Canadian 'universal medicare' is delivered in the States

This by R. Bobak from the Thorold Niagara News, Mar.1, 2006:

“It’s time that more writers like Nicole Montreuil (Privatize OHIP? But that’s blasphemy…Feb.22) challenge Canada’s medicare status-quo.

The Canada Health Act, to our detriment, has unfortunately become a symbolic crutch of Canadian identity and an instrument of dogmatic statism played by those more interested in health-scare than health-care.

It seems those most opposed to even incremental private-sector healthcare participation (“it’s un-Canadian” – “it’s U.S.-style” – “it’s a slippery slope”) aren’t so much concerned that it won’t work, but that it will, exposing their hollow single-tier, public-payer, hypocritical posturing.

Canada’s abolishment of choice in healthcare provider and payer options is rivalled only by Cuba and North Korea’s.

Quebec’s Chaoulli decision shocked the rosy left-wing world view of many myopic Canadians. It essentially revealed the well-cultivated sham which our socialized medicare monopoly was foisting upon us; that being put on a government waiting-list for rationed healthcare, is not actually access to healthcare.

Sounds simple, though it took some 40 years after Tommy Douglas started this grand ponzi scheme for our Supreme Court to actually rule on it. Just keep dumping more money into it is the Romanow answer, solemnly and duly seconded by the lib-left, even if it means de-listing health coverage while raising new health taxes.

Last month, a mom" [Mena Coote] "from Liberal MPP Jim Bradley’s St. Catharines gave birth to twins in the U.S. because no hospital in wealthy Ontario would accept her.

These Liberals dump over $30 billion of our tax dollars into Ontario’s “free” healthcare, yet still citizens are forced to leave the country for covered care.

How ironic for our provincial Lberals, who so enjoy sneering with disdain at “American-style” healthcare, that, when reality superseded Liberal rhetoric, it was a Buffalo hospital which had the capacity to take that mom in.

How convenient for Premier McGuinty that Ontarians already have access to OHIP-covered, private-parallel healthcare – but it’s in Buffalo, in Cleveland, in Detroit.

Whether for colon cancer, radiation, cardiac surgery, lithotripsy, or neo-natal care, OHIP’s shortcomings are met by American-style technology and capacity.

There are lessons to be learned here from this oddly-symbiotic relationship, despite the misplaced bravado of Liberal Health Minister George Smitherman, who once deputized all Ontarians to stop a U.S. diagnostics clinic from crossing the border into Canada.

Hmm… it’s okay for OHIP to send ill Canadians to the U.S., but don’t send that same American capacity to us… because that would violate the CHA!

The British, French, German, and American healthcare models all have hybrid public/private systems we need to learn from – and soon.

Canada needs the moral courage to do much better, to rise above today’s dysfunctional, non-competitive single-tier aberration we call healthcare.”
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I wrote the above almost two years ago, in 2006, and healthcare has become worse in Ontario, not better. Just recently, a man from Windsor was rushed to Detroit for heart surgery, and a huge ruckus was made of the fact that his ambulance was stopped at the U.S. border for 3 minutes.

Even a local CAW official, Ken Lewenza, finally asked why are we going to the States in the first place? Of course, CAW boss, Buzz Hargrove, supported the McGuinty Liberals in the last election, and healthcare wasn't even a campaign issue.

Even yesterday, Nov. 29, 2007, when the Liberals announced their priorities for the next legislative session, healthcare wasn't at the top of the list. (and, hey, Buzz, neither was the 'manufacturing crisis').

So, maybe CAW boss Hargrove can ask his buddy McGuinty for an answer (certainly, I didn't hear any Liberal talk about this patient's ordeal), and then explain it to his local members (of which the patient shipped to Detroit was one). Tell the rest of Ontario, too.

Ontario already has medicare-free zones - they're in the States.