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.

In Which Health Nuttery Abounds - Questions Included

Hi again.

If you've taken a look at some of my other web assets, you'll have caught sight of pictures I've taken of myself and posted. One thing the photos will make instantly clear: I've got eyesight issues.

There's no use in hiding the fact. But it does serve as a springboard for something else that's been nagging at me for a few years. To explain in detail: I'm nearsighted. Beyond the extended reach of my arm, it all starts to blur a bit. For a few years recently, there was a time when it seemed like my vision was improving to hear my eye specialist tell me.

But the process of keeping my eyesight issues in order was made more difficult a couple of years back when the first post-Harris provincial government was installed. You might have heard about the de-listing of eye exams. Bad enough that they'd been demoted from "annual" to "every two years". But this? I need my eyes for my work, whether it's data entry or drawing the latest panel of Local Hero. And eyeglasses or lenses - take your pick - aren't cheap as it is. Heck, even if you're able to get a job with extra health benefits beyond the basic minimum as defined by the province at any given point, it still isn't cheap.

Eyesight is not a luxury item for me.

The next thing up, and I have to admit up front that I'm not sure how it works right now: allergy issues. A few years back, I went to an allergy specialist to deal with some Spring issues. Nothing special, thousands if not millions of us have the same sort of Spring issues and we all cope to varying degrees. I was told that it would take about three years of injections, several times a week. This would be a pain as far as holding down a day-job was concerned. The biggie, though?

It would not be covered by the Ontario Health Insurance Plan(OHIP).

Not good. I don't know if this has changed in Ontario since then, and I also don't know if the same situation obtains elsewhere in Canada nor to what degree. I'd be glad of anyone speaking up to explain what they know about this.

The other major health issue the state of which I'm not quite clear on, although I suspect that it too is treated as a luxury item: mental health services. Specifically, the classic "psychiatrist/psychologist" appointment set-up. I could use some fuzzifying of the muddification - Allan Fotheringham, forgive me for the rip-off, please? - on this particular set of services. If memory serves, it's also very much on the "luxury item" list these days, unless you've got the right private-sector supplementary provider.

For a lot of people who fall between the top and the bottom of the income ladder, this will be a headache. If I've remembered correctly.

I started this posting out intending to write a rant, and now it's turned into a shopping list of questions.

Too many questions.

Private Care Failing in Ontario

Private health care in Ontario has taken off with a resounding thud. First the Indo-Canadian community turned against the provinces first Public Private Partnership (P3) Hospital.

Fuelling people's fury are not only the deaths of two Punjabi men due to the hospital's alleged negligence in November and a wrong surgery on a Punjabi woman last month, but also service cuts, cost overruns and alleged government cover-ups.

Now the Ontario Health Coalition is calling on the provincial auditor for a probe of cost overruns and delays.

"The government's justification for its P3 privatization policy has been that going to the private sector brings hospitals on time and in budget. The evidence from the Brampton case shows that this hospital is (not) on time, it doubled in price and the bed totals are approximately half of the assessed needs of the community at this ... time," the coalition's director Natalie Mehra told a news conference yesterday."The government's justification for its P3 privatization policy has been that going to the private sector brings hospitals on time and in budget. The evidence from the Brampton case shows that this hospital is (not) on time, it doubled in price and the bed totals are approximately half of the assessed needs of the community at this ... time," the coalition's director Natalie Mehra told a news conference yesterday.

Amid all of this failure, a new study shows that Canadian health care is better and less expensive than private health care in the U.S.

Breaking Links: Tuesday, December 6, 2007

Despite all of it's saber rattling, threats and accusations the US now concedes that Iran abandoned it's nuclear weapons program in 2003. This does not, however, seemed to have changed Bush's stance on the issue at all.

"U.S. President George W. Bush defended his approach Tuesday, and Ms. Rice said it would be a “big mistake” to ease any diplomatic pressure on Iran despite the new U.S. findings."

A new public/private hospital in Brampton is already drawing criticism for quality of care.

"Open barely a month, Brampton Civic Hospital has become a lightning rod for opposition to so-called P3 projects, following a death the local Punjabi community is blaming on understaffing."

More than half of Torontonians are now foreign born which does wonders for cultural diversity.

"Half the people in the City of Toronto are now foreign-born, according to 2006 Canadian census figures released yesterday, making it more diverse than Miami, Los Angeles or New York City"

According to scientists gathered in Bali the climate change countdown clock is winding down and there may be as little as ten years left to act.

"In a declaration released Thursday in Bali, Indonesia, where representatives from about 180 countries are attending a United Nations conference on climate change, the scientists say emissions need to peak and then start to decline within the next 10 to 15 years as a first step, and then be cut in half by 2050 from the level prevailing in 1990."

The Canadian Filmmakers Festival is Now accepting submissions for 08.

"The Canadian Filmmakers Festival wants to see your movie. We're looking for all genres so submit your film today. Please download and read the submission form for a detailed overview of rules and eligibility. "

Via CanCult Another Catholic School Board, this one in Calgary, has banned the Golden Compass

"Our children are exposed to a wide range of information,” said board spokeswoman Judy Mackay. “One of our responsibilities is to help them understand how that fits with their belief system and to equip them with the skills so that they understand how they can fit that into their own belief system"