If the Christmas dinner table has a cross-border
contingent, different national characteristics are sure to come up for
discussion. I enjoyed Christmas in Naples, Florida with a mixed group of
Americans and Canadians. One couple consisted of a Canadian husband and an
American wife. She insisted Canada’s single-payer health system was superior in
every way (despite the couple’s living in Florida, not Canada).
I had sailed with her husband the day
before, and he had invited me to pay tennis and golf, too. I was exhausted. How
did he have so much energy? “Ever since I was five years old, I was blind as a
bat, wearing Coke-bottle thick glasses. I could never play any sports. About
seven years ago I had surgery to replace my lenses, and since then I play every
sport I can. It has been a liberation.”
Because he had the surgery in Toronto,
this encouraged his wife to resume her praise of single-payer health care. The
surgery happened before they had met, so he had to correct her: “No, I paid
about $1,000 per eye.”
(The Ontario Health Plan covers
cataract and intraocular lens surgery if medically necessary, but my friend’s
surgery must not have been medically necessary because his vision was amenable
to correction by spectacles.)
This deflated his wife, who announced she
had paid about the same for lens surgery at about the same time, but in
Florida! Everybody at the table thought the price was worth it. When asked for
my opinion, all I could say was: “We all agree a thousand bucks an eye is a
fair price for such a miracle. It appears markets work for health care, whether
in Canada or the United States. Can you imagine how much more accessible all
health services would be if we allowed them to be available through markets,
too?”
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