– Doctors at several Canadian hospitals routinely accepted bribes from patients to expedite surgeries in publicly funded health care (Natural News, March 19, 2012):
One of the major pitfalls of government-run universal health care is long waiting lists for patients who require involved procedures, a situation that often devolves into a “black market” of medical care where patients willing and able to fork over large cash sums are able to move to the front of the line for medical procedures. And this is precisely what has been taking place in Montreal, Canada, where doctors have allegedly been charging patients thousands of dollars in secret fees in order for them to gain priority in receiving medical care.
In Canada, it is prohibited for doctors to charge patients for procedures that are covered under the nation’s universal, taxpayer-funded health care system. But The Gazette reports that Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH) is currently the center of a controversy involving a surgeon who has reportedly charged several individuals $10,000 cash sums to receive bariatric surgery, also known as gastric bypass surgery, earlier than the normal system would have allowed.
With a waiting list of up to ten years for bariatric surgery at some area hospitals, desperate patients who are told they have less than a year to live, for instance, are working out financial deals with doctors in secret in exchange for priority medical care. In essence, those who can afford to pay their way to better quality medical care are receiving preference above those who cannot pay, a corrupt system that is ironically much worse than the U.S. private insurance-based hybrid system that proponents of publicly-funded health care often reference in support of the universal care model.
