Roy Romanow shills for McGuinty Liberal health-care cuts

Pauline Tam wrote in "Quick action on healthcare best" (Ottawa Citizen, Dec.20, 2011):

"Roy Romanow, the former Saskatchewan premier who slashed medicare in an effort to save it, has fighting words for Premier Dalton McGuinty, whose minority government is seeking ways to rein in skyrocketing health-care costs.
No matter how the McGuinty Liberals decide to cut spending and reshape Ontario's health system, they should act decisively, move fast and brace for political heat, said Romanow.
"What you have to do is implement the reforms as quickly as you can and as effectively as you can in order to get the population to understand that it isn't all bad," Romanow said in an interview. "In fact, it's probably the right thing to do."
The Ontario government, crippled by a $16-billion deficit and weakening economy, is contemplating spending cuts and changes to the health system that broadly resemble those of deficit-plagued Saskatchewan in the 1990s. As premier of the province that invented medicare, Romanow enraged many people by closing hospitals, slashing public drug spending and reorganizing the way health services were delivered.
Rural residents grumbled about losing their hospitals - and the jobs that went with them. Scores of nurses were laid off. Doctors complained about their diminished clout.
Voters and labour unions were particularly shocked that the austerity measures came from an NDP government that styled itself a guardian of Tommy Douglas's medicare legacy.
The Ontario Health Coalition, a pro-medicare group, has warned that this province faces a similar fate, which would jeopardize the quality of patient care.
Yet despite fierce public opposition, Romanow's reforms allowed Saskatchewan to balance its budget three years into his term and won his party a second majority government.
Romanow said he tried to remain faithful to medicare's core values of fairness and compassion. He indicated, for example, that his government avoided privatizing certain health services or introducing user fees, which would only have shifted costs from the public purse to individuals who had to pay out of pocket.
Such an approach would have done nothing to reduce the overall share of provincial wealth devoted to health spending - a situation that McGuinty also understands, said Romanow. "In my judgment, I think Premier McGuinty has recognized the traps of false economy. I would say Premier McGuinty is making all the right overtures.""
*

Wow - just look at that:

Romanow is a now some kinda FLICKING socialist hero for trotting out the Michael Decter-ian contradiction of "slashing medicare, in order to save it" (see here, pg.11-12).

It was Romanow's NDP predecessor Tommy Douglas who invented the "false economy" called medicare!

Now, Roy Romanow has strangely somehow become a fountain of sage advice for Dalton McGuinty's monopolist Liberal ideologues?!?! WTF?

Romanow was squeezed by the Martin/Chretien health cuts, as Ontario's Mike Harris also was - yet look at who's now being touted as some kind of advisor/ hero to the Liberals, and who's been incessantly demonized by the lib left!

The only Liberal overture playing here in Ontario is a prelude to tragedy, with McGuinty's faux-finance minister Dwight Duncan Don Drummond and faux-health minister Deb Matthews Romanow setting the sombre tone.

Enjoy your holidays; next year will be real ugly.
*
The whitewashing of Michael Decter, the normalization of Decter, the rehabilitation of Decter, was on full display in the Toronto Star's Feb.27, 2017  story cleverly written by Theresa Boyle. Boyle for some reason, chose to mention Decter in her story, yet, did not bother to mention (ie covered up) Decter's fascistic role in cutting health care during his stint with Bob Rae' NDP socialists. Again, the biased Toronto Star peddles FAKE NEWS (peppered with skewed bias). Boyle could have revealed Decter's destructive politics, but decided to hide (to propagandize) that Decter's own doings then, are quite relevant to the issues going on now - much as the Toronto Star's own role was (and is) for that matter.

The St.Catharines Standard's phony calls for change

What self-boasting the St.Catharines Standard's managing editor Wendy Metcalfe spun in her Sept.9, 2011 article.

She boasts about how the Standard "will campaign on behalf of the community. There are issues faced on a daily basis that are calling out for change. We pride ourselves in having an eye for injustice. We are determined to right the wrongs on your behalf."... oh, please!!

This from the local rag which does nothing but trumpet for the status-quo - in particularly, their Golden Boy Liberal Jimmy Bradley's status-quo! Hasn't the St.Catharines Standard already been campaigning for Liberal Jim Bradley - in their own slick way - for decades?!

Where's the 'justice' in the St.Catharines Standard constantly avoiding the mere mention of Liberal Jim Bradley, in any connection whatsoever to issues which are within provincial jurisdiction?

Metcalfe's rag - aka the St.Catharines Double-Standard, the St.Catharines Sub-Standard, the St.Catharines Lower Standard, the St.Catharines Bradley Buttkiss Society, the St.Catharines Bradley Sycophant - has purposefully, studiously, painstakingly AVOIDED ANY mention of Liberal MPP Jim Bradley in the last five months, when it came to anything whatsoever to do with health-care.
[After all, there are only two persons in all of Niagara responsible for health-care: Liberals Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor.]

Those great reporters Liberal-friendly stenographers such as Grant Lafleche, for instance, are extremely careful not to involve or mention Ole Liberal Jimmy in any story which remotely deals with the C. difficile deaths in Jim Bradley's OWN CITY!! When Metcalfe boasts about Lafleche's 'hard-hitting health care stories', that is such facile spin: to the Standard, 'hard-hitting' is petting Liberal MPP Jim Bradley while spinning the criticism everywhere else.

Wow: it's as if Liberal MPP Jim Bradley HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH ANY OF THIS!!

It's as if Ole Jimmy's Liberals AREN'T fully responsible for funding and controlling their own single-payer health system!

Why, it's as if Jim Bradley's Liberals are NOT running an unaccountable, failing, underfunded, incompetent health-care MONOPOLY!!
Liberals such as Jim Bradley are constantly rehabilitated by the apologist press; the process never ends - it's like the St.Catharines Standard becomes the Liberal Jim Bradley Campaign Office, covering up and spinning for Liberals in-between the real elections!!

Did editor Metcalfe's "eye for injustice" ever notice that the words monopoly, health-care, and Liberal MPP Jim Bradley NEVER appear together in her rag's decades-long campaign for Bradley's status-quo Liberalism??!! Gosh: is that a "right" or a "wrong", Wendy?!

St.Cathariners don't need to be taken 'for a ride' by your biased Liberal-boosting rag, Ms. Metcalfe.

Your paper has been and still is transparently and blatantly avoiding the real health-care issues in Niagara by willfully neglecting to provide local readers with ANY in-depth coverage from our local secretive MPP Liberal Jim Bradley, on a host of issues, not the least of which is Jim Bradley's abdication of his role as Niagara's local (and senior) representative of the Liberal government.

Bradley had all but vanished from the pages of the St.Catharines Standard while some 34 C. difficile patients have died in Niagara, and dozens of others made severely ill.
   (Remember how sanctimonious, smarmy and self-righteously indignant Ole Liberal Jimmy got about Walkerton? More Ontarians died in Niagara this summer than in Walkerton... but because Jimmy's Liberals are now in gov't., then Bradley and his Liberals can be immediately forgiven by the press...)

Gosh: maybe Ole Jim Bradley didn't... uhhh... know about anything about this C. diff outbreak in his own city... and coincidentally - and also amazingly - the St.Catharines Standard didn't... ummm... know either... haha ...that ole Jimmy's Liberal monopolists were fully responsible for health care in Ontario, so, umm...  no-one from the Standard asked Jimmy 'bout anything, 'cuz no-one knew anything about anything!!

Seriously: that, sadly, is the St.Catharines Standard's credo: fer gaia's sake: just don't ask Jimmy...'bout anything!

Ms. Metcalfe, wasn't it your paper that abdicated its responsibility to provide readers with full, in-depth, relentless coverage of the Liberal-controlled health-care situation in Niagara - including constantly demanding on-going questions and interviews from Liberal MPP Jim Bradley? [y'know: the way the Standard BradleyBootlicker would have done, had it been Conservatives - not Liberals - who were running the government...]

Where the hell was the St.Catharines Standard's phony "eye for injustice" during Niagara's 2011 summer of Liberal-monopoly C. diff death??

The one-eyed St.Catharines Standard was PURPOSEFULLY BLIND to the monopolist lies, deceptions, and injustices which Jim Bradley and his Liberal single-payer-pushing ideologues wrought upon Niagara.
The Standard sure must have some kind of perverted "pride" in its long record of  kow-towing to Bradley's every whim. Because it was Bradley and his Liberals who were in government, the dedicated Bradleyphiles at the Standard just sloughed off focusing anything on their BestBuddyBradley.
Instead of covering Jim Bradley, the disgusting full-time Liberal interim campaign workers at the Standard covered up for Liberal Jim Bradley.

Metcalfe's paper now boasts that their 'News team is armed and ready to deliver' [...whatever that means, it's just typical double-speak...] so, have any of her reporters been "armed" with Jim Bradley's... umm... phone number and email address?!?
Are any Standard reporters actually "ready" to finally find Jim Bradley?!?

