Happy Ending for Ava, Backlash from “Our Friends”

My last post talked about the heartbreaking story of Ava Stinson, a baby born 14 weeks premature. Because there was no room at any of Ontario’s prenatal care centers, she was flown to Buffalo, NY, for treatment. Her parents weren’t allowed accross the border to see her because they didn’t have passports. Well great news: CBP has given them permission to cross the border and be with their daughter! Kudos to the authorities for doing the right thing in this situation.

So let’s switch gears to the many articles, commentaries, and blog posts by American authors that have tapped this story as proof that socialized medicine is a failure.

Consider this article by Jim Hoft (check out this re-posting also, as the comments are much more colourful). He talks about the number of cases where Canadians went to the US for similar premature birth needs, and how countries with socialized medicine have wonky infant mortality rates because of whether a premature child is included in the stats or not. Two things really made me laugh in his piece though.

In fact, there were at least 40 mothers or their babies who were airlifted from British Columbia to the United States in 2007 because Canadian hospitals didn’t have room for the preemies in their neonatal units.

So first Jim, some lessons on Canada. Canada’s population is approximately 33.2 million. British Columbia makes up 4.4 million of that. If *only* 40 mothers or babies had to be sent to the US for treatment, that’s pretty damn good. Also, realize that in many cases US cities are closer than the next major Canadian city (keep reading, there’s a map to help illustrate this when it comes up again). Sorry Jim, but throwing small numbers to try and prove your point just doesn’t work.

On to the other part of his article:

As we've seen with these socialized systems, some people will inevitably be denied the care they need to survive. No doubt, with Obamacare Americans will be forced to accept an inferior product with fewer choices.

Wow…”some people will inevitably be denied the care they need to survive.” Are we talking about Canada here, or the millions without adequate health care coverage that live in the USA currently? And accepting inferior care with fewer choices…maybe I’m wrong, but don’t HMO’s tell you which hospitals you can/can’t go to?

Jim isn’t the only one though. Over at Carol’s Closet, Carol was commenting from south Florida on the whole episode. She initially posted this entry, followed by this one. Let’s see what she had to say…

The country who’s health care is soooo much better than ours.

There wasn’t a single available neo-natal bed in the entire province so little Ava was transported to Buffalo, NY. Lets here it for National Health Care aka rationed health care.

First off, I don’t know who keeps telling American’s that our health care is better than the care the receive. I have no doubt that the doctors and hospital staff in the US are of a high calibre, and I don’t necessarily think that our health care system is *better* than in the US. But what our system does provide is health care for everyone. That’s the key difference: we see health care as something every citizen should have access to, a basic right of residing in this country.

Carol tries to jab our system…but I don’t think she gets it. Yes its an issue that there wasn’t a hospital bed available in Ontario. But with *our* system, the authorities were able to consider an out of system, potentially more expensive option in the US for this baby’s care. Our system took care of her, regardless of the fact that it had to happen outside our borders.

Carol references an article by Ed Morissey who asks similar types of questions.

But why wasn’t there a NICU bed for the child in the entire nation of Canada?  The government of Canada won’t pay for more.  They don’t exist to expand supply to meet demand; their single-payer system exists to ration care as a cost-saving mechanism.

Again, a geography lesson is required here. I highly doubt that there wasn’t a bed available anywhere in Canada. What I do suspect is that it made more sense to send the baby to Buffalo as the next closest hospital. Consider this map:

The “A” is Hamilton, and the red line shows where Buffalo is…a very short distance. We know that there isn’t a bed available in Ontario, so the three red circles represent the next closest Canadian cities. Now, what makes more sense for the health and well being of the child? The closer hospital does! 

In closing, my goal of this post isn’t to try and convince anyone about Canada’s health care system being better than the US model. Our system is not perfect, and for all the good of our system we also have some bad. No, my goal here is education. There are so many misconceptions about our health care system and how it operates, and from comments on the referenced blog posts it seems political ideology trumps common sense.

Also, check out my post on Clarifying Public Healthcare for some stats and info Canada’s health care system.

It’s Time to End the “Friends” Rhetoric

I’m sick of hearing North American politicians use the term “friends” when talking about each other’s country. Friends don’t treat each other the way Canadians have been treated by the US in recent months, specifically around the increased border security and related policies that have cost Canadians and Canada dollars, time, and hassle. And yet Canada and its provinces have responded to these new requirements, issuing driver licenses and other government issue ID that are “enhanced” to meet the NHSI standards. We have done our part and shown that we are willing to play by the rules of our “friend” to the south.

And yet, the US government is so rigid, so monolithic, and so black-and-white that they cannot see past their own policies when common sense and basic humanity should prevail.

