The Surgery Center of Oklahoma is proud to be host to Rick Baker starting tomorrow and lasting through Saturday. His company, Timely Medical Alternatives, has thrived due to the type of government run medical system in Canada that the Marxist pigs in Washington want for us here. You see, Rick helps Canadians find high quality, affordable and timely surgical care outside of Canada. It is illegal to pay for your own private care in Canada, so Canadians who don’t want to wait 3 years to have their brain tumor evaluated (not operated but evaluated!!) go to him. People with debilitating joint issues that don’t want to wait 3-5 years to get to see an orthopedic surgeon for a possible total joint replacement go to him. Women with intractable uterine bleeding go to him rather than wait 2 years to see a gynecologist. And what does he do? He finds a surgical facility and negotiates fair payment for a procedure that the patient and the surgeon agree is appropriate. That a business like his even exists is evidence enough that the Canadian health care scheme is a failure. That he has done extremely well in this line of work is indicative of the extent to which this failure has affected the lives of the Canadian people.
Why is he coming to Oklahoma? He sends the vast majority of surgical patients to Oklahoma. To our facility, to the Oklahoma Heart Hospital (which owes its success primarily to the physician owner and leader, John Harvey) and to the McBride Clinic Orthopedic Hospital. Why these three facilities? Why not Mercy or Integris? You say,”..they are not for profit…they would give a better price than those greedy physician-owned and controlled facilities!” Right! Don’t make me laugh. All three facilities will provide transparent and fixed pricing for various procedures which the big “not wanting to make a profit” facilities will not. Coronary artery bypass? Fixed price. Total hip replacement? Fixed price. Any of the procedures listed on our website (surgerycenterok.com) at the price listed.
Canadians have benefitted in two ways. Many have benefitted from the care they received at one of these three facilities. Others have negotiated a price, bought their plane tickets then as they gave the appropriate hand gesture to their provincial health care bureaucrat, the Canadian health care system miraculously works them in and gets them fixed right up, in order to avoid the embarrassment of another patient disaster story. In any event, we are happy to help these patients get care here or at home, unlike our local “not-wanting to make-a-profit” Catholic hospital that refused to grant care to these patients.
The Surgery Center of Oklahoma has provided care to patients from as far away as Nigeria and Turkey. We have more and more patients coming to us from remote parts of the United States where health care is particularly expensive due to virtual monopolies of big hospital systems (California, Alaska and Maine, for example). Having posted our prices online has afforded many patients the opportunity to receive reasonably priced care that they otherwise would not have been able to afford or receive. Rick Baker has seen the value of our approach and increasingly so are many others. Isn’t it ironic that the free market has found a way to provide care to those that the government has promised to take care of? We may all be traveling to foreign countries to receive our care soon unless the states successfully push back the health care plan the Washington trash wants for us.
G. Keith Smith, M.D.
