Buffalo N.Y. health-care a solution to Ontario Liberal monopoly failures?

Further to this previous post here ...

... where is the vociferous left-wing opposition to this cross-border health care proposal?!!

As Allan Benner wrote in "Cross border hospital services pitched" (Welland Tribune, Nov.26, 2012):

"PORT COLBORNE - Dr. Nick Hopkins recalled a stroke patient who arrived the Gates Vascular Institute paralyzed and unable to speak.
Not long ago, that patient would have spent her remaining years in a nursing home — if she patient survived.
Instead, she walked out of the hospital a day later to carry on with a normal life. One that Hopkins learned recently included participation in a San Diego marathon six months after she was discharged from the Buffalo institute.
“This is the kind of result we can get,” Hopkins said, adding it’s an example of “a whole new paradigm for the treatment of acute stroke” offered over the river.
“Right now there’s no place in southern Ontario where you can get that kind of treatment.”
Hopkins was one of several physicians and health care administrators from Kaleida Health hospital system in Buffalo as well as the University of Rochester Medical Centre who visited Port Colborne Monday to meet with South Niagara Health Care Corp. to discuss the benefits of crossing the border to access medical services that are not available locally.
South Niagara Health Care Corp. general manager Joanne Ferraccioli said that kind partnership is not without precedent.
She said Dr. Gord Vail, a physician from Windsor, worked with the Local Health Integrated Network, the provincial government and hospitals in Detroit to allow select patients to travel to Detroit for treatments not available in the Windsor area.
As a result, she said it has resulted in better outcomes for select patients “and the reimbursement rate through OHIP is actually lower, it’s actually more fiscally responsible.”
Patients are returned to Canada for all their post-operative care, she added.
South Niagara Health Care Corp. is hoping to develop an initiative similar to the Windsor-Detroit partnership to benefit south Niagara and beyond, allowing easier access to medical services in nearby U.S. cities. It would, however, ultimately require approval from the Ministry of Health and LHIN.
“If someone is very sick with a heart attack, you should send them to Buffalo as the closest hospital,” stressed Dr. David Janicke of Kaleida Health.
“It’s extremely important to get your patients … your citizens to an acute care hospital as quickly as possible and if there isn’t one close by, nothing could be better than a hospital that’s 20 or 30 minutes away.”
Hopkins said the Buffalo facility also allows medical specialists to work more closely together to offer better patient care.
He recalled one patient undergoing surgery for a stroke.
“(The patient) had a cardiac arrest on the table. In the old days six months ago, that would have been a Chinese fire drill. We would have been scrambling to find a cardiologist, but now within a few seconds we had two cardiologists in the room barking out orders and taking care of the heart while we went ahead and fixed the head.""

Where's the NDP, trotting out that old chestnut about 'Tommy Douglas spinning in his grave'?
Where's Naomi Lakritz?
Where's Barbara Yaffe?
Where's Mike Dukakis??
Where's Linda Silas to guilt us about our 'national spirit'?
Where's Sicko Michael Moore?
Where's Mike McBane?
Where's Richard Murri?
Where's Liberal-appointed NHS supervisor Kevin Smith, lecturing us all about the "Canadian Way"?
Where's Liberal Kim Craitor, bragging about the superiority of his Liberal monstrous single-payer health-care monopoly?!
Where's Jim Bradley, whining about the dangers of evil, two-tier privatized American health care?! Where's Jim Bradley's rhetorical chestnut, warning us about that nefarious 'Slippery Slope' of 'U.S.-style health-care'?!

{Let's not forget: right now there's a Liberal leadership race going on in McGuinty-prorogued Ontario; yet, none of those Liberal leadership hacks - one of whom will, sickeningly, become Ontario's unelected Premier - has said a thing about this proposal! Isn't now the time for these Liberal leaders to unanimously condemn this proposal?!}

For years, Liberals smugly derided Buffalo's health care system - all the while shuffling Ontario patients to Buffalo and other U.S. cities, because Ontario's Liberal-run health monopoly could not provide patients the required care in their own country!

