Health Care

A cross-over moment between my technical life and political life, a story from Dutch ex-pat Hans Nowak, a software developer currently living in Florida:

Last September, my mother-in-law was committed to the hospital. She stayed there for a month. We didn’t get to see many doctors, and if we did they would always say that they didn’t know what the disease was. It wasn’t Huntington’s. They did some more tests, but could not find anything. All the while she was being kept alive, because she couldn’t swallow due to the muscle disorder. Since she had indicated beforehand that she didn’t want that, they took her off the “machinery” in October. She passed away later that day.

A week ago her husband got the hospital bill. I overheard people mention ”$372,000”, and, thinking they were talking about a house, I inquired what was going on. Turns out that was the amount of the bill. Full story

Canada’s health-care system is sick, but its not dying, and it needs to be maintained and improved, not scrapped in favour of an American-style system. Our system is a competitive advantage, but beyond that, providing universal health care is just the right thing for a society to do.