Just askin' - cuz apparently none of her staff reporters Liberal stenographer/marionettes have been willing or able to actually provide readers with any consistent, in-depth, long-running interviews and analysis of Jim Bradley's activities and reactions to provincially-relevant events as our local Liberal MPP.

Except for the typical staged photo-ops, there has been NO RELEVANT coverage regarding Jim Bradley and his policies, in Bradley's local home-town paper: it's as if Jim Bradley's activities as Liberal MPP have nothing to do with the fallout of the actions of his Liberal government! {The Standard as been practicing FAKE NEWS way before the Trump era}

Where's the 'justice' in that kind of skewed Liberal-friendly media bias? What kind of "issues" will the Standard be 'calling out to change"??!! (...quick answer: they'll shill for anything that deflects AWAY from any scrutiny about Jimmy, or, they'll shill for anything which GLORIFIES Jimmy)

Wendy, how about changing the way your paper treats Liberal MPP Jim Bradley?
When's the cosy Bradley ass-kissing going to end?

When will the St.Catharines Standard stop fondling Liberal Jim Bradley?

When is any St.Catharines Standard reporter going to actually pursue Liberal MPP Jim Bradley for a real interview?!
And, by now, in 2011, one token interview wouldn't - couldn't - possibly be enough to assess Bradley's years of Liberal claptrap; the Standard should have had hundreds of in-depth policy pieces regarding their local boy Bradley over the years... but this record of analysis by the Standard simply is not there!
What there is, is mostly Bradley boosterism, or puff-pieces which are JimmyFriendly-to-neutral in content. The Standard's C.difficile coverage is just the latest - but one of the most blatant - displays of its Bradley-friendly advocacy; essentially, of a long-term arc of planned, purposeful political propaganda.

The Standard  has let Liberal MPP Jim Bradley get away with murder, figuratively speaking.
It is important - again - to remember: instead of covering Jim Bradley during the C. diff outbreak, the St.Catharines Standard  has covered-up for Jim Bradley from the moment the C. difficile deaths began appearing.

This is nothing new, though: the Standard has been spinning yarn to cover-up for Bradley, for years.

Where's the St. Catharines Standard's in-depth analysis of Liberal MPP Jim Bradley's response...

- to his Liberals' creation of the LHIN's?
- to the NHS's publicly-stated under-funding concerns?
- to the 2007 CIHI report, which revealed that the NHS's St.Catharines hospital - in Liberal Jim Bradley's home town - had the third-highest patient-death rate in Canada?
- to why he didn't immediately call for a public inquiry into this shocking CIHI report?
- to Smitherman's forcing of the cost-cutting HIP onto the NHS?
- to Dr. Jack Kitts' review of the HIP?
- to his Liberal-controlled LHIN approving the HIP?
- to his Liberals creating a new health-tax, and at the same time creating a two-tier health system by summarily de-listing previously-covered "universal" health care?
- to Quebec's momentous 2005 Chaoulli decision?
- to federal Liberal Bob Rae's candid admission that there is a private (and not 'non-profit private') sector role in Canadian health care?
- to why Helen Harris couldn't get emergency health care in St.Catharines, and died in Buffalo?
- to why he and his Liberals refused to call a public C. difficile inquiry in 2008, which had already then killed hundreds of patients in Ontario's Liberal health monopoly?
- to why - for years - his Liberals refused to call the Ombudsman to investigate the NHS, until days before the 2011 election?
- to why he and his Liberals still refuse to allow the Ombudsman full access to the entire 'MUSH" sector?
- to when he first knew of his own Liberal secret G20 law, and where he was hiding when his Liberal government unleashed its massive assault on civil rights?
- to demands that he provide specific evidence - extant in 2002 - which convinced him that anthropogenic-global-warming was real?
- to why he hasn't reintroduced his own made-while-in-opposition Gasoline Price Control bill?
- we could go on and on, Wendy, about your paper's years of Jimmy-friendly biased half-stories ...

Gosh... we can only imagine how difficult it has been (...cue the sad violin solo...) for the Standard to provide readers with sanitized Lib-friendly "news", while at the same time shying away - on purpose! - from providing any meaningful analysis of Jim Bradley's decades of deceptive Liberalism!
This is thoughtful, skilled and dedicated political media manipulation!

It's not easy coddling Liberal Jim Bradley - delicately holding Ole Jimmy at arm's length from criticism, swathing him and his politics in a cosy of protective velvet, carefully avoiding even the slightest critical mention of his name - while at the same time writing supposedly "hard-hitting" stories on issues directly connected to Bradley's Liberal politics!
That kind of consistent campaign, that kind of subtle media manipulation, that kind of fifth-columnist loyalty, that kind of revisionsm, rehabilitation and evolving hagiography, takes a lot of dedication!!

Yes, it'll be difficult in the next several weeks during this inconvenient election... (whaat? There's an election in St. Catharines? Who knew?!) ...for the "hard-hitting" St.Catharines Standard to mask its deep brown-nosing allegiance to Liberal MPP Jim Bradley!

For appearance sake, the hardly-hard-hitting-at-all Standard - in the name of cross-eyed Metcalfian... umm... phony 'community justice', y'see - might have to give their Boy Jimmy an obligatory, pre-planned, tap over one knuckle with a large, soft, heart-shaped, puffy glove, on some trivial non-issue, which would suffice as "bold proof" to readers of how ...umm... 'fiercely independent' and 'impartial' and 'non-biased' this Jimmy-boosting rag has been for years.

Really, for years, the St.Catharines Standard has been essentially acting as Jim Bradley's full-time officially un-official campaign office in-between elections, spouting the Liberal party lines, protecting their Boy Jimmy and regurgitating his political diarrhea.
*

Liberal Jim Bradley's sicko single-payer moralism

Karen Selick wrote in "Medicare, heal thyself"  (National Post, Sept.2, 2011):

"Pediatrician Karen Dockrill of Whitby, Ont., will go on trial in early October before the disciplinary committee of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, charged with conduct that is "disgraceful, dishonourable or unprofessional." Danielle Martin, spokeswoman for Canadian Doctors for Medicare, was quoted in a recent National Post article, calling Dr. Dockrill's alleged conduct "unethical."
What are the heinous deeds of which Dr. Dockrill stands accused?
She owned and operated a facility called Mom and Baby Depot. For an annual $1,500 membership fee, the Depot provided parents with access to a team of child-care professionals, including breastfeeding consultants, nurses, nutritionists, social workers and a chiropractor. Members could phone in, 24 hours a day, for medical advice, including from Dr. Dockrill herself - reportedly a godsend to inexperienced parents.
Because of the membership fee, Dr. Dockrill was able to offer longer office appointments than the standard well-baby check-up for which OHIP (the Ontario Health Insurance Plan) pays practitioners only $32. But those longer appointments and all that telephone advice (for which OHIP pays nothing) also meant that she had to limit the number of patients in her practice. The College alleges that only babies whose parents paid membership fees were accepted as regular patients.
Ms. Martin, the medicare cheerleader, says it's unethical to "require people to pay again" for something that is already paid for by tax dollars.
But what if taxpayers aren't really getting what they're supposedly paying for? Ontario residents might pay several thousand dollars per year into Ontario's coffers but still find that a 10-minute appointment - all the doctor can afford to give them at OHIP rates - is insufficient to answer all their questions or resolve their children's health problems. Other taxpayers - roughly 7% of Canadians - can't find a family doctor at all. They spend hours waiting with sick infants at overcrowded hospital emergency rooms or walk-in clinics.
No discussion of ethics can ignore the distinction between coercion and voluntariness. Coercion is the very essence of socialized medicine. Under Canadian medicare, extra billing is verboten. User fees - verboten. Competing with the government's monopoly health-insurance plan - verboten. Withholding your tax payments until you get the promised services - verboten.
Forcing people to pay for services and then not providing them is tantamount to theft or fraud. It is the state system of coercive public health care that is unethical.
And it's not just unethical - there's a good chance it's also unconstitutional. In the Chaoulli decision of 2005, three Supreme Court justices pronounced Quebec's health insurance monopoly to be a violation of the rights to life and security of the person under the Charter, saying: "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care." Cases pending in Ontario and British Columbia courts seek similar rulings for their respective provinces.
Dr. Dockrill's service, by contrast, was entirely voluntary. She couldn't force anyone to join. Members who felt they weren't getting value for money simply need not have renewed.
A voluntary transaction between consenting adults, with no harm to third parties and a high probability of significant benefits to those involved - how can that be unethical? Forbidding people to use their own hard-earned resources to optimize their family's health is what's unethical.
Of course, in the topsyturvy moral code of socialists, anything that might produce inequality is abhorrent. By their logic, we should shut down all private schools - after all, customers are paying twice - and permit only hamburger to be sold until filet mignon is affordable to all.
Inexorably, the defects in socialized medicine become obvious. Contrary to official Canadian mythology, our health-care system is far from the best in the world. Among 28 OECD countries, we are the sixth-highest spender relative to GDP. However, we rank 20th out of 22 in the ratio of doctors to population, and 17th in the availability of CT scanners and MRI machines.
Yet we are the only OECD country to ban private medical insurance, and one of only four countries that does not require patients to contribute something towards the cost of using a public hospital, a general practitioner or a specialist. Are those other 24 OECD countries all behaving unethically?
Perhaps when Canada finally realizes the folly of demonizing innovative physicians like Dr. Dockrill, the 12,000-plus Canadian-educated doctors who have taken refuge from our decrepit system in foreign countries will feel more inclined to return.
- Karen Selick is the litigation direcor for the Canadian Constitution Foundation, which is sponsoring a court challenge against Ontario's health-care laws."
*
The above Orwellian health debacle is the work of Liberals such as MPP Jim 'I hate doctors' Bradley; this is Bradley's kind of state fascism. Bradley was there when Liberal premier David Peterson was destroying health care in Ontario in the early 1980's (see here, pg.33). Jim Bradley doesn't believe in the Chaoulli decision! Bradley's a despot who believes that a voluntary transaction between an MD and a patient IS unethical - and that a jackbooted 'liberal/left' HAS a moral right to intervene.

