Saturday, August 18, 2007

Bed lam   [Mark Steyn]

A number of aficionados of socialized health care took objection to my post yesterday on the Canadian mother obliged to give birth in Montana. This was one of the responses from north of the border:

Presumably you know that the shortage of hospital beds in Calgary, like the shortage of apartments is due to the fact that the oil patch is attracting just a few more new residents than Armageddon, Montana or wherever it was exactly that she found a vacant room...

There are literally tens of thousands of things that government tries to do and shouldn't, but health care is a fundamental of any civilized society and the US version provides a pretty good argument that government does indeed have a role to play in it.

Sorry, no sale. The explanation that Calgary's success logically leads to a lack of hospital beds demonstrates only the perverse government inversion of normal laws of supply and demand. But, more to the point, there is no unforeseen boom in Swift Current, Saskatchewan or Trois Rivieres, Quebec, is there? Yet not only was there no bed available for this mother-to-be at the Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, but there was no bed available at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, no bed available at the Toronto General, no bed available at the Royal Victoria in Montreal. There was no bed available in Canada coast to coast.

Anyway you slice it, that's a failure of the system. Or look at it this way: Where would she have given birth were America not next door? In the toilet?

08/18 01:25 PMShare