I read with outrage the story of Ava Stinson. Ava was born on Thursday, 14 weeks premature. There were no available beds available in any of Ontario’s neonatal intensive-care centres, so she was sent from Hamilton ON to Buffalo NY and a facility there.

In Buffalo Ava lies in her bed alone, fighting for her life. She’s too young to understand the idea of mother or father, but we can all understand the agony parents in this situation would feel and the longing and need to be by their child’s side. But they aren’t. Natalie and Richard, Ava’s parents, didn’t go to Buffalo. Why?

Because they don’t have passports.

Yes, our “American friends” couldn’t understand the special circumstances surrounding this situation…couldn’t take the time to validate Ava’s parents in other ways with other pieces of identification. They weren’t going for a vacation, or working, or possibly something illegal…they just wanted to be by their incredibly sick child.

For shame on the Department of Homeland Security! For shame on those from the CBP who could have tried to make an exception to the passport rules and didn’t!

This is not the action of a friend.  

Clarifying Public Healthcare

Earlier this month Rhonda Hackett wrote a great commentary piece in the Denver Post entitled “Debunking Canadian Health Care Myths”.

Rhonda is a Canadian who has been living in the US for the last 17 years, and wrote the column based on discussions she frequently has with Americans and Canadians alike on whether one system is better than the other. I’m not going to re-hash what she’s written, but I do want to point out a few key items:

- Taxes in Canada are only slightly higher than in the US.

- 31% of every dollar spent on health care in the US goes to non-medical costs (paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc.). Provincial single-pay systems in Canada operate with a 1% overhead.

- 10% of Canada’s GDP is spent on 100% of its population.
17% of USA’s GDP is spent on 85% of its population (and that’s not considering the millions with inadequate coverage). So in Canada everyone gets care and we still spend less overall than America which spends more but doesn’t cover everyone.

As a Canadian who’s lived within this system his whole life, I am in no means saying our system is perfect. But the idea that socialized medicine somehow delivers less quality and is always more expensive is incorrect.

How Can We Identify Threats If We Can’t Identify Our Citizens?

Sylvie Menard spent a fantastic vacation in Mexico, and was passing through customs in her home city of Montreal. Unfortunately for Sylvie, her name and birth date matched someone who was wanted by police.

Now, we live in a time of information…where authorities have access, for better or for worse, to more information on us than we may be aware. Or maybe we only think they do? Sylvie’s experience suggests that the amount of information available to authorities at the border is slim, or even scarier that its more a lack of common sense and experience.

After being subjected to initial and secondary screening she was handcuffed, read her rights, and brought to a cell. While the police were called to come and verify her identity, a female border officer asked her to disrobe so she could verify whether a pink tattoo was present on her butt…a physical trait mentioned in the wanted woman’s description. There was no tattoo of course and the officer returned again to further investigate to ensure it hadn’t been surgically removed.

So let me get this straight: our border officers jumped to the conclusion that this woman *must* be the one that is wanted because her name and birthdate matched, and then went all CSI to look at whether this tattoo was present. Interesting. What I would have expected instead is for them to find a physical description (which they eventually did) or a picture and compare that to her. Also, Sylvie was carrying her passport, driver’s license, and health card; she had identification that they could have looked up and verified before performing any sort of physical inspection.

I’m not even going to comment on the idiot police officer’s recommendation to just “change her name” to avoid this in the future. How about this: how about our law enforcement agencies get their acts together and implement information systems that allow them to determine a person’s identity quickly and efficiently? How about we have trained staff that can grasp common sense  solutions instead of defaulting to outrageous extremes?

When false matches occur authorities do have to investigate them. But this isn’t professional police investigation; this is weekend security guard at the local mall antics that have no place at a Canadian port of entry.

Canada Drawing Their Own Line on American Protectionism

This morning in Whistler the Federation of Canadian Municipalities passed a resolution that it will only support municipalities that adopt policies stating they will only buy from companies that reside in countries without trade restrictions against goods from Canada.

This story begins in Halton Hills, a community of 58,000 people. Hayward Gordon Ltd., a pipefitting company, moved its operation to Halton Hills a few years back. It recently lost a pipe-fitting contract in Ontario to a Salt Lake City firm. The mayor of Halton Hills learned around that time that, because of the “Buy American” policies in place, Hayward Gordon couldn’t bid on projects in Salt Lake City.

So while US companies are still free to come take work away from Canadian firms IN Canada, we’re not able to have our companies try to source business south of the border. As the mayor put it in a Toronto Sun story:

I am not against free trade, but it has to be fair trade.

Halton Hills fought back in their own way: they passed a resolution that the municipality would only deal with companies whose country of origin allowed Canadian companies opportunities to bid on work as well. It was this act that started a movement, with other Ontario municipalities passing similar resolutions and ultimately to the resolution voted in this morning at the FoCM summit.

