http://www.canada.com/…

A new report by the Fraser Institute shows Canada-wide wait times for medical treatments have dropped markedly for the first time since the conservative think-tank started tracking health-care delays 15 years ago.

For the country as a whole, the median wait between being referred to a specialist and receiving treatment fell to 17.3 weeks in 2008 from 18.3 weeks last year - the longest delay recorded since the think-tank began studying the issue.

Ontario had the shortest total wait at 13.3 weeks, followed by B.C. (17) and Manitoba (17.2). The longest delays were found in Saskatchewan (28.8 weeks), Nova Scotia (27.6) and Newfoundland and Labrador (24.4).

Among the various medical specialties, the shortest total waits were for medical oncology (4.6 weeks), radiation oncology (5.8) and elective heart surgery (7.3), while the longest were for orthopedic surgery (36.7 weeks), plastic surgery (35.5) and neurosurgery (31.7). The median wait for a CT scan rose slightly from 4.8 to 4.9 weeks, while the same wait for an MRI fell to 9.7 weeks from 10.1. The median wait for an ultrasound rose from 3.9 to 4.4 weeks.

I’d provide comparison numbers with the USA but I couldn’t find any in a quick Google search. Looking up “usa mri wait times” results in just articles from the UK and Canada about long waits in their system.

Opening:

• Was just visited by Henri Makembe. Told me they would be providing for interview with people but I’d have to keep it friendly. “If we make them mad then they won’t want to give any of the other bloggers time.” So… they don’t want me to ask serious questions. What a surprise.
• Have quoted Winston Churchill, Mother Teressa, Mahatma Gandhi.
• They show all these examples of service yet they all appear to be real voluntarism, ie no government involvement.
• “We are not here as Republicans, Democrats, libertarians, socialists or Green party members. We are here as Americans.” I appreciate the shout out but I’m here as a libertarian.
• “We are here today because of Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” Too bad they don’t wish to abide by the ideas contained in those documents.
• “Politicians get a bad wrap. Some deservingly. But there are all kinds of politicians who help America.”
• Being a citizen of the United States is the highest reward.
• If you googled “giving back” you’d likely find “Mike Bloomberg.”
• Bloomberg: New York City’s government school system improvement is an example for the rest of the nation.
• New York City is the city of service because William James who wrote The Moral Equivalent of War (intro by Jon Roland) advocating national service was born here.
• “We are the beneficiaries of those who give their lives to defend us.” Defending from the Koreans? The Vietnamese? The Iraqis? The Pakistanis? The Iranians?
• Bloomberg babbles on about global warming, “We are polluting the air we breath.” Yes… by breathing.
• “Service should be asked of everyone and should be open to everyone. So we are creating new programs.”
• “Democracy and capitalism hasn’t helped everyone…”
• George Bush: Asks everyone to spend two years or 4k hours helping out in a lifetime.
• Laura Bush: “People have more opportunities to volunteer through government programs.” Being incentivized by tax payers money is not voluntarism.
• Rolling Ridge elementary school gives it’s kids service journals and have made ’service’ party of the curriculum.
• “Children who learn the importance of service early are more likely to volunteer later in life.” Gotta indoctrinate them young.
• The program has moved on to personal stories from ‘volunteers.’ One from City Year, Civilian Conservation Corp, AmeriCorps.
• Admiral Michael Mullen: “the soldiers in Iraq are protecting our democracy at home. They are there because of what happened on 9/11.” I thought Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. How is it that our invasion of Iraq is protecting us?
• “There is no greater reward than working for something greater than yourself.”
• “Keep singing (God Bless America), keep waving (flags), and keep serving!” Yay nationalism/fascism!
• Obama, McCain, Dodd, Clinton have said they will cosponsor the Serve America Act from Kennedy and Hatch.
• The language used always refers to “the two candidates for the oval office.”
• Senator Hatch: “We want to help children who want to serve.”
• “Our efforts will start early in our classrooms.”
• “Service learning has shown to keep kids interested in school. So we are going to offer more incentives.”
• 61 million Americans volunteer without government incentives.
• “We will invest into a volunteer fund matched dollar for dollar from the private sector.”
• Want to create funds to help non-profit entrepreneurs.
• Offer older people “education rewards” to give to their children and grandchildren to pay for school.

Read More…

http://www.marketwatch.com/…

Central bankers and regulators are rethinking their faith in the ability of market forces alone to police the increasingly complex global financial system.

In a speech in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the Fed’s toughest challenge is not restoring growth, fighting inflation, or providing fragile banks with sufficient liquidity to get through the current financial crisis. Rather, it’s finding a way to prevent the next one.

The bailout of Bear Stearns in particular represents a failure of the supervisors to monitor the system. Bear wasn’t a particularly large institution, but its assets and liabilities were so thoroughly linked with the rest of the financial world that its failure would have been devastating, Bernanke said. Read the speech.
It’s not that Bear Stearns was too big to fail, it was too interconnected.

Bernanke suggested that the Fed and other bank supervisors need to use a holistic approach, rather than look at each institution in isolation. The explosion of securitization and derivatives in the past few decades has shifted risks in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. A risk that would be manageable for one bank would be unbearable if it applied to all, because systemic risks tend to create illiquid markets.

The regulators also have to clearly explain when and under what conditions financial institutions will be allowed to fail and when they will be bailed out, Bernanke said. To limit moral hazard, bailouts should be structured so that shareholders are wiped out, similar to the way failing banks are now treated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Imposing systemwide supervision and regulation won’t be easy to design or cheap to implement. Unintended consequences are certain to appear. But the alternative of doing nothing would consign us to periodic costly boom and bust cycles that could leave us all poorer.

