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Originally Posted by HighwayStar
In addition, remember that *everyone* over 65 in the US is on Medicare automatically. Medicare is full, government insurance coverage just like all Canadians have.
Look at Wikipedia "List of Countries by Hospital Beds": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_beds
US has 29.4 ICU beds per 100,000 people. Canada has 13.5. Also sort by Hospital beds per 100,000 people and Canada is near the bottom.
With all the Billions being borrowed and spent, I haven't heard a single mention of, "maybe we should take a look at beefing up our health care system".... perhaps we should. |
I'd just point out that ICU beds are only one measure of a health care system. We are much closer to the U.S. in terms of acute care beds, where most Covid patients ended up (2.5 vs. 2 beds per thousand people), and we are actually ahead of the U.S. in physicians per capita, to cite two examples.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-health-care-resources-compare-countries/
But fair point in terms of looking at where our system falls short. I have heard quite a bit of discussion of the Canadian approach of running hospitals at or near capacity. It is great for efficiency, and contributes to the fact that our system has far lower overall costs than the U.S. system with better results by lots of measures. But it is not great in a situation like a pandemic, where surge capacity becomes a key factor.
The pandemic definitely raises some questions in terms of whether we are investing enough or in the right spots.
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