Let's look at this two-faced, disingenuous editorial from the St. Catharines Standard, Dec.4, 2007: "Symptoms of a broken health-care system" [The same editorial also appeared the same day in the Niagara Falls Review, headlined "Mortality statistics indicative of broken provincial health-care system"] :
"Sobering statistics for St. Catharines, indeed.
According to a recent study, the St. Catharines General Hospital site of the Niagara Health System has the third-highest mortality rate in the country.
The lineup of excuses, to be sure, is long.
We have an older population, meaning longer hospital stays, complex ailments and the unfortunate but inevitable passing of patients.
Our system is financially stressed.
Our shortage of family doctors puts more strain on an already-stressed emergency department. There aren't enough long-term care beds, meaning patients who should be living, and ultimately dying, in a nursing home are left to do so in a hospital bed.
A shortage of palliative care and hospice services mean more people stay in the hospital to die.
No question, all are valid excuses, but they are excuses nonetheless.
But this isn't necessarily a study that should reflect wholly on the local area, or even directly on the Niagara Health System.
Yes, the NHS is directly responsible for the delivery of its services.
But it is working within a provincial health-care framework that is broken.
Ontario as a whole is underperforming on this index, lagging behind the western provinces and New Brunswick.
Ontarians routinely engage in debates about our health-care system, and it often boils down to our public system versus privatization.
Lost in this ongoing battle of rhetoric is the reality that the system we cherish so much is faltering.
Surgical wait times are long.
Emergency rooms are packed.
Diagnostic equipment is in short supply.
We're short family physicians and certain specialists.
A nursing crisis is looming.
Obviously, the traditional response to health-care issues - throwing more money at the system - isn't working.
About 46 cents of every dollar Ontario spends on services this year will go to health care.
Yet what improvements do we see for that investment?
What is needed is a systematic overhaul of the way our health-care system is managed.
We have to stop with the shortsighted Band-Aid approach and rethink how health care in Ontario is delivered.
And no, this isn't a call for the privatization of our health-care system.
But we have to start asking hard questions about the way our health-care system is run.
For example, why can a person drive across the Peace Bridge and get an MRI today, but has to wait months to get one in Ontario?
The challenge will be getting past the institutional resistance to the kind of sweeping change required.
It will be incredibly difficult to get the diverse interests - medical and nursing associations, hospital administrators, public sector unions, government officials - all moving in the same direction.
But it has to be done.
The best argument against privatized health care is to build a public health-care system that is stable, efficient and effective.
We are a long way from that perhaps utopian goal, but we have to start moving towards it now.
The status quo isn't working. It's time for a new approach."
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Where does one begin with this editorial? How about its biased premise:
“This isn't a call for the privatization of our health-care system”, and “The best argument against privatized health care is to build a public health-care system that is stable, efficient and effective.”
So: in regards to the “public health-care system” (otherwise known as the provincial single-payer health monopoly) which has operated unfettered for forty years in Ontario and which the editorial notes is “broken”, the Standard is proposing… um... what… more "public health-care"? End of debate?
This is the “best argument” only for those not truly seeking "change"; whose goal is promoting more of the same! The equally valid argument, calling for reduced socialization of our health-care system, was obviously not this editorial's focus.
By what measure does the Standard propose to asses the stability, efficiency, and effectiveness of government-run health-care? Are we to satisfy ourselves with shuffling the deck chairs while the ship sinks? Shall we pretend to change the way things are done, but confined solely within the scope of a single-payer monopoly, ignoring the private sector? After forty years of the state supposedly 'building' medicare, what has not yet been tried to get it right?! Why isn't accountability mentioned along with 'public health-care's' other supposedly-shining attributes?
"Ontarians routinely engage in debates about our health-care system, and it often boils down to our public system versus privatization.
Lost in this ongoing battle of rhetoric is the reality that the system we cherish so much is faltering".
The reality that the system “is faltering” (to couch it nicely; it’s more like “failing”) is not “lost”: it has been IGNORED!
Why no mention in the Standard’s editorial of Jim Bradley’s role in establishing and defending this failed system? The Standard wrote:
“Surgical wait times are long.
Emergency rooms are packed.
Diagnostic equipment is in short supply.
We're short family physicians and certain specialists.
A nursing crisis is looming.
Obviously, the traditional response to health-care issues - throwing more money at the system - isn't working.”
But, there was an Ontario election campaign a scant two months ago, and there was no health-care debate: all was well, according to Bradley! Liberals have been “throwing more money” at the “broken” health system by raising billions of dollars from their unprecedented health-tax, resulting in what? An increasingly expensive - and still broken - monopolist system.
“But we have to start asking hard questions about the way our health-care system is run.
For example, why can a person drive across the Peace Bridge and get an MRI today, but has to wait months to get one in Ontario?”
The Standard might have started by “asking hard questions” of Jim Bradley. Why did his Liberals foolishly spend tax dollars by socializing private MRI facilities? Jim Bradley railed against the “American-style two-tier system” (St. Catharines Standard, Nov.1, 2000), as did Premier Dalton “I stand against the Americanization of our hospitals” (Toronto Star, Sept.26, 2003) McGuinty…but that’s where patients are increasingly standing – in line at the border, forced by the McGuinty monopoly to the States for treatment.
"The challenge will be getting past the institutional resistance to the kind of sweeping change required."
When 'institutions', (ie, private health organizations) were willing to enter Ontario (as in the 2004 instance with Life Line diagnostics), the Liberal Health Minister at the time, the ridiculous George Smitherman, went ballistic, deputizing Ontarians to stop them at the Peace Bridge from crossing into Canada!!! And Good ole Jim Bradley supported Smitherman’s ridiculous stunt. Liberals resisted the beneficial health-care changes competition could bring.
"It will be incredibly difficult to get the diverse interests - medical and nursing associations, hospital administrators, public sector unions, government officials - all moving in the same direction."
This editorial mentions all the usual health-care special interests within our closed, non-competitive health monopoly, neglecting one particular little group: the interests of PATIENTS.
Why should Ontario's patients consistently be at the end of the list, if even mentioned at all? Why should patients suffer at the behest of this vaunted healthcare system, which was ostensibly supposed to serve them? Patients pay, but have no say.
This particular health-care editorial, created by the Liberal-friendly St.Catharines Standard, is a mockery to the patients who have suffered under our demagogic health-care monopoly.
What "new approach", what “systemic overhaul”,what “sweeping change” is the Standard talking about?!??
More of the same-old from Jim Bradley?
Will the Liberals return our right to buy our own health coverage, to protect ourselves from the state-monopoly’s negligence to provide timely treatment? Or, will the Ontario Liberals wait, causing even more patients to suffer, until the case of Lindsay McCreith and Shona Holmes (who sued the Ontario government for not providing them timely care) is decided?
If the Standard, or its readers, are truly serious that “the status quo isn't working. It's time for a new approach”, then it’s time we consider abolishing two main sources of the “status-quo”: the aged federal Canada Health Act, and the provincial Liberal’s flawed Commitment to the Future of Medicare act.
Or, get a very large box of Band-Aids.
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