33 C. difficile patients were killed in Niagara in the summer of 2011, yet secretive Liberal Jim Bradley didn't once say anything about this horror which happened in his own local Liberal-monopoly hospitals. Bradley also neglected to link Niagara's C. diff deaths in 2011, to the false assurances which Bradley's own Liberals made in 2008 that Ontario's hospitals were safe.

It's Liberal health-monopolist-pushing scum such as MPP Jim Bradley who are truly "disgraceful, dishonourable, and unprofessional". It's amazing how the left can always vilify another scapegoat, launch another sanctimonious witch-hunt, yet never have to account for the blowback of their own despotic policies.
*
The monopolistic state-socialist-single-payer healthcare model charade continued to be pursued by the likes of Danielle Martin, as seen in this nice "fake news" story appearing on Bell media's CTV network , Jan. 11, 2017).
Of course, the reason Martin was suddenly "made into news" again in January 2017, is because the Canadian leftist media are gearing up to revive their anti-US agit-prop groundwork, after 8 years of shameless Obama-fawning, Now that Hillary and Obama's legacies were soundly rejected and demolished in the US election, and with Trump about to become U.S. President, the majority of Canada's media will have to revise their narratives. It's back to the old template, back to America-bashing, back to their usual anti American narratives to demonize the U.S. This timing is meant to coincide with the moves in the States to dismantle that horrible Democrat failed abortion known as Obamacare. Canadian lefties loved Obamacare, so the reason for this story appearing now {....ah, yes - look; Canada GOOD! America BAAAAD..!}is self explanatory.
Canadian Liberals had used that Anti-American narrative as their touchstone for years, Jim Bradley and McGuinty and the Chretien gang used that meme on a daily basis
But what about Dr. Dockrill? Take a look at the fascistic, evil results stemming from the kind of state-socialist 'ethics' beloved by Danielle Martin.
Martin's media sycophants often refer to her espousal of a construct called 'universal' healthcare, but which in reality is no-choice state-run monopolist, single-payer healthcare, They hide behind the true definition and real nature of the system for which they shill, and work diligently to confuse the issue, claiming that only their kind of "universality"should exist - ie, single-payer monopolist health-care fascism.
Furthermore, in order to deflect from Canada's monopolist healthcare failures, Canadian lefties will predictably trot out their usual fear-mongering conflation that the only possible alternative to Canada's current single-payer system, is the American system! (...which is the cue for Canadian media to immediately flame knee-jerk hatred towards the Americans) It's a slick bit of deception, fear, and false-comparison, but this tactic has worked well to cover up for the deficiencies in Canada's single-payer heal monopoly.
I think it is disgusting how Danielle Martin's kind of political 'ethics' helped wipe Dr. Dockrill's practice "off the map". She even traveled to the States to smugly shill for Obamacare, as some kind of hero of Canada's demonic no-choice health-socialism.
*

Another patient forced to travel to Buffalo for "universal" health-care unavailable in Ontario

Tom Blackwell wrote in "Ontario told to pay for U.S. surgery" (National Post, Dec.15, 2010):

"Suffering headaches, vomiting and imbalance, Suresh Kapur was diagnosed with bleeding on the brain when he showed up at a Toronto-area hospital, then given an “urgent” follow-up appointment with a neurosurgeon — three days later.

The retired professional engineer decided to seek out a second opinion in Buffalo, N.Y., that same day, only to have doctors there rush him into the OR, believing “there were absolutely no grounds” for waiting longer. Now the patient has won a year-long battle to get Ontario’s medicare system to cover his U.S. costs, reviving questions about Canada’s stretched brain surgery resources and reliance on the United States to fill the gaps.

Though the situation has improved markedly in Ontario since the government poured new money into the field, the province still sends an average of close to two people a week to the U.S. for emergency brain operations, a situation specialists call unacceptable. Other provinces also transfer patients out of the country for some neurological treatment.

Mr. Kapur’s surgery in the U.S. was not approved in advance by the Ontario health-insurance program — known as OHIP — and it refused to pay his bills, saying it was not convinced his condition was an emergency. The province’s Health Services Appeal and Review Board ruled in his favour this month, however, ordering OHIP to pay for the operation.

Mr. Kapur, 70, said he believes his life was saved by the fact he has medical connections in the family — including a son-in-law who is a doctor in Buffalo — and worries about others in the same situation.

“The system is in serious trouble,” he said. “I was recently back in Buffalo and all the doctors who had seen me, all talked about this case and they all said, ‘How can this happen?’ ”

In fact, many patients are dispatched directly by Ontario hospitals to the United States. In the six months that ended Sept. 30, Ontario sent 41 pre-approved patients for emergency neurosurgery in the States, mostly Buffalo, at a cost of about $4.1-million, or $100,000 per case. That compares to 202 transfers in 2009-10 and 120 the year before, said Dave Jensen, a spokesman for the Ontario Health Ministry.

The government has provided an extra $400,000 to each of the province’s 10 neurological centres to help them handle more patients, he said. A deal to provide even more funding has just been signed with hospitals that should bring about further improvements, said Dr. R. Loch Macdonald, head of neurosurgery at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital. But he acknowledged the situation as it stands is not right.
“There’s definitely a problem,” Dr. Macdonald said. “The hospitals in Buffalo have intensive care set up to look after Canadian patients, and they’re paid handsomely to look after them.… We can provide better care, cheaper, in our hospitals in Ontario if we had the resources.” The major roadblock is not a lack of surgeons, he said, but the other services the doctors need to provide the operations and hospital care afterward, he said.

It is common to refer a seriously ill patient to a neurosurgeon, only to be told the specialist would love to treat the person, but has no access to hospital beds for them, said Dr. Ed Klimek, president of the Association of Ontario Neurologists.

“This shouldn’t be happening,” he said. “A life-threatening situation, presenting in this province seven times a month, getting sent out of country for treatment.… Is that acceptable?”

Mr. Kapur said he had been having severe headaches last fall, then woke up in the night, vomiting and feeling confused, weak and faint.

A CT scan done after he visited a Mississauga, Ont., emergency department on Sept. 14, 2009, revealed he had a large subdural hematoma — a pool of blood between the brain and skull — with evidence of both chronic and recent, acute bleeding. Such conditions can be left to clear themselves up over time, or require immediate attention to prevent serious brain damage or death.

Mr. Kapur was referred to a neurosurgeon in Mississauga who agreed to see him on an “urgent” basis, offering up an outpatient appointment three days later on Sept. 17.

A son-in-law who happened to be a neurobiologist looked at his CT scan and “panicked,” suggesting he seek out a second opinion on whether he could wait three days for an expert examination. Another son-in-law who works as a doctor in Buffalo arranged for an appointment at a hospital there.

Based on his CT and other test results, the neurosurgeon who saw him said, “ ‘I thought I was going to see someone who was dead, or about to die,’ ” Mr. Kapur said. Within hours, the hospital performed an operation to drain the blood from his brain.

Statistics on out-of-country neurosurgery are harder to come by from other provinces. In Saskatchewan, seven neurological cases were sent to the United States last year. Alberta said it cold not provide statistics because of “privacy” reasons, while figures were not available from British Columbia. A spokesman for the Nova Scotia Health Department said that province treats all of its neurosurgery patients at home. "
*
Let's hear Good Ole Liberal MPP Jim Bradley - a McGuinty health care monopolist - once again laugh at and dismissively denounce the American health system: the same system which Bradley and his Canadian-flag-waving single-payer health-care monopolists keep on sending [in fact, FORCING] patients to, for falsely-promised health services which are strangely unavailable in Bradley's own state-run Liberal monopolist "health nirvana" of Ontario.

