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Posted
Monday, March 30, 2009 3:12 PM
| By
Rachael Larimore
It makes me uncomfortable when individual medical cases become fodder for national debate, from Terri Schiavo to Natasha Richardson. It seems macabre to turn a family's private grief into a public debate. But since you brought it up ...
You make a valid point about helicopters: They are perhaps overused here. I certainly wouldn't want to use one in the event of non-life-threatening injuries.
But I had a different takeaway about what makes Natasha Richardson's death the fault of socialized medicine. The New York Post's article on this matter suggested that the first hospital that Richardson went to might not have had a CT scanner and that by the time she got to a hospital with one, it was too late. This blog post says that she did have a CT scan at the local hospital, but that she wasn't transferred to a larger hospital with a trauma center for another three hours.
Either way, it sent me a-Googling for numbers comparing the United States with Canada. During a conversation with a friend who'd just had an MRI, my friend told me that the MRI tech had told her there are more MRI scanners in Orange County, Calif., than there are in Canada. If that's inadmissible as hearsay, there is this: Canada in 2007 had 419 CT scanners and 222 MRI scanners. We have more than 10,000 MRI scanners in the United States and more than 6,000 CT scanners. Even if you account for the population difference (33 million people in Canada vs. 300 million in the United States), this country is outfitted better with high-tech life-saving medical equipment.
Did socialized medicine kill Natasha Richardson? I don't think we can say one way or the other, and I hope that her family is able to ignore the hubbub and grieve in peace. Health care in this country is far from perfect. But even with all the problems we have, this is just one reason that I'll take my chances in the United States over Canada any day.
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