Single payer refugee

From our frosty northern neighbor (emphasis mine):

A critically-ill premature-born baby from Hamilton [Canada] is all alone in a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital after she was turned away for treatment at local facility and transferred across the border without her parents, who don’t have passports.

Ava Stinson was born Thursday at St. Joseph’s Hospital, 14 weeks premature.

A provincewide search for an open neonatal intensive care unit bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two pound, four ounce baby to Buffalo.

No beds?  How could this happen?!  Canada’s health care system is the sterling example we should be following, right?

As it turns out this situation is not without precedent.

In addition to the cardiac and I.C.U. patients that Canada must send south to get proper care, women with high-risk pregnancies and sick babies are also being sent to the U.S. The Globe & Mail reports the following:

More than 100 Canadian women with high-risk pregnancies have been sent to United States hospitals over the past year.

Why? Because the bureaucrats who run the Canadian system failed to allocate enough beds:

The problem is due to bed closings that took place almost a decade ago, the absence of a national birthing initiative and too few staff.

And even when there is a bed, there’s a shortage of neonatologists:

When extra NICU beds were added in Victoria, it took about a year before they were operational due to the difficulty in recruiting a neonatologist.

Right now our health care system is Canada’s relief valve.  Their government made the decision to make certain specialized care available below the needs of its citizens.  So when people encounter severe medical problems and the Canadian system fails them they turn to the U.S.  What happens when Obama effectively forces us into a similar situation by creating a tax subsidized money loser health plan that will choke the life out of our pseudo-private health care system?  Where will our premies go when there aren’t enough beds?

I wish I could write more now because it (”it” being the broader health care situation) really is a complex dilemma.  At its core the discussion has a few fundamental questions:

• Should health care be considered a “right” (of sorts) not unlike K-12 education is viewed by many?
• Like all goods and services, the supply of health care is finite.  Who determines how it is rationed?

After that the rest is just details.  Really, really big details.  But at least answering those fundamental questions frames the solution approach.