Due to shortages in availability in the national Canadian health care system.

More than 100 Canadian women with high-risk pregnancies have been sent to United States hospitals over the past year--in what a doctors’ group attributes to the lack of a national birthing plan.

The problem has peaked, with British Columbia and Ontario each sending a record number of women to U.S. neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Specifically, 80 B.C. women have been sent to U.S. hospitals since April 1, 2007; in Ontario, 28 have been sent since January of 2007, according to figures from the respective health ministries.

André Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, said 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.

“Neonatologists are very stretched right now,” Dr. Lalonde said in a telephone interview from Ottawa. “We’re so stretched, it’s kind of dangerous.”

Discussion question: With America’s free market system, would these nationalized health care systems in other countries not collapse?  If access to the American health care system weren’t available for Canadians who can’t get timely care in the system they pay dearly for in taxes, would they not riot?  If drug companies couldn’t make profits in the American medical system to offset the slim margins they operate under in nationalized markets such as Europes would invention and innovation in that industry not stagnate?

We spend a good deal of time complaining about the cost of health care in America, and while our system certainly isn’t cheap it seems to this observer to be the keystone on which keeps universal health care systems in other countries afloat. 

In fact, Canadians and Britons and all the other citizens of the world who live under a government-run health care system should be hoping and praying that America doesn’t mimic the policies of their respective countries.  Without the American health care system acting as a primary release valve for the systems in other countries those systems would implode.