A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:

Scott fails to get the point:
==================
Nope. She can seek out medical care wherever and whenever she likes.
All she
has to do is find a provider willing to provide the care for what she
can
(or cannot) pay in return. That she can't walk into her corner hospital
and
*demand* service is not important. What's important is that she can
choose
freely from among tens of thousands of hospitals and hundreds of
thousands
to millions of doctors and specialty clinics and obtain immediate
treatment
from any who are willing to serve her. In Canada, she isn't allowed to
even
seek out a hospital or surgeon willing to treat her, perhaps pro bono,
because her position in the queue is dictated by the government.
===============

Like I said, her "freedom" is illusionary.

As I said earlier, you confuse equality of outcome with equality of
opportunity.


And, wrong again, her position in the queue is NOT dictated by the
government but, rather, by her condition. And that, Scott, is
determined by the physicians.

Nope. It's determined by the government, which decides what conditions take
priority and dictates to doctors what patients can be jumped in the queue.

That is undeniably the case because your entire system depends utterly upon
such "triage." Somebody in government says "An acute MI patient has a higher
priority than a teenager with a torn ACL, so the MI gets a bed while the ACL
gets a pair of crutches." That decision cannot be made by the individual
patient's doctors because one doctor cannot possibly know what the current
demand/availability list looks like, so they have to submit their *opinions8
about the relative urgency of their patient's condition to some government
arbitrator who decides who gets priority based on what services are
available. There is simply no other way for your socialized system to work,
by its very nature.

And when there's an acute MI and a chronic arteriosclerosis patient vying
for the same bed and surgeon, the government dictates which one gets the
care. And if there are too many MI's and too many clogged arteries for the
system to accommodate, the government dictates who gets served and in what
order. Those decisions are NOT made by the doctor. They cannot be made by
"the doctor" because there are many doctors with many patients all vying for
the same bed and surgeon, so SOMEBODY has to set the priorities, and in
Canada's case, it's government bureaucrats.

You can claim that the doctors make these decisions, but it's only true
insofar as they make the classification of the individual patient. But the
categories, and the priority list, is kept by the government, necessarily,
so that it can dole out care according to need and availability. To suggest
otherwise merely shows willful ignorance on your part.


BTW, you have yet to dentify for me who this government bureaucrat is;
who do you think determines her priority?

Ultimately, whomever is in charge of setting up the treatment priority list.

--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser