Eug
Senior Member
You may not have seen this, because I updated my post as you were posting yours. This is my update above:^^^Yes really, I doubt you have any experience with the US system so I put you in the group that likes to take anecdotal evidence as truth. Again I have intimate and extensive experience, not only working in both systems but using both systems. Until you have you probably shouldn't comment on it.
---
Well, I know several physicians who have worked in the US, and they would beg to differ. Now if you're talking about those patients with money to spare on health care (not medicaid), some would argue they can get better care in the US than in Canada, but that's not overall.
BTW, several physicians have told me that for some of their colleagues, they won't even see a patient if they have Medicaid coverage. One guy I know started to see his income dwindle significantly because he didn't turn away medicaid patients in his middle-class practice. His colleagues refused to see medicaid patients so they started going to him, and he began to get an unusually large number of medicaid patients in his practice. Unfortunately, medicaid often pays a lot less than other insurance plans or less than what he'd charge patients directly. This was in New York State.
---
The problem here is that while Medicaid can work in certain jurisdictions, the convoluted structure of the overall systems means it can fail horribly in others. Just the one Michigan fee schedule graph alone from my subsequent post goes a long way to illustrate this point.