mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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 Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2009 7:44 am Post subject: The Canadian Model |
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Sending women to America to give birth?
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A critically ill Hamilton preemie turned away from McMaster Children's Hospital is all alone in a Buffalo intensive care unit because her parents don't have passports to get across the border.
Hamilton's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was full when Ava Isabella Stinson was born 14 weeks premature at St. Joseph's Hospital Thursday at 12:24 p.m.
A provincewide search for an open NICU bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two-pound, four-ounce preemie to Buffalo that evening. |
http://www.thespec.com/News/Local/article/590540
| Quote: |
The four girls were born at a US hospital because there was no space available at Canadian neonatal intensive care units.
Karen Jepp and her husband JP, of Calgary, were taken to a Montana hospital where the girls were delivered two months early by Caesarean section.
Autumn, Brooke, Calissa and Dahlia are in good condition at Benefis Hospital in Great Falls, Montana.
Health officials said they checked every other neonatal intensive care unit in Canada but none had space. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6951330.stm
I see situations like this over and over again. Women being flown around Canada (and the border states) to give birth because the major metropolitan area they live in has no space. One would assume that a good statistical model could adequately predict demand for these services with sufficient slack to prepare for deviations in demand. Instead, they have almost no slack built into the system and even a small surge of births on a given day blows the system up. The idle excess capacity is too expensive for the medical system to handle. Rationing dominates the system.
We really need reform. The Swiss, French and Dutch have mixtures of public and private, better health outcomes and less problems with rationing. |
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