Canadian Physician Vs. Republican Senator: Senator Slam Dunked!

I work to avoid generalization and stereotypes when and where possible. The following exchanges literally takes away an opportunity to overlook the deep and wide crevasse between a learned professional physician (woman, young, competent, executive-cool-feisty) and the intellectual capacity of yet another baby-boomer Paleozoic Era Republican member of Congress.

How is it possible the congressman could have felt the witness was not carefully chosen to join the committee as witness? How could the nocturnal slow snail slug congressman not know the witness would anticipate his tired and tried GOP questions? 

Dr. Danielle Martin, vice president at the  Women’s College Hospital in Toronto

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.)

                       

  VS. 

When Burr asked Martin “on average how many Canadian patients on a waiting list die each year,” she answered with a fact about the American healthcare system.  “Do you know?” Burr asked.  “I don’t, sir, but I know that there are 45,000 in America who die waiting because they don’t have insurance at all,” Martin said.

There’s more…..

Burr: What do you say to an elected official who goes to Florida and not the Canadian system to have a heart valve replacement?  Martin: It’s actually interesting, because in fact the people who are the pioneers of that particular surgery, which Premier Williams had, and have the best health outcomes in the world for that surgery, are in Toronto, at the Peter Munk Cardiac Center, just down the street from where I work.  So what I say is that sometimes people have a perception, and I believe that actually this is fueled in part by media discourse, that going to where you pay more for something, that that necessarily makes it better, but it’s not actually borne out by the evidence on outcomes from that cardiac surgery or any other.

International healthcare Hearings.

http://youtu.be/iYOf6hXGx6M