Once again, Buffalo's hospitals have helped treat and save another Canadian patient, but you won't hear Liberal hypocrite Jim Bradley thanking Buffalo's hospitals for their service. Jim Bradley refuses to provide details of how many Ontarians are being forced to leave Canada to obtain out-of-country health-care, care which was not available to them when they needed it at home, in single-payer Ontario.

Why don't McGuinty or Bradley or Matthews explain to Dr. MacDonald exactly why more resources aren't available to provide 'better care in Ontario'?!
Is it because Ontario Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty's idiotic health-care monopolism deprives the health-care system of resources? Is the state-run OHIP monopoly (controlled by McGuinty's Liberals) purposefully short-changing patients? Would de-monopolizing the state-run health-care apparatus allow for the system to have the proper resources necessary to meet patient needs?

Why isn't anyone looking into the patient-health consequences of McGuinty's Liberal health-care monopolism?

[Bear with me here: it's interesting how Ontario's medical officer of health, Arlene King, claims that the proliferation of George Smitherman's government-subsidized wind turbines throughout Ontario cause no ill health effects upon those living nearby, yet King did not interview any of the affected people nor conduct any independent studies. McGuinty's Liberal health minister Deb Matthews, predictably, is satisfied with this position. Yet the medical officer of health for Grey Bruce, Dr. Hazel Lynn, has nevertheless been asked by her Board to look into carrying out a study locally of the effects of living too close to wind turbines.]

Why then, similarly, aren't any of Ontario's local medical officers of health studying the effects upon their own local health-care systems of Dalton McGuinty's Liberal health-care monopolism?!

These local medical health officers throughout Ontario well know that patients are being told to wait for necessary care {...this is not even 'elective' care we're talking about, where time is not of the essence; this is necessary and immediate care.}
These medical officers know that Ontario patients are being forced to leave the country because necessary health care is not available - so why are Ontario's medical officers of health ignoring this?!



- Why is no medical officer of health, anywhere in Ontario, bothering to ask about THAT?!

That is a health care issue: it is the of fallout of false promises based on failed Liberal ideology, based on faulty monopolist/statist political policies.

- Why are Ontario's medical officers afraid to examine the dangerous toxicity to Ontarians of McGuinty's poisonous Liberal health care duplicity?

- How is it that Ontario's proximity to, and reliance upon, available American health-facilities, has now BECOME A COVERT PART of Liberal health-care policy in Ontario?!

- McGuinty's Liberal hypocrites are forced to send patients from Ontario's failing monopolist so-called 'Utopia' to medical facilities in the States - to facilities which would be ILLEGAL if they were located on the Canadian-side of the Niagara River, in Ontario's perverted ideologically-illogical single-payer health-monopoly!! 


Even premier McGuinty himself  has already admitted  that his Liberal health-care monopoly "can't deliver the best possible care within every Ontario community" - yet, McGuinty then negligently continues to propagate his failing statist single-payer health-care monopoly, as if it does (or even could) 'deliver the best possible care within every Ontario community'!!

That jarring incongruity is the very essence of McGuinty's Liberal health-care duplicity: McGuinty's admission shows that he knows full well that his single-payer health-care monopolism is a failing, fraudulent political charade; yet, his Liberals nevertheless continue to peddle their monopolist health-care pretensions with more illusory, ever-receding promises.

Why won't St.Catharines Liberal MPP Jim Bradley support a coroner's inquiry into the death of Helen Harris, who was transported from St.Catharines to Buffalo N.Y. for health-care which was mysteriously, unexplainedly unavailable in Liberal Jim Bradley's own Liberal health monopoly in St.Catharines, Ontario??

Why isn't anyone in Ontario looking into the circumstances surrounding Helen Harris' death; into how it came to be that her health-care treatment - such as it was - had to be delivered not in Canada, but in Buffalo, New York?!!
Where was McGuinty's grandiose (criminally fraudulent) Liberal health-care monopoly when this Ontario patient actually needed it?

By taking the initiative to leave Ontario and head for Buffalo N.Y., Suresh Kapur was lucky enough to have survived Dalton McGuinty's and Jim Bradley's Liberal health-care house of horrors - it is obvious in Blackwell's report that Ontario's Liberal health-care monopoly utterly failed this patient; other Ontario patients - such as Helen Harris - were not as lucky. Are any Liberals accountable for this? Or are we just supposed to sweep these incidents under the rug, while bowing to the medicare-myths of Tommy Douglas?

Why have McGuinty's Liberals, Niagara's Regional health officer, and Ontario's chief coroner, ignored examining the circumstances surrounding Helen Harris' death in 2009? If it wasn't for his courage to escape McGuinty's Liberal-run Ontario health-care prison, we could have just as easily been reading about Suresh Kapur's death in 2009 - - - and nobody would care...

Certainly, no-one in the Liberal Jim Bradley butt-wiping Niagara press cared to ask their hero Jimmy about how Jimmy's monopoly failed Ms. Harris.

...[Still waiting for Naomi Lakritz to attack Kapur for leaving Canada to get health-care, the way she attacked Shona Holmes for doing the same thing!]...

Why can't Ontarians know the extent to which monopolistic, ideological Liberal health-care policies played in Helen Harris' death?
*

The two-percenter's health-care solution

Ted Mouradian wrote in a letter (St. Catharines Standard, Nov.18, 2009) about how he had cut into a bit of his finger and so went to the former-ER, now Liberal-run 'urgent-care' centre, to have it looked after. Fine. He writes gushingly:

"We have a great health-care system and these new changes are for the better. In the old days I used to wait hours for the same type of treatment. Moving to the urgent care type of system is a good move.

It's times like these that I am proud to live in a country with universal health care; all I took out of my wallet was my health card. For my friends in the United States. I do hope you pass your health-care bill soon."

There's that good ole nationalistic/ignorant universal health care tripe emerging!

All he took out was his health card! How nice!

Is that the health card which McGuinty and company now underwrite, to the tune of a $25 billion deficit - yet (even after collecting MORE billions with their hated Health tax) still continue to UNDERFUND the NHS (Niagara Health System)?!

This is what the former 2004 federal NDP candidate now trumpets?

Mouradian should have helped pay for his 'kibbitzing' session with his own cash, as his great socialist predecessor Tommy Douglas had envisioned medicare to be. He wasted the health care system's time with his boo-boo, when other Ontarians are truly needing serious medical attention.

Obama-fan Mouradian's own 'two-percenter' attitude regarding his "friends" in the United States also shows his prejudice and misconceptions about what the health care issues really are in the States.

There are millions in the U.S. who don't want Obama's abominable "health-care bill" forced upon them.

Clearly Mouradian hasn't read this review of ObamaCare. It doesn't fit into his two-percenter mould.

We cannot ignore glaring failures in Liberal monopoly health-care

As someone who was reported in the Globe and Mail, Jan.5, 1991, as saying he hates doctors, (see: Can Jim Bradley explain why he "stood up and said 'I hate doctors'"? ), I wonder if Liberal MPP Jim Bradley will ever further elaborate on what he meant, and whether he still hates doctors today, and if so, which doctors does he hate?

I wonder what a single-payer health-scare monopolist like St. Catharines MPP Jim Bradley thinks about the election of the Canadian Medical Association’s new president, Dr.Robert Ouellet, who said on CTV (Aug.24, 2008):

“Canada needs to look to European countries that have restored their health-care systems by including private clinics and changing funding formulas.

Dr. Robert Ouellet told CTV's Question Period on Sunday that Canada's health-care system is not sustainable and will need the help of the private sector to get back on track.

Ouellet, who owns five private MRI clinics in Montreal, said Canadians are too "dogmatic" about the debate over public versus private health care and need to be more open to the best solutions for a broken system.

"We have to think about the patient and not be dogmatic about it," said Ouellet, who became CMA president on Wednesday. "And that's the problem in Canada. We're very dogmatic about public and private, and you know this public and private system exists everywhere in the world except three countries: Canada, Cuba and North Korea."

Ouellet said the goal is not to privatize Canada's health-care system or to have a U.S.-style system. Instead, he suggests that private clinics could ease the patient load on an over-burdened public system.”

But this kind of action is exactly what Good Ole Jim is against!

Jim Bradley spent years fear-mongering and fomenting his anti-patient-choice, anti-American- health-care-style, slippery-slope chauvinism, even though his own Liberals rely on the U.S. system as back up for his monopoly’s failings.

Jim Bradley and former health minister Smitherman were nothing BUT dogmatic and partisan and ideological when it came to denying patient-payer-choice in Ontario health care.

And, the system which is “broken” – is none other than JIM BRADLEY’S Liberal health care monopoly!

Wrote the National Post (Aug.22, 2008):

"It's not the best solution in the world, of course. If it was possible to have a public system that was running well, nobody would be talking about private," Dr. Ouellet said.

