Further to this previous post here ...
... where is the vociferous left-wing opposition to this cross-border health care proposal?!!
As Allan Benner wrote in "Cross border hospital services pitched" (Welland Tribune, Nov.26, 2012):
"PORT COLBORNE - Dr. Nick Hopkins recalled a stroke patient who arrived the Gates Vascular Institute paralyzed and unable to speak.
Not long ago, that patient would have spent her remaining years in a nursing home — if she patient survived.
Instead, she walked out of the hospital a day later to carry on with a normal life. One that Hopkins learned recently included participation in a San Diego marathon six months after she was discharged from the Buffalo institute.
“This is the kind of result we can get,” Hopkins said, adding it’s an example of “a whole new paradigm for the treatment of acute stroke” offered over the river.
“Right now there’s no place in southern Ontario where you can get that kind of treatment.”
Hopkins was one of several physicians and health care administrators from Kaleida Health hospital system in Buffalo as well as the University of Rochester Medical Centre who visited Port Colborne Monday to meet with South Niagara Health Care Corp. to discuss the benefits of crossing the border to access medical services that are not available locally.
South Niagara Health Care Corp. general manager Joanne Ferraccioli said that kind partnership is not without precedent.
She said Dr. Gord Vail, a physician from Windsor, worked with the Local Health Integrated Network, the provincial government and hospitals in Detroit to allow select patients to travel to Detroit for treatments not available in the Windsor area.
As a result, she said it has resulted in better outcomes for select patients “and the reimbursement rate through OHIP is actually lower, it’s actually more fiscally responsible.”
Patients are returned to Canada for all their post-operative care, she added.
South Niagara Health Care Corp. is hoping to develop an initiative similar to the Windsor-Detroit partnership to benefit south Niagara and beyond, allowing easier access to medical services in nearby U.S. cities. It would, however, ultimately require approval from the Ministry of Health and LHIN.
“If someone is very sick with a heart attack, you should send them to Buffalo as the closest hospital,” stressed Dr. David Janicke of Kaleida Health.
“It’s extremely important to get your patients … your citizens to an acute care hospital as quickly as possible and if there isn’t one close by, nothing could be better than a hospital that’s 20 or 30 minutes away.”
Hopkins said the Buffalo facility also allows medical specialists to work more closely together to offer better patient care.
He recalled one patient undergoing surgery for a stroke.
“(The patient) had a cardiac arrest on the table. In the old days six months ago, that would have been a Chinese fire drill. We would have been scrambling to find a cardiologist, but now within a few seconds we had two cardiologists in the room barking out orders and taking care of the heart while we went ahead and fixed the head.""
Where's the NDP, trotting out that old chestnut about 'Tommy Douglas spinning in his grave'?
Where's Naomi Lakritz?
Where's Barbara Yaffe?
Where's Mike Dukakis??
Where's Linda Silas to guilt us about our 'national spirit'?
Where's Sicko Michael Moore?
Where's Mike McBane?
Where's Richard Murri?
Where's Liberal-appointed NHS supervisor Kevin Smith, lecturing us all about the "Canadian Way"?
Where's Liberal Kim Craitor, bragging about the superiority of his Liberal monstrous single-payer health-care monopoly?!
Where's Jim Bradley, whining about the dangers of evil, two-tier privatized American health care?! Where's Jim Bradley's rhetorical chestnut, warning us about that nefarious 'Slippery Slope' of 'U.S.-style health-care'?!
{Let's not forget: right now there's a Liberal leadership race going on in McGuinty-prorogued Ontario; yet, none of those Liberal leadership hacks - one of whom will, sickeningly, become Ontario's unelected Premier - has said a thing about this proposal! Isn't now the time for these Liberal leaders to unanimously condemn this proposal?!}
For years, Liberals smugly derided Buffalo's health care system - all the while shuffling Ontario patients to Buffalo and other U.S. cities, because Ontario's Liberal-run health monopoly could not provide patients the required care in their own country!
After all these years of Jim Bradley's Liberal healthcare duplicity and rhetoric; after all of Jim Bradley's anti-American jingoism; after all of Jim Bradley's incessant health-care cuts and health-care tax-increases - Jim Bradley's Liberal single-payer, state-run health monopoly still cannot deliver the Utopian care which Bradley for decades claimed it could.
Why is Liberal loud mouth Jim 'I-hate-doctors' Bradley now suddenly silent, in the face of such dastardly intrusion, unfolding right on Jimmy's own doorstep in Niagara?!
Why is Ole Jimmy not smugly railing on and on about how these Yankees aren't welcome in Canada, the same way Bradley and his buddy Smitherman did when they ridiculously agitated against the U.S. company Lifeline, by 'deputizing Ontarians to stop them at the border' ?!! (see: here pg.44-45, and here, and here, and here and here)
Did the editors of the St.Catharines Standard bother asking their Liberal buddy 'Silent Jim' Bradley about this proposal?! (...of course not!! Jimmy's protected from media scrutiny!!)
*
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment