McGuinty's Liberal health-care gulag

Carol Anne Hunt of Niagara Falls, Ontario, posted this on the St. Catharines Standard website, Jun.25, 2008:

“I'd like to comment on the story I read in the June 25 online edition about the diligence of NHS hospitals tracking C.Diff - and I have to say, having recently been in hospital, I beg to differ. Last January, I had the unfortunate experience of a kidney stone and went to GNGH for treatment, about 10 pm. In extreme pain, it was at least 2 hours before anyone admitted me to the ward, another 3 hours before it was diagnozed as kidney stone and so at approximately 4 a.m. i finally received pain management.During this 6 hours, I lay on a bed with my boyfriend next to me, and very rarely saw a nurse, had no doctor see me until 4 a.m., had two nurses try to put i.v.'s in two different hands because one did not know one had already been inserted, and when i vomited from pain, not one nurse came to check. My boyfriend found me a pan to be sick in, and when he asked the nurse where to put the waste, he was told 'wherever, that garbage can over there is fine' as she whisked past him, not caring what was actually in the pan. The open garbage can was right in the middle of the pathway where nurses, doctors, visitors, and patients travelled.Now, if the nurses were all busy, I would have understood, but there were half a dozen at any given time in their little cubicle where the computers are right across from where i was ....Well, all i can say is, .... hygiene? patient care? monitoring? ummm ...i didnt see any of it.”

Jamie Varga wrote this letter to the editor in The St. Catharines Standard, Jun.26, 2008:

“In the past couple of years, our family has had to make one too many trips to the emergency room at the St. Catharines General Hospital -- the latest when the garage door came down on my fiancee's head, leaving a gash that needed stitches.

The dreaded wait was something we were expecting, but the problem I have every time we've been there is the disgraceful behaviour and attitudes from the emergency nurses.

Right there, up on the wall where patients wait, is the patient bill of rights: As a patient I have the right to be treated at all times with compassion, professionalism and respect and express concerns or complaints and expect the hospital to to make the best efforts to provide a timely response to questions.

What a laugh! So after four hours of not being acknowledged, no questions answered or my fiancee's head even being looked at, we came home more frustrated than ever.

Here's a tip: If you are not a people person, or you lack empathy, don't become a nurse. That is the very tip of this iceberg.

The NHS has a plethora of problems and our MPP is going to hear about it from me personally.”

I guess that MPP would be Good Ole Liberal Jim Bradley in St. Catharines. Good luck getting Bradley to answer any questions, especially regarding health-care in Jim’s own riding! Remember, during the election, not that long ago in Oct. 2007, the Liberals pretended there were NO PROBLEMS in their health monopoly!

Besides, why should Jim Bradley be bothered to respond to his constituent’s concerns? His Liberals have a majority government, and they can, frighteningly, do whatever they want, such as ... oh … spend billions on new nuclear plants which they have conveniently fast tracked from environmental assessment worries! How special! A highway such as the Mid-Pen takes years of various environmental-impact studies, but if you need a nuke plant built in McGuintyland – here you go, start tomorrow! (Weren't windmills McGuinty's great energy solution several years ago?)

McGuinty’s Grit gang were once opposed to carbon taxes – now suddenly they’re in favour of them (St. Catharines Standard, "McGuinty supports carbon taxes, despite costs", Jun.26, 2008). Astoundingly, McGuinty is now essentially condemning his coal-generated power plants (the ones he lied about closing) to a new liability of untold billions more in Dion taxes!!

Who’s going to pay for that? The "revenue -neutral" charade only applies to the government!

What shell-game is big enough to hide this audacious federal Grit Tax-Gouge: well, conveniently, the McGuintyites just resurrected a dead mini-Kyoto with Quebec…and viola – their complementary provincial scam of cap’n’trade is all set and waiting in the wings !

McGuinty is supporting Dion’s ridiculous Shaft-Me tax, which will shift the costs onto our own plants such as Nanticoke which (as Bradley was fond of bringing up when he was in opposition but not so much now) is responsible for ‘thousands of smog related deaths in Ontario’.

So the McGuintyites will now sacrifice billions (of our tax dollars) to Stephane ‘Bumbledore’ Dion’s Tax-Grab – yet the McGuintyites have no money for scrubbers on their plants? And, over the past five years, how many thousands more lives have been sacrificed due to McGuinty's broken promises? Jim Bradley should know – after all, he smugly and ever-so-righteously blustered about them when he was in opposition.