"I want to solve that ugly problem that we have in health care and tell Canadians that it is possible to do something; that it's not a sin to have a small part of a complementary system."

The Post continued: “Those who advocate an exclusively public system are ignoring glaring challenges that posed by current system, Dr. Ouellet said.”

Sounds like Jim Bradley will hate THAT kind of talk, doesn’t it?

Jim Bradley’s been the one advocating an exclusively public system - for some thirty years now, hasn’t he?

Good Ole Jim doesn’t talk about the glaring challenges and the glaring authoritarianism of his Liberal’s Commitment To The Future of Medicare Act, or about the McCreith/Holmes constitutional health care challenge against Bradley’s Liberal government, now before the Supreme court, that sprang from it.

Good Ole Jim waltzed through the last election in Oct. 2007 pretending there was NOTHING wrong with our health care system – all this while the NHS hospital in his own riding was found, barely a month after Bradley’s re-election, to have the third highest patient mortality rate in Canada! (see: Liberals ignore call for health-monopoly investigation )

And Good Ole Jim didn’t even bother to immediately call for an independent investigation into that revelation!

Now, his health monopoly is proposing closing facilities and restructuring the health care delivery within Niagara, and Jim Bradley, once the great bombastic protector of health care, has vanished from the scene as his own system rubblizes itself! (see: Jim Bradley keenly rubblizes health-care in Niagara )

Consumers in Niagara have no choice but to be pawns held hostage by this NHS/LHINS public-monopoly puppet show now being orchestrated by the Liberal majority government.

Even so, a dogmatic Bradley will still most certainly disregard what Oullet said in the National Post (Aug.21, 2008):

"A mixed public and private practice can be a positive if it contributes to improved access to health care," he said.

"Does it make sense, in the face of a shortage of operating rooms, to ban surgeons who provide 90% of their services in a hospital from performing five to 10% of their surgeries in a private clinic?

"I am talking about improving it by allowing the private sector to intervene in a complementary way, where possible, in areas where the public sector is unable to provide services.

"Instead of trying to ban the private sector, we need to provide a framework, with conditions, that will enable it to intervene in an orderly fashion."

Why doesn’t Jim Bradley publicly explain why his Liberals are not already implementing these kinds of proposals? Why are his Liberals ideologically opposed to such reforms, instead favouring tired, broken statist monopoly health-care?

The Post continued: "Dr. Ouellet contended that "shutting the door on private health care is the same as shutting the door on our patients."

He said that although Canada's public health care system has made "significant" improvements in the past 10 years, it still fares poorly when compared with many other countries. He noted Canada ranks last out of seven major industrialized nations in the use of electronic patient files.

"The overall assessment of the Canadian health care system is alarming," he said. "We have one of the most costly and least efficient health systems of any industrialized nation."

Dr. Ouellet also talked of the need to "rid ourselves of the burden of waiting lists."

"Other countries have done it. England, for example, managed in five years to do away with waiting lists. In Denmark, if the wait is more than one month, the patient is referred to the private sector."

Rather than partner with the private sector, Jim Bradley and his Liberals decided to implement a Health Tax in 2004, to supposedly solve all the problems inherent with their monopoly system.

But as Kevin Gaudet of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation pointed out (National Post, Aug.11, 2008):

“To date, the health tax has taken a total of $12.2-billion out of the pockets of families, businesses and individuals in Ontario -- enough to build 12 new Rogers Centres. The tax revenue has already grown from $1.7-billion in 2004-05 to a whopping $2.8-billion projected for 2008-09 -- a 65% revenue increase in only five years.

Even though the government has buried the health tax review in the dead of summer and said the review won't make a whiff of difference, individuals and groups, including the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, showed up at committee to argue for the tax's elimination.

The fact that the Ontario health tax represents a key broken promise by the McGuinty government should be justification enough for it to be eliminated. However, there are other good reasons.

First, the health tax provides a money crutch for government, merely enabling its runaway spending, which has operated at twice the combined rate of inflation and population growth.

Second, Ontario GDP is close to zero growth and 1.4% below what was predicted. Unemployment is up sharply to 6.7%. With the Ontario economy close to a recession, broad-based tax relief for individuals, families and businesses would help spur spending, savings and a return to healthy growth in the economy.

Third, in its press release announcing the health tax, the Mc-Guinty government touted two other provinces as examples to follow: British Columbia and Alberta. If Ontario wishes to continue following the example of other provinces, it should indeed follow the latter's lead. Alberta axed its health tax in its last budget. This leaves Ontario and B. C. as the only two Canadian provinces with a health tax.

Fourth, the so-called Health Care Premium is intentionally misnamed in an effort to fool Ontarians into believing they are paying for health care. There is no doubt this tax would have been eliminated had it been named the "bureaucrat salary enhancement levy." Health care premiums pay for health care no more and no less than does the new electronics tax, the new paint tax, the business tax, the insurance tax, the gas tax or the hotel tax.

By calling the tax "a premium" the government is trying to equate it with an insurance premium, like the ones Ontarians pay for their car or home insurance. If this were accurate, the level of the premium would fluctuate up and down depending on how much one used health care. It does not. The tax is not dedicated to or used for health care. It is a spend-happy government's way of lining the public treasury.

Finally, health care spending in Ontario has grown at a fairly constant rate, both before and after the imposition of the tax, just as it did in Alberta. If the tax were really for health care then health care spending should have jumped. It did not. What did go up were projects like corporate welfare to American based multi-nationals and slush funds.

The one project the government should really get behind instead is tax relief. It can do this by getting rid of the health tax crutch that props up its out-of-control spending.”

“Out of control spending” – why, the Liberals just announced that they were doling out multi-millions of supposed “surplus” dollars to the cities – money ostensibly meant for the broad category of “infrastructure”, but which really has no strings attached (see: Liberals dole out 'no strings attached' cash, while hospitals remain underfunded ) - it can be used for anything.

As Gaudet writes: “If the tax were really for health care then health care spending should have jumped. It did not.” And not only that - now Bradley’s Liberals are simply giving away the surplus which was raised by charging Ontarians a false “health tax”.

The sickening Liberal Healthcare Duplicity just continues on.

Liberals hide like cockroaches from Ombudsman's light

There were three interesting and somewhat-related stories in the St. Catharines Standard over the last several days.

The July, 4, 2008 St. Catharines Standard had a story headlined “Region to get $16M for community health care”, saying: “The provincial government announced an extra $16 million on Thursday to support community health-care programs in Niagara and surrounding regions.” The story listed varying amounts of monies, to be “delivered” by the government to the local LHIN, which was described in this story as “a non-profit corporation that works with local health providers and community members to determine the health service priorities of their region”.

Wow - the LHIN-healthcare bureaucracy just seems so wonderfully benign when it’s described this way by the “Standard Staff” writer, doesn’t it? The LHIN is just this good-hearted “non-profit” that just good-naturedly “works with” the local providers and “community members”. What community? Are they not medicare apparatchiks?

The LHIN is legislated TO FORCE health care “priorities”. The LHIN is a government apparatus, a sad child of Smitherman. Its mentioned “non-profit” status is irrelevant to this story anyway, isn’t it? (Unless you are one who nods approvingly at such things, while sneering at the concept of ‘for-profit’). The LHIN is a social-policy instrument designed, funded, and played by fiat of the Liberal government. The LHIN consists of government appointees. The LHIN protects the government from policy blowback. The LHIN is the operating scalpel of the McGuinty Liberal cabinet’s medicare ideology.

Let’s look at the way the word “extra” is used in this news-story, preceding the dollar figure.

“Extra” from/in-addition-to what?? From an under-funded, lowball, barebones budget allocation made initially somewhere in the Liberal bowels of Queen’s Park; at some Liberal central-planning-is-best medicare-pushing apparatchik’s desk?

In a health-care MONOPOLY, legislated by McGuinty’s Liberals, what exactly is the definition of “extra”? When it is illegal by Liberal law for Ontarians to provide for their own health-care funding, what parameters are the Liberals, and the media, using when descriptors such as “extra” are being used? How is it "extra"?!

Is this funding that otherwise would NOT have been provided? (and why, then, not? Because the central-planner-geniuses didn’t allow for budget contingencies? Because the Liberals are rolling in a lot of “Health-Tax’ dough, and need to get rid of it on unplanned (!) efforts, the efficacy of which conveniently don’t fall under Ombudsman scrutiny?)

Is it a way for the politicians to ingratiate themselves into the psyche of their voters: ‘look, oh all ye of our fair realm, how we Liberals have magnanimously bestowed upon the health-system all this "extra" money. By the way, this “extra” money, we have generously deemed, is good for a- our re-election brochures a couple of years hence, and b- it shows we can spend your tax-dollars as we deem fit. Do not ask whether this money is wisely spent; just humbly know and be thankful that we, glorious Liberals, are here to spend it for you, so that your system may live forever!’ For some reason, we're never explicitly told when 'it's not enough' funding, until the Liberals graciously bestow upon us the bonus of "extra". Is it ever 'enough' ?! Isn't it all "extra"! Isn't it a political matter of making these distinctions only when its politically favourable for politicians to do so?

