American-style health care comes to Canada...

...but not in a good way.

George Smitherman, Ontario's crackpot health minister -- who recently said he would deputize citizens and organize a posse to run a private medical diagnostic company out of the province -- has now decided that doctors prescribe too many drugs and he wants them to cut down. And he'll offer the doctors cash-money for each pill they withhold from their patients. Laughably, he states that he's doing this for the patients own good, not because he's trying to cut costs:

"The real issue is that everybody in the province of Ontario knows that we have a problem with over-medicating seniors," he said, citing "plentiful" studies that show an over-reliance on drugs such as antibiotics.

"This is motivated by one clear and pressing reality, which is that there are too many people in the province of Ontario who are over-medicated."

Traditionally, Canadian governments have limited health care expenditures by restricting availablity. Back in the 80's, the class sizes for medical schools were reduced to control the spiraling costs of healthcare. The thinking was: fewer doctors, less billing, lower costs. And it worked -- too bad about all those waiting lists.

But now we're starting to experience what is supposedly one of the great shortcomings of the American HMO system: bureaucrats deciding what kind of treatment you can receive. As health care costs in this country become impossible to afford, be prepared for government workers to start using databases to track which doctors are costing too much money. Maybe they'e already doing this. And once they start compiling all this data, they're going to use it. They're going to overrule doctor's decisions -- and another argument that the Canadian heath care system is better will be put to rest.

Posted by Bruce Gottfred at October 4, 2004 03:52 PM | TrackBack