Canadian doctors: “Well, crap, if the Americans are going to make their health care more like ours…”

“…we’d better make ours more like theirs. Otherwise, who’ll take care of the preemies?”

Via Memeorandum, Canadian doctors talking about a health-care system overhaul:

SASKATOON — The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country’s health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.

…”We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize,” Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“We know that there must be change,” she said. “We’re all running flat out, we’re all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands.”

[Dr. Robert] Ouellet has been saying since his return that “a health-care revolution has passed us by,” that it’s possible to make wait lists disappear while maintaining universal coverage and “that competition should be welcomed, not feared.”

In other words, Ouellet believes there could be a role for private health-care delivery within the public system.

I don’t know where I’d rather be: trying to maintain the private sector’s role in health care delivery, or slowly coming to the realization that “there could be a role” for the private sector in health care delivery.

At least the latter is moving in the right direction. I’d just hate to be in a place where we have to move in that direction.