Three Things Saved My Mom
From: Aaron
Date: Friday, July 13, 2007 8:23 PM
To: mmflint@aol.com
Subject: A few stories about access to health coverage in Canada
Hi Mike,
I grew up in Canada and have (thankfully just) a few stories about access to health coverage in Canada under our universal health plan.
These stories start with and center mostly around my mother. My mother is one of the strongest people I know and despite a couple of significant run-ins with the Canadian hospital system, is still kicking up fuss and doing all those things mother's do.
When I was four years old, my mother was in a very serious head-on collision. My sister and I were staying with our grandparent's for a few weeks during the summer and Mom was driving up to see us. She was on the highway about half way between home and our grandparents place when she saw a speeding car coming over a cresting hill along the highway and approaching her in the wrong lane. With little time to react Mom swerved towards the shoulder of the highway to avoid the on-coming car. As she hit the gravel along the shoulder (the details are a bit sketchy here, as mom does not remember a lot of what happened after this point (nor is it particularly easy to write about). She remembers seeing a telephone poll directly in front of her. Mom remembers swerving to avoid the poll. She believes that as she swerved, she spun in the loose gravel. This threw her back across the highway, across the central meridian strip and directly into the path of an on coming cube van. The last image mom remembers was the grill of the cube van filling up her entire field on vision. The last thought she remembers was that she would never see me or my sister again.
Three things saved my Mom that day (I suppose four things if you are religious). The first was that she was wearing her seat belt. The second was that the vehicle she drove (yes it was a wood paneled station wagon) was the first model of its make that had introduced a feature wherein the engine would drop below the vehicle and the steering column would collapse upon a significant head on impact. The third was the paramedics and surgery staff.
Mom's injuries from the accident were awful. She had broken nearly every bone in her face when her head hit the steering wheel. She had soft tissue damage in her neck and in her knees which still bother her today. I remember seeing her shortly after her accident. Dad had driven up to meet her, and had he not been with her when I saw her, I would not have known who she was.
After her initial recovery from the accident, Mom was forced to pursue compensation through the vehicle insurance company to recover the cost of our station-wagon (which was destroyed in the accident) and to cover her lost wages through disability. The insurance company (a government company no-less. In Canada only government companies may underwrite insurance. Its believed they are more fair. Ever tried to get money from the government?) tried to accuse mom (quite literally) of being guilty of everything from driver fatigue and not wearing her seatbelt (this was despite the 15cm wide black bruise that ran the length of her body from her collarbone to the opposite hip) to drug and alcohol use (despite no evidence of any of this in the medical report). Thankfully, although she had to fight for compensation from the government insurer for the car and for wages, she did not have to worry about her medical treatment. Because Canada has free health care, the most important aspect of mom's recovery was safely covered.
A second (shorter) story about Mom happened when I was 12. Mom was diagnosed with cancer of the cervix (I told you she was tough!). Mom went through radiation therapy and eventually underwent a hysterectomy (here uterus was removed -- I told her she had her womb renovated). Mom was in hospital for several weeks and had to travel back to the cancer institute (yes in Canada we have entire institutes devoted to cancer treatment) a number of times during the next five years to ensure the cancer was removed. Thankfully it was and my mother enjoys good health (for a now nearly 60 year old!).
These two major encounters with the Canadian health system would clearly have required very expensive treatments. The total cost of the bill we received from the Canadian government for this health care was $0.00 (that's in Canadian dollars I should add). You would know the figures better than I would, but I suspect that similar treatments for the uninsured in the United States would be crippling. How the wealthiest country in the world can allow its poorest citizens to face bankruptcy in the face of just wanting to get well is beyond me. Many may point that the US has far more people to cover than Canada does, however, you also have far more people paying taxes. I can think of no better way to spend those taxes that ensuring the health and well-being of your people. I wonder how far the nearly $1,000,000,000,000 (that one's in US dollars) spent on this needless war would have covered in health care for Americans. How many Americans grieving the deaths of lost loved ones (not including the thousands of families who have lost loved ones fighting in Iraq) would still have their loved one, as I still have my mother, had their government spent that money more wisely?
Perhaps that is a question better asked by people in you country than by those in mine. I think we in Canada already know the answer.
Aaron
Canada