In a related story, the next day, on July 5, 2008, the St. Catharines Standard carried a story which ties into the government healthcare funding sleight-of-hand I mention above. This story was titled “Psychology for $400, please”, by Michael S. Rosenwald.

The story described how prices are planned (“engineered”, as it’s now known!) for psychological impact to affect consumer behaviour.

Examples were given such as the considered setting of restaurant menu prices, with several extremely high and low entree prices, together with some mid-range choices: the mid-range choices would sell better.

Also described were situations (or “pricing tricks”, as Rosenwald writes) such as that initially-high set prices determine a consumer’s “reference” or “anchoring” point’, which, when the price drops, makes the purchasing consumer believe he has made a wise decision, that he ‘perceives’ having obtained deal.

“Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago economist… came up with the notion of transaction utility, which he has described as “the difference between the amount paid and the ‘reference price’ for the good, that is, the regular price that the consumer expects to pay for this product.” But there are trade-offs, Thaler notes, in incidental, or not quite hidden, but associated costs, down the road, “thus wiping out any gains, real or psychological”. “Thaler said we tend to “underweight” these costs because they are off in the future.”

So what do these two stories in the St. Catharines Standard, one after the next, have in common? I guess if you hate markets and choice, then you might well be politically predisposed to believing that all corporate marketing – and pricing – is inherently evil, that it’s all fundamentally ‘pricing trickery’, and therefore that it all must be controlled by the government.

And isn’t this the underlying philosophy as well, behind the "engineered" concept of medicare? Wasn’t old socialist Tommy Douglas one of these central-planning-is-best believers - the market be damned, we will set and control and rule the market by legislating a ban on payer and provider health-care choices?

Does anyone believe we have found “transactional utility” in Ontario’s health-care monopoly? That is, even if this concept could even be made to apply to a closed, Marxist-style government monopoly construct? The government relies on the “perceived” benefits to somehow be disassociated from the actual costs - this is the great unsubstantiated myth which surrounds medicare. ‘Yes, yes, yes…we've told, you - you’re covered … so now, go back in line and wait. Stop pestering us with your perceptions of value … you individuals gave that privilege up to Tommy Douglas's collectivists years ago!!’ The government relies on continuous, grand “extra” funding announcements to maintain the perception that it is ‘keeping up with problems’ (never of its own making, naturally!) and continually inserts itself as a heroic saviour by providing strategic “extra” funding solutions where and when politically advantageous … a great political perpetual-motion machine!

What did we expect to get – for the price of having the government subjugate our right to provide for our individual health-care choices?

Here's the third related story to that subject, titled “Surgery wait riles patient’s family’ (St. Catharines Standard, July 4, 2008) which described the circumstances of 67 year old Cecile Boudreau who shattered her pelvis while she was a passenger in a lurching city bus. She had to wait over 72 hours in the St. Catharines General Hospital before she could finally obtain an operation. The hospital said such waits are the norm across Ontario.

This is ‘normal’?

‘Normal’ compared to what – the rest of the Liberal-run health-care policy-laboratory called Ontario?!

Why isn’t anyone asking whether this is acceptable, rather than accepting that it is ‘normal’; rather than just sloughing it off to ‘oh, well, that’s just how it is in Ontario”? We can't do better?

(And - is it actually ‘normal’, as the NHS claims, to have your operation three days later in other areas of Ontario? In a similar incident - over a national holiday, no less - would that really have been the case in Toronto, or in Hamilton? What about in Buffalo, or does that not count as a comparison?)

Is this an example of how accepted “transactional utility” has become in the Ontario health-care consumer’s psyche?! That we just accept such tradeoffs as ‘normal’, that we are resigned - if not trained - not to demand better ??

Astoundingly, this is what the injured lady’s daughter Linda Rogers said in the Standard about the ordeal:

“I’m not out to get any doctors or nurses in trouble. I’m just trying to raise awareness of how badly we need some government interference in this sad medical system we have”.

What? Read that again...! What is to be made of this comment? We need MORE “government interference” … what, as if the interference already caused by the Liberals over the last five years is NOT ENOUGH?

Or, was she trying to say we need more interference INTO the government's handling of medicare??! Such as perhaps...oversight from the Ombudsman's office? But, if so, why call that "interference" ??

Did the Liberal’s medicare ideology, as found in their 2004 “Commitment to the Future of Medicare”, not directly contribute to the “sad medical system we have” today; the same sad Liberal-run system that told Boudreau it’s normal to suffer and wait three days after an accident for an operation?

This is the price we are forced to pay for Liberal medicare! These are the ‘tradeoffs’ for being forced into believing the charade of universal, government-run, single-payer health-care, the kind pushed by the likes of St. Catharines MPP, Liberal Jim Bradley. (See:Liberal Healthcare Duplicity, An Ontario Overview 2003-2007)

What exactly was St. Catharines Liberal MPP Jim Bradley’s reaction to this situation in his own city’s hospital? Well, none, as far as can be seen, because Good Ole Jim Bradley wasn’t mentioned in the story! Our Stealth MPP, the elusive Jim Bradley, once again, strangely sits silent while patients in his riding suffer in his health-care monopoly. After all: these are just normal problems; anomalies, obscure incidents, minor inconveniences compared to the Grandeur That Is Liberal Medicare! Just trust the Liberals, they will soon find another “extra” funding announcement to distract us!

Just don’t ask Jim Bradley why his Liberal government is hiding from allowing the Ombudsman to investigate their health-care monopoly. Don’t ask whether there is a systemic link in the Liberal’s health-monopoly which makes three-day surgery waits like Boudreau’s to be “perceived” as “normal”.

Yep, Liberal Jim Bradley, the pompous, grand champion of ‘anti-American-style health-care’, cannot be found to comment on his Liberal-style health-care’s failings. Bradley and his Liberals hide from scrutiny like cockroaches scurrying from the light; the Liberals are afraid to allow the Ombudsman to shine the light of scrutiny upon them.

And sadly, in the meantime, Ontarians have no competition, no other choices to turn to.

Michael S. Rosenwald’s story, mentioned earlier, can also be utilized to examine consumer behaviour in a no-patient-payer-choice-by-legislated-government-fiat health-care system.
Funny that Rosenwald’s story doesn’t quite explain what happens if you go to ANOTHER restaurant and check THEIR competitive pricing (you have to read the book, I guess!). The assumption one needs to willingly believe/swallow is that all competitors are in a planned, nefarious conspiracy to fix prices, which then only a populist government, interfering with individual rights, can 'fix' for the supposed ‘betterment-of-all’! (Remember, for example, St. Catharines MPP Liberal Jim Bradley ragging on about ‘gasoline price fixing’ when he was in opposition?! See: Jim Bradley's criticisms in opposition foreshadowed duplicity in government)

Health care is “free” in Canada (!), or so Michael Moore-ish Sickos preach and lead others to believe (just don’t ask about taxes). This is their “perception”! And what of the trade-offs in the future, the associated costs down the road?? Well, the medicaristas are counting on the consumer to politically “underweigh” those very real medical risks!! This is what happens when lefties want to make decisions for you on your behalf, for ‘your own good’! DO NOT MENTION the associated waiting-lists, shortages, new central-planning fixes for old central-planning blunders, the resultant unaccountability of anyone for anything down the road … this aspect of single-payer, universal health-care is not broached when the medicaristas are making their pitches! Do not ask what eventually is “perceived” to be “normal” under a medicarista-run monopoly! There is no “trickery” when it comes to single-payer health-care, is there?!

Our local Liberal Jim Bradley made a lot of noise in the past, agitating for political power, by condemning his pet boogey-man, 'U.S. style health-care'; yet what responsibility does Jim Bradley now shoulder when hundreds of C. Diff patients have been found to have died in his secretive, no-choice health monster; a situation which possibly could have been reduced or avoided had Bradley’s ‘non-U.S Style’ (!) system been accountable to patients, and not just for perpetuating itself?

Conveniently (for Liberals) there is no market mechanism to challenge the Liberal government-run health monopoly’s standards, practices, funding decisions, or 'value-received-for money-spent' comparisons. Conveniently, the Liberals prevent any oversight, such as from the Ombudsman’s office, from investigating their health-care actions.

Questioning such things is anti-Canadian, anti-Tommy Douglas, anti central-planning heresy.

How dare we have the unmitigated audacity to ask Jim Bradley and his Liberals to stand to account for their health-monopoly’s performance?!

How dare we even ask whether the question is even 'value-received-for-money-spent' anymore, anyway – that would apply if you are talking about a government that understands the enormity of its responsibility when it decides to ban an individual’s health-care choices by maintaining a legislated monopoly.

