Are We Really Better Off Without Socialized Medicine?

The so-called advantages of private healthcare are looking less and less advantageous.

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Whenever I have a colonoscopy, I think about Serge.

I had my first colonoscopy about fifteen years ago. I met with the doctor who was going to perform it and shortly after that I was on the table being probed. And ever since then I’ve gotten another one every five years.

I got my most recent colonoscopy at the end of last year. I called about a year in advance to make the appointment. I wanted the same doctor to do it again but I was told that he had retired. Anyway, I was told the scheduling procedure had changed. I would first have to make an appointment with the nurse practitioner who would then schedule my colonoscopy. And whatever doctor happened to be on colonoscopy duty that day would be the one who would perform mine. I couldn’t just schedule a specific doctor anymore.

The earliest I could get an appointment with the nurse practitioner was four months in the future. So I took it. And the earliest the nurse practitioner could schedule me for a colonoscopy was nine months after that. So I took it. It’s a good thing I wasn’t dying.

When the day of my colonoscopy finally came around, the doctor who was going to perform it introduced himself to me as I was lying on the table, all prepped and ready to go. He asked if I had any questions. I said no. So then, the anesthesiologist put me under. When I came to, someone else told me to come back in five years.

By now you’re probably saying to yourself, “Who is Serge and what does he have to do with any of this?” Well, I’ll tell you. Serge is a guy I met who lives in Montreal. Whenever I meet someone who comes from a country that has socialized medicine, I ask them what they think of it. That may be an obnoxious thing to do, but I do it anyway because I’m curious about socialized medicine. I don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all. Even if we had a single-payer system in this country, we’d have many of the same complaints about the government that we now have about private insurance companies. But I also think that most of our problems with health care delivery can be solved by taking the profit motive out of it.

Serge said that he loves the affordability and availability of health care in Canada, but sometimes you can’t get an appointment for several months. That’s the most common complaint I’ve heard about socialized medicine and the only thing I’ve heard that has made me feel as if we had an advantage in our laissez-faire system. But as my colonoscopies throughout the years, and going to medical appointments in general, have made me feel more and more like I’m on an impersonal assembly line, I don’t feel that advantage anymore.

So anyone who thinks that we’re better off without socialized medicine needs to come up with another example.