Ex-Calgarian Warns Canadians Against Copying U.S. Health-Care

By Cam Millar, New York, U.S.A. Appearing in the Calgary Herald January 27, 1997.

I'm a former Calgarian who has been living in New York City for almost six years now, and I read the Herald on line.

I've seen the American health-care system operated in all its glory and all its ineptitude.

I'm on a health-care plan here at last. My wife (an American citizen) and I lived without any health care for three years. We couldn't afford it. We can still barely afford it. I know hundreds of people without any health care.

Some time ago, I had a routine test; my health provider was to pay for it. Over the subsequent months, I kept receiving the same bill from the medical lab, which wanted me to submit my insurance information and pay for the test. I sent the lab all the correct insurance information.

The lab sent yet another bill. This time we phoned our health provider to ask what the problem was.

Our health provider had no record of me. We phoned our insurer, and they found my file at long last. They hadn't forwarded my insurance information.

If I had been in a serious accident, I would have had a huge legal night-mare. I would have had to pay several hundred-thousand dollars that would have had to have come from the sky.

The health-care system down here is run by administrators who only see dollar signs, not human beings. It's a very scary reality.

Many of the homeless people I see every day are simply people who have had to spend their family's money to pay for what might have been just a broken leg. Most of the homeless people shut out of the health-care system have been dumped because their health-care insurers didn't want to cover them. That's because the administrators have to think of the bottom line and their quarterly reports. That's what the American corporate reality has come down to. I'm not exaggerating.

I live in norther Manhattan. There are 600,000 people living in about three square miles up here. Almost the population of Calgary. There is one hospital. You can imagine the lineups. People are lined up out the door just for simple emergencies. These are middle-class to lower-middle class people here. If you've got millions of dollars in the United States, you can do what you like. But, for the rest of us, it's a health-care hell.