"Socialized" Medicine results in more equitable swein flu vaccine distribution

[Anonymous]

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20091106/flu_europe_091106/20091106?hub=Health

[Anonymous]

Couple of points:

1) The U.S. has such strong right to privacy laws and proponents that I would never see this working in the U.S. My doctor's office will not even leave a detailed message on my answering machine!

2) I would love to see a more equitable distribution of the flu vaccine. In most instances the Gov't is controlling the distribution, but they are leaving it to the local governments to set their own rules. Some are stricter than others. None or almost none though request identification or proof of being in a high risk group. This gets back to point number 1 above.


3) I found it interesting that the article did not mention how efficient these other countries were in administering the vaccine. How many doses does the country have, how many have been sent to doctors offices, how many have been administered, what percentage of high risk groups have received their vaccination?

[Anonymous]

I'm just thankful we don't have socialized medicine in the US> I woudl hate to have to wait in a line, for hours, to get a vaccine.

I like our system here much better.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
1) The U.S. has such strong right to privacy laws and proponents that I would never see this working in the U.S. My doctor's office will not even leave a detailed message on my answering machine!

My doctors send me test results via mail. If every OB/GYN in the state had been allocated a certain number of vaccinatins for their pregnant patients, why couldn't the doctors have sent their patients "invitation" to come and get their shot at the office sometime in the next few weeks? Same with doctors for other high risk conditions.

This would leave out pregnant woman or people with high risk conditions who do not have a doctor of course -- that doesn't happen in those socialized medicine countries as uch, I doubt.

[Anonymous]

France, which has one of the most highly-rated government-run medical care in the world, has the following procedure right now for flu vaccines: patients in announced high-risk groups will be responsible for buying their own H1N1 vaccines in pharmacies and then going to a doctor to have them injected. Of course, everybody just pays the co-pay, because the rest is automatically reimbursed by the government. This has already been implemented for seasonal flu, along with another solution my dad is implementing in his company: having a doctor visit the workplace and vaccinating (for free, company pays) all who so wish against seasonal flu.

There is no predicted vaccine shortage, and no waiting lines (of course, the Sanofi vaccines are french-made, so I imagine they would have allocated a good portion of their vaccines to their own country).

However, the H1N1 vaccine will only be available to the first high-risk groups on Nov 12th, therefore a little later than US availability for the same high-risk groups.