Back in the battle to save Canada's national treasure: Medicare

Do you want your health care run like Enron?

The Straight Goods Cyber Forum
with Larry Solway

Commentary:

  The righteous rage against "Socialized" medicine in the United States is best expressed by the question: "Do you want your medical care run by a bureaucrat?" The obvious response, but not to Americans and many neo-con Canadians is: "Would you like your medical care to be run by a Wall Street accountant working to raise profits for an HMO or an insurance company?"
  We're back in the battle to save Canada's national treasure: Medicare. It looks like the Federal Government will do almost nothing while the Provincial Premiers fulminate about being beggared by Ottawa. Sadly, the debate is all politics. It is all about individual rights, except that under the rubric of "individual rights" is really the right of the rich to keep as much as they can and oblige the middle and low end to fend for themselves.
  Ralph Klein wants to increase premiums. "Good," say the righteous who can afford it. But $100 a month to a simple wage-earning family is a horrible burden. Once again democracy prevails: everyone pays the same regardless of means or income. Some "democracy!"
  Watching 60 Minutes last Wednesday I wondered how many Americans, devout in their belief that the marketplace runs everything and keep your hands off health care, reacted to the crisis in hospitals emergency rooms. Ambulances are being diverted because the ER is full. Ambulances running to another hospital while the critically ill die without ever leaving the ambulance. Sound familiar? Sounds like what happens regularly where we live. But horrors - that shouldn't happen in a country as rich and bountiful as America. That's what happens, say the Medicare critics, when government is in charge. America is losing what is left of its innocence, while Canadians, led by Ralph Klein and Mike Harris want to abandon theirs.
  Meanwhile Ottawa plays hardball, they continue to congratulate themselves on making tax cuts and keeping out of deficit. Bookkeeping is more important than people. The old saw about economists: people who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. I am waiting for them to remind us all, with patriotic hubris, that we are in difficult times and must all be prepared to make sacrifices. Easy to sacrifice if you are on top of the world. Tough if you work for GM in Ste. Therese, or Ford in Oakville, or Nortel.
  There is something tragically ironic about the report on emergency rooms in US hospitals. If self-praise were a recommendation, Americans would have the universally best health care system in the world. The fact is that, according to 60 Minutes, the diversion of ambulances was rampant. Places like the Cleveland Clinic, I think America's largest health facility, were diverting about 50% of the time. So while we agonize over our ER waiting they applaud themselves for their success.
  Alberta jumped the gun, using the Mazankowski Report as a springboard. Although good old Don, a kindly man for a Tory, didn't say anything about raising Medicare fees, Ralphie wants to to it all: raise fees, add deterrent fees, and institute that most American of all neo-con health care ideas: the medical savings account. That means you get to save money by not using the medical system. Only the rich can afford to waste money. Only the affluent can afford to be hypochondriacs.
  Meanwhile we can hope that Romanow upsets the medical establishment just a little; that he intrudes on the primacy of physicians; that he takes aim at the empire building of hospitals; that he remembers something Maz didn't seem to care about: health care is not a commodity, it is a right.
  The system works. It needs tuning. It needs diversion, not from jammed emergency facilities, but to primary health care in community care facilities. It needs physicians to return, at least partly, to the time-worn practice of making house calls. It means, not reducing the number of procedures allowed under Medicare, but of increasing them and increasing the availability of life-saving drugs.
  It will cost money. But it will also cost political will. It will rock the boat - but better than scuttling it. Klein and Harris and Campbell know which side their political bread is buttered on. Good luck Canada!

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