Are Canadian physicians and other health care professionals practicing “defensive medicine,” paying more attention to the legal risks they face than to the well-being of their patients? And are patient-care dollars being diverted by university hospitals to academic pursuits such as esoteric research and teaching?

We on the Canadian left have been very quick to assail plans by provincial governments to experiment with American-style, market-based health-care delivery systems — and rightly so. The additional costs to taxpayers and the potential to harm the ability of the health-care system to deliver care to everyone are well established in two-tier market-based systems, no matter what the Wildrose Alliance has to say about it.

But is anyone paying attention to the Americanization of our health-care system when it comes to aggressive civil litigation and the importation of American-style regulatory bodies to Canadian medicine?

In other words, there is more than one pernicious import from the United States slipping across our undefended Medicine Line that can have a nasty impact on our health-care costs, and I’m not just talking about automatic pistols sneaking across the Ambassador Bridge!

Physicians will tell you privately that the impact of aggressive U.S.-style civil litigation on our health-care system has been a dramatic — and expensive — increase in what they term defensive medicine. To avoid the potential for litigation, physicians will order every test known to medical science, or at least every test the doctor concludes a lawyer or judge would like to see. And then maybe some more after that. If the testing doesn’t produce satisfactory results, they’ll recommend a hospital admission where one really isn’t necessary.

Results still inconclusive? Well, leave the patient in hospital. Never discharge anyone until you’re rock-solid certain there’s a cure for whatever it is that ails them.

Obviously, in an uncertain world, this is going to have an impact on the cost of operating the entire system.

Worse, though, I have heard physicians discreetly suggest that close to a third of the time medical professionals take up preparing for operating room procedures goes to making sure a perfect medical legal document exists — rather than ensuring the patient’s well-being. Reduced to its cruelly absurd endpoint, the survival of the patient is unimportant as long as the documentation achieves perfection!

Apparently nowadays there’s a need to drape more than the patient during preparation for surgery — the surgeon’s butt and those of other OR staff need covering too!

The danger is that without adoption of a new model of medical litigation and regulatory enforcement, the efficiency of our health-care system will continue to grind down, and costs will continue to rise.

Another cost factor little commented upon by anyone on the left, or anywhere else in the political spectrum for that matter, is the diversion of funds earmarked for patient care to academic pursuits, particularly at hospitals affiliated with university medical faculties. Universities are burning through patient-care funding to finance academic research and education.

Influences like these mean that whomever you put in charge of Alberta Health Services — even if he or she has sworn off oatmeal-raisin cookies for a lifetime — their chances of success are slim when two out of three of the significant problems they face are outside their jurisdiction.

This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...