By: Pat Daley

  Allan Rock is going to save medicare. That's what the federal health minister told the Globe and Mail.
  "We have an urgent need to do something about the health-care system," he said. "If we don't fix it, we are going to lose it. ... It is worth a national effort to save it."
 

*Chutzpah is like an accused killer telling the court: "I admit I killed my mother and father, but consider this: I'm an orphan." After billions in federal cuts from medicare, Rock's pledge to save the system tests credulity

  Funny. I'm looking at a clipping from the Toronto Star, March 16, 1995: "Budget cuts will save medicare, Chrétien says."
  Five years ago, the Prime Minister was stumping in Saskatchewan to explain his budget that had just laid out plans to suck $7 billion from transfers to the provinces for health, post-secondary education, and welfare. Also in 1995, he brought in the Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST) that bundled all those transfer payments together.
  Monique Begin, a former Liberal health minister, said in a lecture last fall that the CHST has helped to erode universal health care in this country, "wiping away as it did even a notional sense of what money goes to health."
  Now Allan Rock is feeling "an urgent need to do something." He wants more cash in the next budget. He wants a national home care and community care program. Don't we all. It's just a little hard to believe that Rock or anyone else is finally going to do it right.
  A recent HealthInsider survey by Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP found that 15% of Canadians are providing an average 21 hours of home care a week to friends and family members. Thirty-four per cent of them cannot afford basic services like nursing and physiotherapy. Twenty per cent of people who used emergency rooms over the last year were seen within 15 minutes, but one-quarter waited two or more hours - and this was before flu season started.
  These crises were predicted with every cut to health care spending by a government that had Allan Rock on the inside. No matter how badly the provinces have compounded the problems, he's got a nerve to play leader in a game of let's-pretend-to-save-medicare.

Pat Daley is a freelance writer and editor in Athlone in Simcoe County, Ontario.