They just don’t get that TRUST has to be there! This medicare monopoly is only as good as the belief that it would do what was promised – and it is not doing that at all. The McCreith/Holmes constitutional court challenge against McGuinty's Liberal government health monopoly is an indication of this.

The question now should be 'what is the value-PERCEIVED-for-the-money-spent'? How, or why, should we trust the government anymore with such an important individual liberty as health-care? They have pandered to us the PERCEPTION that only a health-care monopoly will be our saviour, our mythical heaven on earth. They FIXED (manipulated!) the competitive nature of the health-care 'market', because competition was distasteful (not to mention disruptive!) to the socialist tenets underpinning their grand supply/demand-fixing scheme.

Yet, when it fails, suddenly Jim Bradley is no-where to be found! He is unavailable to drone on about his Liberal health-care duplicity. James J. Bradley and the other Liberal McGuintyites have retreated into their ideological shells. No questions need be answered. All you need to do is trust the Liberals. You need no substantiation.

This is not just a "sad medical system" we have, it’s an "extra" sad Liberal government which perpetuates it; it’s a sad, secretive Liberal government where the word ‘normal’ is synonymous with barely-acceptable; where an Ombudsman's scrutiny, when patients need it most, is suppressed by frightened Liberals.

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.

Jim "Crackpot" Bradley's Liberal realism

In Nov. 2007, CIHI released a study which showed that the mortality-rate in the Niagara Health System’s St. Catharines hospital was the third-highest in Canada.

Five months have passed, yet the local Liberal MPP, Jim Bradley, has not bothered to provide an explanation for this shocking revelation, right in Niagara, right in his backyard.

Neither has Bradley asked for any independent inquiry to provide an explanation for such poor results occurring in Bradley’s Liberal healthcare monopoly. Why hasn’t he? What is Bradley hiding? (...and why isn't the local press hounding Ole Jimmy for an answer? Why is the Niagara press looking the other way, and letting Bradley get away with hiding from this issue?!)

Niagara Falls Liberal MPP Kim Craitor, to deflect the impact of the CIHI report, raised a red-herring that the “governance” model of the NHS should be revisited, and that there should be more regional hospitals. (The question then is: how can the Liberal health monopoly, which can barely keep up with what it has now, support more hospitals?)

The Liberals announced, then re-announced, that they were going to review the governance model, and then the NHS said that they would have to first dig up a bunch of previously-carried-out-and-then-filed-in-the-basement reviews, and then review the reviews... and so we see the institutional circling of the wagons.

The fact is, Jim Bradley, the local MPP, has done nothing to explain why the health care system in his city of St. Catharines was/is performing with such poor results.

Does Bradley agree with Craitor that “governance” is the issue for this poor performance?

Or is it their Liberal government which is at fault for such poor performance?

Jane Coutts wrote in the Globe and Mail, (Oct.28, 1998) about the Niagara Health Services Restructuring Commission recommendations at the time:

“Local Liberal MPP Jim Bradley quickly denounced the proposals, saying the area has residents who are older, on average, than elsewhere in the province and will need more, not fewer, hospital beds.

"I know the crackpot realists will be accepting this . . . but I find it unacceptable. No one objects to rationalization of services, no one objects to elimination of duplication, or to single governance, . . . but with the demographics we have we should be maintaining our hospitals, not shutting them."”

Impressive Bradley-baffle-gab, isn't it?!
But what did Bradley really mean then?
In the 2007 election Bradley was trumpeting how he’s the champion of the planned new St. Catharines super hospital - an idea which in 1998 he found to be “unacceptable”!

But now, Liberal MPP Jim Bradley endorses an idea that he himself once said would be accepted by “crackpot realists”!! Pardon?!??

“No one objects to rationalization of services, no one objects to elimination of duplication, or to single governance,” said Bradley in 1998!

So, has Bradley bothered to repeat that duplicitous meme today, in 2008, when Craitor is trotting out “governance” to mask the troubles in Niagara’s Liberal government-run health-care monopoly?

What “single governance” was Bradley referring to, anyhow – the Board of a single hospital? A single region? A single network (...such as the LHIN bureaucracy, which the Liberals went on to spawn?) A single super-hospital? The authoritarian powers of a single health minister, ruling a single-payer, no-patient-choice failing health-care monopoly?

Bradley trumpeted in 1998 that Niagara will need more, not fewer, hospital beds.

But in 2006, Bradley’s Liberals were singing a different tune, as James Wallace reported in “More hospital beds not in the cards: premier” (St. Catharines Standard, Sept.30, 2006):

"Premier Dalton McGuinty has poured cold water on a call by Ontario doctors to create more hospital beds to ease emergency room overcrowding.
McGuinty, in an exclusive interview with Osprey News yesterday, said emergency room doctors "got our attention," but deflected questions about funding additional beds to alleviate wait times."

Looks like McGuinty poured cold water on Jim Bradley, too.

The NHS has an unexplained high-mortality rate; the NHS has asked for more funding; yet, the NHS has been ordered by Liberal Health Minister George Smitherman (sickeningly being touted now as a potential mayor of Toronto?! WTF...? What's next... Bradley running for mayor of St. Catharines?) to 'live within its means'.

Now, Jim Bradley, who ten years ago ominously brought up Niagara’s “demographics”, today sits silent on the mortality and funding issues.

Bradley, who ten years ago huffed and puffed sanctimoniously about more (not fewer) hospital beds, now stays silent when his own beloved Liberal premier says no to more beds, as patients pile up on stretchers waiting in ER's!

Who’s really the "crackpot", Mr. Bradley?!??
*

Liberals say fired nurses not necessarily real people

Mike Adler wrote in “Centenary cuts to be made over three years”, (Scarborough Mirror, Mar.25, 2008):

“Directors of Rouge Valley Health System say the hospital must swallow some unpleasant medicine to balance its budget and run itself more efficiently.
The 3,000 staff at Centenary Health Centre in Scarborough and the Ajax and Pickering Health Centre will be told at meetings Wednesday the hospital must cut 220 positions, including 13 managers, over the next three years.
Centenary will lose some of its 295 adult beds - 36 between surgery, cardiology and complex continuing care alone - but will gain a medical psychiatry unit by next year, giving the Nielson Road campus a new total of 274 beds.
Cuts were a foregone conclusion after the debt-ridden hospital accepted a report in December by a peer review team critical of Rouge Valley's inefficiency and years of deficit spending.
The hospital must start getting rid of its $40-million operating debt and $38-million capital debt, so a recovery plan eliminating some positions and beds is necessary for future growth, President and CEO Rik Ganderton said this week.
"We're at the point where we're out of options."
In a candid session with reporters on Monday, Ganderton and board chairperson Tom Atkins said the plan calls for the hospital to balance its budget by the final quarter of the fiscal year and to run a surplus thereafter.
"We've paved the road to financial hell with good intentions," Ganderton said. "Maybe we should have acted sooner but we've grown up a ton in the last two years."
Voluntary exit or early retirement packages should reduce the number of involuntary layoffs to "very few," he said, while the opening of Centenary's new birthing centre later this year and an Ajax-Pickering expansion scheduled for 2010 will likely provide chances for re-employment.
Changes at Rouge Valley began 18 months ago, he said, when Ganderton was made interim CEO (he was permanently in the position by last fall).
Senior hospital managers were replaced with "pretty well a new team" and the hospital stopped using agencies to hire nurses at a premium, rebuilding its pool of part-time and casual nursing staff, Ganderton said.
Now, while serving the same number of patients, Rouge Valley will reduce staff-to-patient ratios as well as the length of stay for some patients. "Keeping people in hospital longer isn't necessarily a good thing," Ganderton said.
The hospital is facing the fact it is a "poor performer" on efficiency and the province rewards efficient hospitals while doling out less cash to the less-efficient ones, Atkins said.
A board member for four and a half years, Atkins added there's some truth to criticism the board had avoided tough decisions. Members were typically told the hospital was slipping behind in its budgeting but that "we would catch up. It never happened and then you push reset," he said.
The capital funding deficit has become a handicap of its own, leaving no money free for new equipment. Centenary's boilers are 40 years old, 15 years beyond their expected lifespan and only one of four is currently working, Atkins said.
The board also sent members for training with the Ontario Hospital Association and has hired an internal auditor who is soon to deliver a separate report, Atkins said, adding a new whistleblower program will be in place at Rouge Valley in 30 to 60 days.
The 20 mental health beds in Ajax will consolidated at Centenary in a 15-bed psychiatric unit, a recommendation Ganderton said was made before the recovery plan. (There will still be two beds at each site for emergency observation).
In a statement, Psychiatry Chief Dr. Steve Fishman acknowledged "some inconvenience for families who have to travel to visit in-patients, but since fewer and fewer mental health patients tend to be hospitalized this impact should be minimal."
The hospital board approved the plan at Ajax in a Tuesday morning meeting Atkins described as uneventful. The Central East Local Health Integration Network will review the measures on Friday.”

