One opinion on health care

In case anyone's wondering, this is strictly my own point of view here. It's quite possibly ill-informed, but it's all mine. And it's a bit of a rant. But since I once hailed from Tommy Douglas' neck of the prairies, the rant would perhaps be inevitable.

You can also blame it on reading reports like this one over the last few days.

I think that Drs. Brian Day and Robert Ouellet, the outgoing and incoming presidents of the Canadian Medical Association respectively, are wrong when it comes to the public-private argument over health care in Canada. There are real problems with their thinking.

Start with this: the idea proposed by Dr. Day that opponents of private-run health care in Canada "need a reality check" is itself in need of such.

If you're alive, you need health care services. This is not a negotiable item. No matter how careful you are, with your diet, with exercise, with risky (or "risky") behaviour on other fronts, something's going to happen to you sooner or later to medically complicate your life. And you're going to need help with it. The idea of having to either pay out of pocket up front everytime this happens, or working out a payment schedule or, in the extreme, flat out begging...should be offensive on principle to anyone with a brain.

(And yes, I'm leaving out optional items like cosmetic surgery to "enhance" specific regions of the anatomy. Unless you've been disfigured by accidents, genetic or otherwise, you're out of luck with me.)

As some of the people who posted responses to that CBC article I linked to above noted, the health care systems as we've known and built up over the decades since Douglas got the ball rolling in Saskatchewan has been shortchanged. Part of it was well-meaning, some of it was accidents of timing, some of it was deliberate attempts to roll back the societal clock.

Yes, there is only one group of people paying the bills for the system at the end of the day: us. All of us. It's going to be that way, no matter what we do about the situation. Do we really want to drive the cost of the system up even quicker than we already know it will, by way of creeping re-privatisation or parallel public-and-private(or some other label for it as yet unknown)?

I don't think so.

I can't afford it.

I don't think any of us can.