Question:
How about demonstrating this 'over the border' traffic so that normal
people can see it too, not just the conservatively visually gifted?
Answer:
"We conducted a telephone survey in the fall and winter of 1998¨C99 of
all ambulatory care clinical facilities located in specific heavily
populated U.S. urban corridors bordering Canada (***Buffalo***,
Detroit, and Seattle) that offered services that might be less
available in Canada. These services included diagnostic radiology,
ambulatory surgery, ambulatory eye surgery, cancer evaluation and
treatment, and mental health and substance abuse treatment....
Almost 40 percent of the facilities we surveyed reported treating no
Canadians, while an additional 40 percent had seen fewer than ten
patients. Fifteen percent of respondent sites reported treating 10¨C25
Canadian patients, and only about 5 percent reported seeing more than
25 during the previous year (generally 25¨C75 patients; none reported
more than 100). These findings were fairly consistent across the
service categories. The overall response rate was 67 percent, and it
varied across type of clinical facility from 56 percent for ambulatory
surgery centers to 80 percent for cancer centers.
If we extrapolate these findings (assuming that nonrespondents show a
pattern similar to that of respondents), these facilities in the three
large metropolitan areas combined saw approximately 640 Canadian
patients for diagnostic radiology services such as computed tomography
(CT) scans or MRI and 270 patients for eye procedures such as cataract
surgery over a one-year period. By comparison, the annual volume for
CT scans and cataract extractions averaged about 80,000 and 25,000
procedures, respectively, in British Columbia alone during the mid-
1990s. In Quebec the annual volume during the same period for CT scans
and MRI averaged 375,000 procedures and 44,000 procedures,
respectively....