*

So, let’s check out our evasive Liberal Health Minister George Smitherman’s slithery response to the concerns raised in Mark Adler’s above story, during this exchange (from Hansard) in the Legislature on Apr.8, 2008, with Health Critic Elizabeth Witmer. (Note how Smitherman pretends that jobs cut are ‘positions’, and somehow are “not necessarily real people”! That’s classic Liberalese!! Newspeak is alive and well in Dalton McGuinty's Liberal government!):

“Mrs. Elizabeth Witmer: My question is for the Premier. Despite your rhetoric, about two thirds of the people surveyed in a year-end poll indicated they'd seen no improvement in health care. Now we learn in the Toronto Star today that 72 registered nurses are going to be fired from the Rouge Valley Health System because they can't balance their budget. This is not an isolated incident. Other hospitals are also going to be laying off staff and cutting services and beds. Premier, how can you justify the firing of these nurses?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: To the Minister of Health.

Hon. George Smitherman: While the question remains unanswered from the earlier answers provided by our Premier, which is, where is that party's specific plan in terms of how they intend to cut $3 billion in health care-
Interjections.

Hon. George Smitherman: Obviously, asking them to come forward with a list of the $3-billion cut to health care in detail would be helpful.
In the very specific case of the Rouge Valley Health System, I can confirm that this is a hospital that has been operating beyond its level of budget. The implication, according to Rik Ganderton, the CEO, is that there may be some disruption in employment. The key thing to make note of is that it is not necessarily real people who will leave the organization. The 72-number figure-
Interjections.

Hon. George Smitherman: I know this is hard for the honourable members but-
Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Would the member for Renfrew please take his proper seat? Thank you. Member for Kitchener-Waterloo.

1440
Mrs. Elizabeth Witmer: Premier, you now have the longest serving health minister in the province of Ontario. Regrettably, under his watch, we now have 66% plus of the people in the province indicating in the Nanos poll that they had seen no improvement in health care. We now have a situation where this government has refused to keep their promise to hire 8,000 new nurses in their first term. In fact, you fired 757 in January 2005.
Yesterday, Premier, you said you were not going to fire nurses. Today we learn that you are. How can you justify firing nurses for a second time?

Hon. George Smitherman: The honourable member stands in her place and is not prepared to acknowledge her record and her reputation. When they were in office, nurses were referred to as hula hoops and thousands of nurses were fired. Our record, to the contrary, as evidenced by all the data from the College of Nurses of Ontario, is that there are thousands more nurses employed in Ontario today.
On the issue of support, look to the agreement ratified recently between the Ontario Nurses' Association and the Ontario Hospital Association: the highest percentage ratification for a contract in the history of negotiations between those two parties. In the member's very own community, as a result of our intervention at the Grand River Hospital, 20 additional doctors are on site and wait times have been reduced in emergency rooms-

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you.
Interjection.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Respect the Chair, please. Final supplementary.

Mrs. Elizabeth Witmer: Well, Mr. Speaker, I am proud of our record. We hired 12,000 additional nurses.
Interjections.

Mrs. Elizabeth Witmer: We hired 12,000 more nurses. We introduced family health teams.
We have a minister today who has cut hospital beds. We have fewer beds today than we did when our government was in office. We have a minister-the facts are right here, Mr. Smitherman-who said on March 31 that Ontarians don't want to lay off nurses. Today he said to the media that it "may be a necessary evil" to balance hospital budgets.
I say to you, Mr. Smitherman, how can you justify the firing of nurses?

Hon. George Smitherman: In the particular instance of one hospital in Ontario, the Rouge Valley Health System, they have been operating beyond the level of their approved budget. Accordingly, consistent with the notion that we are all accountable and responsible to work within an approved volume, they are taking the action necessary to align their budget, as all hospitals in the province are expected to.
On the issue of nursing, we are very proud to be the government that is further evolving the role of nurses, that we have a nurse-practitioner-led clinic in Sudbury and that over the course of the next several years, we will be bringing this extraordinary innovation where nurse practitioners can work together and enhance access to family health care right at the community level. Nurses are appreciated, for once, in the province-

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. New question.

Mr. Howard Hampton: A question to the Premier: Does the Premier agree with his health minister that laying off 72 nurses at Rouge Valley Health System is necessary?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: I think we just heard, and will hear shortly again, from the Minister of Health on this score. I think that any objective assessment would help Ontarians come to the conclusion that we have hired thousands more nurses. We're proud of the fact that they're available and working in a number of different environments.
We're hiring thousands more and, as the Minister of Health just said, we're going to take this a step further. There's going to be a new evolution in the role nurses play in Ontario. We're going to have-what do we call them?-n urse-practitioner-led clinics. That's something that has been sought for a long time on the part of nurses. We think it's time to take that step forward. We have one already in Sault Ste. Marie. We look forward to putting a few dozen more around the province.

Mr. Howard Hampton: Premier, the College of Nurses of Ontario says that you failed to keep the promise that you made in 2003 to hire 8,000 new nurses. You fell more than 2,000 nurses short on that. The heart of the matter is this: Nurses are the very people in the health care system who make our hospitals work. If people are going to get quality care, we have to have nurses providing that care. Premier, why are you, who promised to hire more nurses, now in effect cutting patient care by firing nurses?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: To the Minister of Health.

Hon. George Smitherman: It's important to note again that the 72 is a reference to positions, and this does not result in a named individual leaving a hospital corporation. This is the quote from Rik Ganderton.
I think it's important to restate the facts here: Rouge Valley Health System has seen an increase of nearly $30 million in their base budget since our government came to office. This is a substantial investment. Every hospital in Ontario has received more money, each and every year. The honourable member can make no such claims for when he was in government, nor can this party opposite. We have a hospital, Rouge Valley, that has spent beyond their approved budget. They're taking the steps necessary, which is fair not only to the local citizens but to all the citizens across the province of Ontario.
Some 17.55 million additional hours of nursing care is what's in our party's platform as we seek to further enhance the number of nurses working in Ontario, something that neither of these parties did when they were the government.

Mr. Howard Hampton: The Premier and the minister can repeat the promises all they wish. The fact of the matter is, 8,000 new nurses were not hired. The fact of the matter is, in an area where the population is growing, where patient load is growing, where health care needs are growing, the McGuinty government is now laying off nurses.
But it's not just there. A community-based bachelor of nursing program run out of Lakehead University in northwestern Ontario is also shutting down. Twenty-five annual graduates who are supposed to serve underserviced communities have been told that their program is not going to operate.
I ask the Premier again, why are the McGuinty Liberals laying off nurses in the greater Toronto area and shutting down nursing programs in northwestern Ontario when you promised to hire more nurses, because, to quote the Premier, they're the heart of the hospital and health care system?

Hon. George Smitherman: On the issue of Lakehead, it's astonishing that a member from northwestern Ontario would be so ill-informed as to offer that information. He knows it was the absence of a post-secondary institution to support that program which has allowed it to continue. There has not been any alteration whatsoever in the resources available from our government, and the honourable member knows that very well.
He knows another thing very well. He knows that nurses are the heart and soul of health care, and he knows, through a variety of initiatives, that we've done more to enhance their standing and position than any government in a good, long time.
Some 17.55 million annual hours of care are what we will add to the extraordinary progress that we've made to date, including the implementation of the new graduate guarantee that saw 86% of program participants transitioned to full-time employment.
When they were in office, we trained nurses and then we squandered them; our government's putting them to use. And nurses in Ontario ratified, to the highest degree in their history, the recent contract between the Ontario Nurses' Association and the Ontario Hospital Association. How about-

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. New question.”

*

Unflicking believable, these Liberals. Hey, Smitty: Adler wrote that Rik Ganderton also said this week: "We're at the point where we're out of options."

Why didn’t George “free-for-all” Smitherman use that little quote from the hospital chief? And who is imposing these no-option deadlines – in a monopoly setting which also denies patients any other legal alternatives to obtain alternate health-care in Ontario, other than what George and his gang magnanimously deem fit to give?

It is ominous how this demagogic Liberal Health Minister casually explains his single-payer, government-run, universal health-care system's rationing rationale; it would make Michael Moore cringe.

Smitherman says: “they have been operating beyond the level of their approved budget. Accordingly, consistent with the notion that we are all accountable and responsible to work within an approved volume, they are taking the action necessary to align their budget, as all hospitals in the province are expected to.”

In light of this Smitherman Principle, maybe Liberal MPP Jim Bradley can now explain the high death rate in his St. Catharines hospital – is that what has been happening here?

Mortality rate = alignment?

So, make sure, folks, that you get sick before your hospital’s approved budget goes out of alignment.

And if you’re unlucky enough to get sick after the approved Liberal quota has been reached – well, Smitherman has now put you on notice – don't expect to be bailed out – not in the “People’s System”, and not if George is in charge.

You’ll have to go to the States. Make room, Mike.