Health Care “Reform”: What’s at stake

A few anecdotes about what happens when a “free” health care system needs to be bailed out by its friends across the border.

Shona Holmes

Shona Holmes was in trouble: The list of her symptoms included headaches, sleeplessness, dizziness, low libido and, worst of all, rapidly deteriorating vision. Her family doctor in Canada ordered an MRI, and a brain tumor was detected. But it would take months for her to get on the appointment calendar of a neurologist or endocrinologist in Canada.

Ava Isabella Stinson

A critically ill Hamilton preemie turned away from McMaster Children's Hospital is all alone in a Buffalo intensive care unit because her parents don't have passports to get across the border.

Hamilton's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was full when Ava Isabella Stinson was born 14 weeks premature at St. Joseph's Hospital Thursday at 12:24 p.m.

So much for free health care. Its sounds lovely unless you are really sick.

This reminds me about a show my wife and I watched on TLC a few years back. It was about a little girl named Kenadie Jourdin-Bromley who suffers from primordial dwarfism. When playing the flashback to her birth, there were scenes where the doctors were speaking about how they thought Kenadie wasn’t going to make it more than a few days and how everyone, parents included were shocked by what was going on. They commented that she seemed very small on the ultrasound and how it was the first ultrasound that the mother had at 36 weeks into the pregnancy.

My wife and I wondered to ourselves, 36 weeks and no ultrasounds? Wasn’t the OBGYN concerned that the mother was as small as she was? Weren’t there some kind of markers in all the blood tests that expectant mothers get? I remember my wife having several ultrasounds and blood/urine tests with both of my girls and thought that something wasn’t quite right.

And then I realized that the parents were in Canada.

Sure, the “private” American health care system is expensive, but you get results. And yes the Canadian system and all government run health care systems are “free”, but you better pray to God you don’t need to use them.