But what about NAFTA? Isn’t there already a free trade agreement in place that should be taking care of all this stuff? Unfortunately, as an article from Investors.com points out, NAFTA is too high level:

…much of the money allocated to infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges and the like is being spent at the city and state level where Nafta rules do not override "buy American" provisions or sentiment.

The Washington Post cites examples such as the town of Peru, Ind., which told a Canadian supplier it was rejecting sewage pumps that were made near Toronto. John Hayward, president of Hayward Gordon, the Canadian pump-maker, says many U.S. towns have told him they can no longer buy his products because of stimulus provisions.

Work done on a construction project at Camp Pendleton was literally pulled out of the ground when someone noticed Canadian pipe fittings had been used. The fittings were made by a Toronto-based company that had been doing business in the U.S. for 60 years. The company had supplied plastic pipe to be used in a new health care facility at the Marine Base north of San Diego.

The Canadian government isn’t sitting on its hands during all of this. Stephen Harper is entering discussions with the US to try and get Canada excluded from the “Buy American” provisions, although that will only go so far as there’s nothing that can be done to the protectionist sentiment in America. Still, the resolution passed by the municipalities also includes a 120 day waiting period to see how the US responds before putting it in action.

Some have suggested that this sort of tactic isn’t necessary and will backfire; that we should let the elected leaders sort this out and “convince our customers to remember who their real friends are”. As I’ve stated before, “friends” don’t treat each other this way. This is business, and in business relationships both sides need to be satisfied with the agreement.

We want to do business in the US, and we want US companies to do business in Canada; but the rules of opportunity need to be the same on both sides.

Canada needs to start standing up for itself and not playing the nice guy with friends that seem more like opportunistic bullies.

No Thanks Obama, You Can Keep Your Guantanimo Detainees

Canada takes a lot of flack for being "soft" on immigration. The US has even used that as a reason for the recent border reinforcements along the US/Canada border. There have been comments made suggesting that Canada lets in people the US would not.

So its with great pride that I read the story of how Canada has denied a request by the Obama administration to take in 17 Chinese Muslims that have been detained at Guantanamo Bay.

The US is in a bit of an odd place. The US courts have ruled that these 17 detainees are being held illegally, and they should be released. But they can't be released into the US...in fact the article I linked to above suggests that anyone detained at Guantanamo will never be allowed on US soil again.

But the US can't release these men to China because their safety can't be guaranteed. Will they be tortured because of their faith, or because they were already suspected of being linked to terrorists, or for some other reason? China has claimed the men won't be tortured but the US obviously doesn't buy it. A little odd that they're not so hypersensitive to torture policies of other countries considering what their own is, but I digress...

This all leads to the US coming to Canada to see if we'll take them in. Are the people of the Obama administration that incredibly brash and idiotic that they would, after all the tough talk about securing the border and concerns of who Canada lets in, approach Canada to take in their own detainees?

Guantanamo is America's mess, not Canada's. I feel for the situation these men are in, but its America's responsibilty to do whatever is best here. Trying to pass it off to Canada is a horrible slap in the face.

Why Would Border Security Be Free?

Maybe I’m missing something here…

According to a Canadian Press story, a proposed additional rail service offering from Seattle to Vancouver is in danger of being scrapped. The reason? The Canadian Border Services Agency is claiming that they will need $1,500 a day to pay for the extra staff it would require to process the extra travellers. The article points out that this works out to $500k a year.

Amtrak can’t pay it and neither can the Washington Dept. of Transportation that was pushing for the run.

BC politicians are fuming. The BC government spent $4.5 million to upgrade railway infrastructure specifically to accommodate this extra rail line offering. There’s also numbers ranging between $14 million and $30 million in how much money will be pumped into the local economy by adding this secondary rail line. They feel the CBSA should waive the fee altogether in light of the obvious benefit to the BC economy.

I have an idea: why doesn’t BC PAY the fee since *they’re* the ones who will see the biggest profit from this? Even at the lower end of the potential winfall, after the fee is paid you’re still seeing $13.5 MILLION dollars being pumped into the local economy.

I don’t understand why the BC politicians think that they somehow deserve extra border protection for free *just because* it’ll help their economy. Border protection is a service provided by a government agency that is already looking at cutting back their workforce. Why should this agency be forced to find alternatives within their organization to allow more officers to patrol a single transportation line that benefits only one city of a single province?

I don’t get it. On paper, this is a no brainer: pay the fee and get the added border officers. If I’m missing something, someone please explain it to me.

Bill Maher – America is Greedy, Not Good

Saw this on his show the other night…New Rules segment is funny, but its followed with a great monologue on the culture of greed in America.