Saturday 9 July 2016

Canadian health care dictatorship.

"Administrators maintain waiting lists on purpose, the way airlines overbook. As for urgent patients on the list who are in pain, the public system will decide when their pain requires care. These are societal decisions. The individual is not able to decide rationally." — Dr. Charles Wright, current member of the Health Council of Canada and a former vice-president at Vancouver General Hospital, quoted in a Reader's Digest article.

   I came across this  statement by my quondam colleague and Professor of Surgery at the University of Saskatchewan where my patients and I were fortunate to  avail of his surgical knowledge and skills and his compassionate approach.  The above quotation hit the spot so precisely that I could not avoid sharing it.  It encapsulates  the changes that the 'health care industry' has adopted and the damage it has done to medical humanism.   Politicians encourage the administridiots to cut back on expenses in the manner that is most advantageous to the political masters and not to the patients whose needs are greatest.  The length and urgency of waiting lists is of little significance if more political mileage can be garnered by say financing an in vivo fertility clinic, a trans gender sexual clinic or a medical marijuana clinic.  Patient suffering is secondary to political expediency and those who squeal loudest often get the limited resources regardless of the validity of their demands.    Unfortunately the administridiots really don't care as long as they or their families are not the ones on the year-long waiting list, which I can assure they rarely are.  The public still don't realize that when they voted for control of medical care to be transferred from those who understood and cared about it to those who regarded it as the staircase to political popularity and success, that they were contributing to undermining a system that was the envy of the developed world, and depreciating it to one that is being increasingly recognized as a third rate, not even a second rate (which it  is now) system.  Further, their idealogue philosophy and dedication to political correctness, has justified, in their minds, the prevention of those who would willingly pay for their care the freedom of spending their own money, in the way they chose.  In effect, our government is dictating what we can do as in a typical dictatorship.Thus, Canada, now has a health care system, as described in the paragraph below. 
  

"With regards to international comparison, the 2014 Commonwealth Fund report on the health system performance of 11 countries ranked Canada 10th overall, indicated particularly low scores in quality, safety, access, timeliness, efficiency and equity.17 "
17
Commonwealth Fund, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: How the Performance of the US Health Care System Compares
Internationally, 2014 Update.  Note the broad range of care in which we are at the bottom of the heap.
   Makes you proud,eh?   It doesn't make much difference to me, I'm eighty, but those of you who have children and grandchildren better start thinking who you want to look after your health care, a group of vote seeking politicians and their janissaries or medical professionals. I have spent most of my life trying to improve the standards of health care in this country and it greatly perturbs me to see the system being undermined by a group of bureaucrats who understand only the 'health care industry' and really care little about actual health care.

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