http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6285366&mesg_id=6285366Throughout the 1990s, opponents of the Canadian system gained considerable political traction in the United States by pointing to Canada’s methods of rationing, its facility shortages, and its waiting lists for certain services. These same opponents also argued that "refugees" of Canada’s single-payer system routinely came across the border seeking necessary medical care not available at home because of either lack of resources or prohibitively long queues.
This paper by Steven Katz and colleagues depicts this popular perception as more myth than reality, as the number of Canadians routinely coming across the border seeking health care appears to be relatively small, indeed infinitesimal when compared with the amount of care provided by their own system....
To examine the extent to which Canadian residents seek medical care across the border, we collected data about Canadians’ use of services from ambulatory care facilities and hospitals located in Michigan, New York State, and Washington State during 1994–1998. We also collected information from several Canadian sources, including the 1996 National Population Health Survey, the provincial Ministries of Health, and the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association. Results from these sources do not support the widespread perception that Canadian residents seek care extensively in the United States. Indeed, the numbers found are so small as to be barely detectible relative to the use of care by Canadians at home.
For more than a decade anecdotal reports of waiting lists for elective procedures in Canada and of hordes of Canadian "Medicare refugees" crossing the border in search of medical care in the United States have provided emotive fuel for critics of the Canadian health care system from both sides of the border.1 American opponents of universal public coverage have argued that global constraints on capacity and funding force many Canadians to cross the border in search of services that are unavailable or in short supply in their own country.2 Some have gone so far as to suggest that the widening health care spending gap between Canada and the United States is partly the result of counting expenditures by Canadian Medicare refugees in the U.S. rather than the Canadian expenditure totals, although there is an extensive body of evidence showing that the sources of the spending gap lie elsewhere.
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