Just… wow. The organization that is the biggest nonfree component of the current economy and who is looking daily to increase its power doesn’t have faith in the market’s ability to handle things. What a shock. I love that last sentence too. “But the alternative of doing nothing would consign us to periodic costly boom and bust cycles that could leave us all poorer.” Is this guy serious? Has this guy ever opened an economics book or thought critically on the subject? Making us poorer? The Fed’s massive inflation has helped do that. So has the socialization of so many aspects of our lives. We have periodic costly boom and bust cycles BECAUSE they refuse to do nothing. The bust doesn’t make us poorer. It makes us wealthier in the end. The bust is the liquidation of bad investments. If you continue on with the malinvestment you’re continuing on with an inefficient system and not investing in the things with the highest priority. The boom shouldn’t be happening in the first place. Spurred on by cheap debt and other manipulations. Some debt so cheap, like today, that they in fact are paying people to take money. Price inflation being higher than interest rates. Even if you don’t believe Mises and Rothbard on that one show me where the Fed has stopped the cycle? Please. Once you’re finished show me how well government regulation and interference in healthcare, education, housing, the poor, drugs, etc. has done.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/…

Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.

In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It’s as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced.

What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.

Interesting. I like MikeS’s of MooreWatch.com line: “Somehow, I rather doubt this will be a part of Sicko II: The Search For More Money.” I agree.

Check out the original article for a few Canadian healthcare horror stories.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/…

The National Health Service is providing dying cancer patients with drugs that are five times less effective than those available privately and is refusing to treat them if they try to buy medicines themselves.

One drug for kidney cancer, routinely available through public health systems in most European countries but not to British patients, can reduce the size of tumours in 31% of patients, compared with just 6% of those prescribed the standard NHS drug.

The growing row over “co-payments” has prompted the government to reconsider the ban. Alan Johnson, the health secretary, has promised a “fundamental rethink” of the policy.

Research presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology found that kidney patients taking the new drug Sutent lived six months longer than those prescribed alpha interferon, the NHS treatment.

The failure of the NHS to make more effective drugs available to cancer patients has been condemned as “unethical” by leading doctors.

A woman with bowel cancer is fighting for the right to pay for a drug that could extend her life long enough for her to spend Christmas with her grandchildren.

Sheila Norrington, 59, a former NHS medical secretary from Maidstone, Kent, has been told by doctors that if she buys the drug Erbitux, which the health service will not pay for, she will lose her state-funded cancer care. Erbitux is the only drug capable of treating her advanced bowel cancer.

Norrington’s husband, Goff, 61, a former sales manager, said: “We have been told that if we pay for it ourselves we will be thrown off the NHS completely and we will need to pay for everything privately. We are devastated. This is not going to cure my wife, but if it keeps her alive a little bit longer, then we would pay for it.”

The couple say that although they could pay for a few cycles of the drug, which costs about £3,000 a month, they could not pay for all Norrington’s care, including scans, blood tests and consultations.

Goff Norrington added: “We have two young granddaughters and this could make the difference between sitting round the table with them at Christmas or not. We think it is deplorable that patients can get this drug almost anywhere in Europe but we cannot get it in the UK.”

A spokesman for Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust said: “We are governed by Department of Health policy on this issue.”

A poll for The Sunday Times shows strong support for allowing co-payment in the National Health Service, with 89% saying that people who buy additional cancer drugs should continue to get free NHS treatment.

Only 5% think allowing co-payment would create a two-tier NHS. Until now this has been the position taken by Alan Johnson, the health secretary.

Ministers had feared that allowing co-payment would upset less well-off patients, but the YouGov poll of nearly 1,800 people shows strong backing across the social spectrum and supporters of all three main parties.

Lee over at MooreWatch.com I think said it all: “This, of course, begs the question.  If compassionate free government healthcare can’t provide, y’know, actual healthcare to patients, and they are forced to paying massive amounts of money to buy their own treatments, maybe the solution to the problem is less free government healthcare and more private sector solutions.”

When will these people realize that the government can not negate scarcity? The only thing that can bring more and better healthcare to the masses is an increase in their wealth and the only way to do that is capital accumulation through free market capitalism.

http://news.scotsman.com/…

Under a national law that came into effect two months ago, companies and local governments must measure the waistlines of Japanese people between the ages of 40 and 74 as part of their annual check-ups. That represents more than 56 million waistlines, or about 44% of the entire population.

Those exceeding government limits and suffering from a weight-related ailment will be given dieting guidance if, after three months, they do not lose weight. If necessary, those people will be steered towards further re-education after six more months.

The limits of 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women are identical to thresholds established in 2005 for Japan by the International Diabetes Federation as an easy guideline for identifying health risks.

To reach its goals of shrinking the overweight population by 10% over the next four years and 25% over the next seven years, the government will impose financial penalties on companies and local governments that fail to meet specific targets. The country’s Ministry of Health argues that the campaign will keep the spread of diseases like diabetes and strokes in check.

With the new law, Matsushita has to measure the waistlines of not only its employees but also their families and pensioners. As part of its intensifying efforts, the company has started giving its employees “metabo check” towels that double as tape measures.

Companies like Matsushita must measure the waistlines of at least 80% of their employees and get 10% of those deemed metabolic to lose weight by 2012.

NEC, Japan’s largest maker of PCs, said that if it failed to meet its targets, it could incur £9.7m in penalties.

Penalties and re-education for being too fat? What exactly would this re-education entail? I’d imagine it’s not optional and the fines will just be passed on to the general public.

This whole “problem” goes away by letting people be responsible for themselves and their healthcare.