So yes, apparently Bradley and McGuinty have billions to spend on nukes and on Dion’s Shifty-Tax, but as far as health-care goes – well, they imposed a new tax on that too, gave Ontario’s system a budget, and told us we just have to live within that! At least that’s what the now-thankfully-canned Smitherman kept saying.

The Liberals don’t want to have any oversight into their health monopoly. They are afraid of a prying, nosy Ombudsman hovering over them with bothersome questions and issuing pesky, factual reports.

McGuinty and his gang at Queen’s Park simply want us to believe them; that they are telling the truth - you know, the truth, as when an oh-so-sincere McGuinty signed his name on a no-tax-pledge; or when an oh-so-sincere McGuinty said ‘I’ll close all the coal plants by 2007’; or when an oh-so-sincere McGuinty says now ‘C. diff – hey, we’ve got it under control, trust us … hey, only 264 people (that we’ve told you about) died, so what’s your problem?? Didn’t you hear me? I said you better trust me.’

And this is the kind of glorious single-payer, universal health-care system that the Michael Sicko Moores and American Democrats are agitating for? This is what they want? A doctor-shortage plagued health-care monopoly hidden from scrutiny, immune from patient/taxpayer/opposition control, where patients wait days in hospital ER’s before they can get a bed??

Who is liable for these C. diff deaths in Ontario’s government-run system? What real accountability is there? The same jokers agitating for socialist medicare are the ones who also like to limit liability, limit investigations, limit oversight, limit responsibility, limit standards, limit individual choice … after all, it is SOCIALIZED medicare, it’s not better medicare: it’s a system where no-one is really held responsible in any true sense of the word. The 'buck stops nowhere'; someone else is always to blame. Welcome to your rights in a single-payer-monopoly.

(David Suzuki not long ago blabbed about jailing politicians who have broken their environmental promises. This would mean that Suzuki’s enviro-jails would be full with McGuinty Liberals. Yet what if Suzuki’s gulag also included broken political health-care promises? I guess the McGuintyites would then also be serving consecutive terms for forcing Ontarians into their failing health-care gulag).

Why shouldn’t a political cabinet, and individual politicians, be held liable for the blowback of their incompetent decisions, in the same way a board of directors can be held liable for certain breaches of its expected duties?

Why should they be shielded from accountability? When their political health-care rhetoric meets medical reality and patients start dying in their no-other-choice health-monopoly, the politicians conveniently muzzle independent investigation into the causes!

What a gig!! Why is Jim Bradley not publicly calling for the Ombudsman to be able to investigate the Liberal health-system? What’s MPP Jim Bradley going to say if, despite reasurrances, a C. diff outbreak does occur in the Niagara Health System this summer?

We don’t need no stinkin’ investigations…we’re oh-so-sincere Liberals, remember?

All you have to do is trust us!

Un-FLICKING-believable.

If only one more patient dies from here on in, these Liberals should be sued – again, on a constitutional basis, like the McCreith-Holmes case now proceeding against the Ontario government.

What else can we do??

It’s unconscionable that this smug, unresponsive Liberal government can be so utterly blasé about this outbreak in their own health monopoly.

Had this happened in a private setting, wouldn’t heads have rolled?? Instead, Smitherman got a promotion!!

Socialists point to all the supposed-savings of universal medicare – where is it here? A private facility couldn’t afford to expose its patients to this kind of unmitigated risk, and then try to hush it up, without being sued. That’s the accountability part of ‘check and balance’. But the Liberal medicare-monopoly simply disregards these risks and steamrollers ahead – because, well, IT CAN !! There is no layer of responsibility – which is the beguiling attraction of this scheme for those who peddle it. Universal single-payer health-care: sounds good until you actually need it.

Opposition leader John Tory said of McGuinty’s Liberals (St. Catharines Standard, Jun.26, 2008):

“There can be no explanation for their absolute failure to have anybody take a look at this, as has been done in Scotland, the Netherlands, and so on, other than they want to cover it up and put politics ahead of the public interest.”

Tory said he had “every reason to believe” that more C. difficile deaths will be reported because the Liberals refuse to allow an inquiry to find out what went wrong, and how to prevent further outbreaks. “I think they’re paralyzed with the political fear about actually having the truth come out in terms of their own negligence.”

Former health minister George Smitherman said a C. diff inquiry wasn't needed because it would cost too much. Yet, McGuinty just dumped billions of tax dollars into Smitherman's new sand-box to build nuclear plants, and, McGuinty simply acquiesced to Dion's multi-billion dollar carbon tax-increase on Ontario.

Trust us - we're not negligent.