients in Ontario, Canada, 141 deaths

5)
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/abstract/162/6/775

Benchmarking the vital risk of waiting for coronary artery bypass
surgery in Ontario

Interpretation: Patients awaiting CABG in Ontario are at a much greater
risk of death than the general population. However, when compared with
thousands of other patients living with coronary artery disease, they
are at similar or decreased vital risk

6)
http://www.blupete.com/Commentary/MedSystemCanFailureOct'00.htm

"The Reason for the Failure Of the Canadian Medical System."

Yet, when it comes to medical services, we shun the market: we adopt a
system that has brought about ruin to entire countries, a system
(central, absolute, and top down) which has never worked and which
cannot work.

7)
http://winnipeg.cbc.ca/regional/serv...tories20030522

The Tories have called for a review of the province's cardiac care
system since Diane Gorsuch died while waiting for surgery back in
February.

8)
http://www.news-medical.net/?keyword...%20Association

Canadians are unhappy with the current Medicare system

9)
http://ats.ctsnetjournals.org/cgi/co...tract/77/3/769

CONCLUSIONS: Long waiting lists for coronary artery bypass grafting are
associated with considerable mortality. The risk of death increases
significantly with waiting time. Sex, unstable angina, perioperative
risk, impaired left ventricular function, and concomitant aortic valve
disease are independent risk factors and should be considered at
triage.

10)
http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/cont...4/suppl_1/I-92

In summary, a peer-reviewed standardized approach to risk-stratified
queue assignment of cardiac surgery patients resulted in a 0.7%
waiting-list mortality and an 8.7% rate of upgrades, the majority of
which required hospitalization for unstable symptoms. The majority of
these adverse events occurred early. A marked increase in surgical
capacity would be required to effectively deal with these events. Given
our utilization of a peer-review conference to validate indication for
surgical intervention, surgical capacity could be increased where
economically feasible, allowing reduction in waiting time without fear
of rampant overuse of cardiac surgical procedures. Prolonged waiting
time was not associated with adverse surgical outcomes among patients
undergoing cardiac surgery, and in the urgent queue, earlier
intervention was associated with worse outcomes.

11)
http://www.cp.org/english/online/ful...D052306AU.html

The 58-year-old woman had been awaiting bypass surgery for more than
two years. She was the third to die since last July while awaiting
surgery.

12)
http://canada.medbroadcast.com/healt...nnel_ id=1006

OTTAWA (CP) - Canada's public health system, ignored when it works
well, is attracting attention now that its fragility has been
highlighted by the SARS outbreak. Public health is a term used to cover
many activities designed to prevent illness from occurring, rather than
on treating illness after it happens.

She said it's an excellent organization with dedicated people, but the
municipal tax base is not sufficient to deal with a crisis like SARS.

Elliott Halparin, president of the Ontario Medical Association, said
the entire health system, not just the prevention side, has been
underfunded for years.

"This (the SARS outbreak) is going to make everybody realize just how
stretched we really were."

Halparin said Ontario already had a big problem with waiting lists, but
the situation will be exacerbated by the SARS outbreak, which has led
to the closure of some hospitals.

He is not convinced that the problem will be remedied by federal money
promised as part of the recent first ministers health accord. It's
still not clear to him how much money there will be, and how it will be
directed.

He said the biggest problem in medicare is health human resource
shortages - not enough doctors, nurses or technologists - and crumbling
infrastructure.

"Those are the real fundamental issues that need to be addressed. What
SARS is doing for us right now is it's creating incredible stress,
personal stress."

Halparin declined to speculate whether the system could cope with
another crisis at the same time as SARS, or whether it could deal with
a full-blown pandemic with a high mortality rate.

"I think people can draw their own conclusions from the degree of
difficulty we're having in dealing with this particular problem right
now."


[x] Yes

[] No

Thank you for your patience.

Tinkerntom, aka KnesisKnosis, Life, Live it!