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POPSStraight Talk About Universal Healthcare I'm all about personal freedom and the rights of individuals. Universal healthcare is not only impractical, but costly - and not just for your pocketbook. It's handing over yet another right to the government, and allowing the government to decide and rule your fate. I'm not compassionless-I'm just sensible. And universal healthcare as it's being proposed by both Clinton and Obama still doesn't make much sense to me. The disaster of the Massachusetts universal healthcare system should give you a preview of what life under a universal healthcare scheme could be like. Even more shocking is the manner in which Massachusetts state officials have decided to deal with the out-of-control costs of their broken system: they've ordered the insurance companies to cut payments to doctors and hospitals, reduce choices for payments, and possibly increase how much patients will have to pay.
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POPSNeed A Specialist Fast? Too Bad You're Not A Dog
And where care for our dogs, cats and horses puts our own system to the greatest shame is in the domain of wait times and access to specialists. Our pets may not be able to talk, but they can get an appointment with a primary care vet within 24 hours and a specialist within the week. "I have a friend who had a dog with cancer and it got treatment within two weeks," says Tina Kelly, an IT buyer in Waterloo, Ont. "For something like that in a human, I bet the response would've been 10 times as long." There are just 10,800 vets in this country compared to over 62,000 human doctors. But try, as a human, to get an appointment with a specialist. Try, for that matter, getting a GP — five million Canadians, about 15 per cent of the population, don't have one, while 15 per cent of those who do still report trouble receiving routine care. And a referral from your family doctor to a specialist puts you in store for a new ordeal. According to the most recent edition of "Waiting Your Turn...
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