Saturday, September 29, 2007

'You're Not Helping Me,' Angry cancer patient tells Liberal Premier of Ontario

This story From CityNews.ca Staff, Sept. 26, 2007:

"As he continues to pound the campaign trail, Premier Dalton McGuinty came face to face with perhaps one of his biggest critics Wednesday after a cancer patient at an Ottawa hospital simply refused to shake his hand.
Mike Brady, who has stage four colon cancer, told the party leader, "You're not helping me." McGuinty replied, "That's not true," before continuing with his tour.
The angry patient said McGuinty shouldn't be visiting those in hospital with similar ailments when the Ontario government doesn't provide funding for some types of cancer that other provinces and the U.S. already do.
McGuinty's response? It reminded him of how personal health care is to patients and their families.
The doctor escorting the Grit boss through the facility quickly tried to put a spin on the incident, telling McGuinty cancer patients in hospital often experience feelings of despair.
But Brady insisted he wasn't sad - just mad. "The study I was on was paid for by the drug company," he related afterwards. "If I had to rely on drugs available in Ontario I would be dead today." "

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Brady’s last quote is worth noting, because it echoes exactly the same theme Suzanne Aucoin expressed after she was denied funding by Ontario's healthcare monopoly (twice), and was forced by McGuinty's Liberals to the United States for her treatment. Aucoin said: “If I lived by what they could provide me, I wouldn’t be living, I’d be dead. It is only because I go to other places, that I go to the U.S. and look outside of what’s available to me here, that I’m able to stay alive.” (Toronto Sun, Mar.16, 2007)

McGuinty happened to pass a patient, Brady, who was standing in the hospital lobby as McGuinty and his entourage campaigned in the hospital. (... yes: this is what these Liberals do: troll for votes in hospitals. Pathetic.) As McGuinty went by, he tried to reach out his hand, Brady did not offer his, and that's when the curt exchange took place, with Brady saying "I've got cancer and you're not helping any." (St.Catharines Standard, Sept.27, 2007) McGuinty really didn't even stop walking.

What occurred in this brief, yet revealing, episode is politically significant. A campaigning McGuinty meets a patient, face-to-face, who’s suffering in the Liberal healthcare system, and then McGuinty has the audacity to dismiss what the patient just said, scurrying away, saying "That's not true".

These Liberals are blind to the reality of the sicko healthcare mess which they, through their health minister George Smitherman, have propagated. When McGuinty saw and met the reality of his failing health-policies face-to-face, he responded with rhetoric and walked away, pretending this was just an anomaly. Shameful. The Standard reported this incident “was an unexpected glitch for the premier”. You think?! The “glitch” is that reality trumped Liberal ideology. And shame on that doctor for trying to spin it otherwise.

This incident demonstrates more than just embarrassing Liberal hypocrisy; it shows the outright negligence of Ontario’s Premier - who runs our restrictive, single-payer, so-called ‘universal-healthcare’ monopoly - to pretend that the suffering patient he just met, a hostage trapped in McGuinty’s no-choice monopoly, was somehow lying.

And what exactly did Brady say, which was "not true"? And how would Dalton even know, since he didn't bother stopping to talk to Mr. Brady? McGuinty’s response was rich indeed, coming from a Liberal premier whose entire 2003 election platform pretty much ended up being “not true”.

The video (see:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UzKjfwtXrE&feature=related) of this encounter was shown on almost all Ontario news shows that night, Sept. 26, 2007. (Once again, please, don't tell Michael Moore about this sicko example of universal government-run healthcare in Canada. Moore may not want to use it in his next propaganda film extolling the glories of Canadian single-payer medicare.)
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1 comment:

R.Bobak said...

Nadia Abderrahman wrote in the Toronto Sun (Sept.28,2007): "After seeing Dalton McGuinty snub cancer patient Mike Brady, I will definitely not be voting for the Liberals. McGuinty should have stopped and listened to Brady's concerns. But because the comments were negative, the premier walked away. McGuinty does not care about people, he only cares about getting your vote."
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Now that they are in power again, The Liberals will be snubbing a lot of patients over the next four, long years.