Silly Little Country

American-style Healthcare

Our Supreme Court is ruling today on whether a Canadian is legally permitted to purchase accelerated or improved healthcare with his own money (or possibly via private insurance). I continue to be fascinated at how the CBC reports this (I am not sure about other Canadian media). They give a voice to someone opposed to the idea who does the usual rant on how this would lead to "American-style healthcare". Now in fact what we would get if the court suggests we are able to make medical decisions without the direct intervention of bureaucrats is what I would call European-style healthcare.
And this raises an interesting question to me - why is it NEVER mentioned (in my experience) that Canada has the outlier medical system and that two-tier systems exist pretty well everywhere else? All the reporting I have seen starkly contrasts our humane approach with the, obviously, inhumane "American-style" two-tier approach. Only by using the scare words "American-style" can they make this so frightening - what if they said "UK-style" or "Austrian-style"?
Possible answers:
a) the CBC staff are biased and want to do all they can to maintain their conception of our healthcare system
This kind of theory I generally cannot buy into.
b) the CBC staff are ignorant and actually think European healthcare systems are like ours
Surely some of them have been in Europe, or know Europeans, so this is hard to believe.
c) Help? I can think of no other theory.

UPDATE:
Very interesting. An excellent web page at the CBC site
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/healthcare/public_vs_private.html

I ran into something like this once before - an ignorant report from Neli McDonald on screen on CBC TV, while at the same time, the CBC web site had an accurate and reasonably correct report on the same subject. Do these people not talk to one another?

posted by Alan Adamson @ 8:25 AM