After all these years of Jim Bradley's Liberal healthcare duplicity and rhetoric; after all of Jim Bradley's anti-American jingoism; after all of Jim Bradley's incessant health-care cuts and health-care tax-increases - Jim Bradley's Liberal single-payer, state-run health monopoly still cannot deliver the Utopian care which Bradley for decades claimed it could.

Why is Liberal loud mouth Jim 'I-hate-doctors' Bradley now suddenly silent, in the face of such dastardly intrusion, unfolding right on Jimmy's own doorstep in Niagara?!

Why is Ole Jimmy not smugly railing on and on about how these Yankees aren't welcome in Canada, the same way Bradley and his buddy Smitherman did when they ridiculously agitated against the U.S. company Lifeline, by 'deputizing Ontarians to stop them at the border'  ?!! (see: here pg.44-45, and here, and here, and here and here)

Did the editors of the St.Catharines Standard bother asking their Liberal buddy 'Silent Jim' Bradley about this proposal?! (...of course not!! Jimmy's protected from media scrutiny!!)
*

Impeach McGuinty? Why let Ontario's Liberals off that easily?

In Let's impeach the premier (Hamilton Spectator, Oct.6, 2012) Stephen Skyvington wrote

"Like Brian Mulroney before him, Dalton McGuinty seems determined to take his party down with him

Dalton McGuinty is lucky he’s the Premier of Ontario and not the President of the United States. If he were the President, we’d all be calling for his head and Congress would be preparing Articles of Impeachment.
But as we all know, McGuinty isn’t president, and we don’t have any articles of impeachment or a Congress to prepare them. And after receiving a strong endorsement from his own party at their convention in late September, McGuinty is giving every indication he intends to lead the Liberals into the next election.
All of which boggles the mind, quite frankly. Not since former prime minister Brian Mulroney has there been a politician so vilified as Dalton McGuinty. Type the words “Liberal scandals” into any search engine and you’ll be bombarded by the premier’s legacy. It’s actually quite sobering to go through the list. It would almost be amusing if it wasn’t so tragic.
We’ve had the eHealth scandal. The Ontario Lottery and Gaming scandal. The Samsung deal scandal. The Eco Tax scandal. The Ornge scandal. I could go on and on — one website lists 30 different scandals before running out of gas.
Then we have the granddaddy of them all — the Power Plant scandal. Or as I like to call it, the Seat Saver scandal. For those who haven’t been paying attention, the Liberals announced they were stopping construction on two power plants in order to save some Liberal seats in danger of being wrestled away by the PC or New Democratic parties last year. The seats were saved, although McGuinty’s Liberals were held to a minority government, after having won two consecutive majorities in 2003 and 2007. The cost for this disgraceful, politically motivated decision is $230 million and counting.
Surprisingly, McGuinty has chosen to throw his very capable Energy Minister (and former attorney general) Chris Bentley under the bus. Not only is Bentley taking the heat for this one, he could actually go to jail if found in contempt of the legislature. To his credit, the premier did eventually try to defend his minister, albeit lukewarmly, saying: “These attacks, these threats, this heavy-handed, unprecedented process — using the full force of the legislation against one MPP — these are decidedly not in keeping with the standards and traditions we seek to uphold.”
One question Liberal supporters and backbenchers must be asking is: “How did it come to this?” How indeed. My opinion, as a longtime political operative and former political staffer, is that the Liberals (like all parties who win back-to-back majorities) were the victims of their own success. To use a sports analogy, they started reading (and believing) their own press clippings. Shortly after their second term began, a rot began to settle in. Once that happens, deception and corruption can’t be far behind.
Or to use another sports analogy ... if Dalton McGuinty was the coach of the Leafs, Raptors, Argos or Blue Jays, the fans would be singing in unison by now: “Goodbye, Dalton. Goodbye, Dalton. Goodbye, Dalton. We’re glad to see you go!”
The premier did have the opportunity to make a graceful exit during the Liberal convention last month. But he chose instead to stick around.
Am I surprised? Not one bit.
I’ve never written about this before, but in 1996 then-MPP Dalton McGuinty asked me to drop by his office. I was working for the Ontario Medical Association at the time and Dalton was reaching out to potential supporters. He told me that he was thinking about running for leader of the Liberal Party of Ontario and wanted to know what I thought about that. Nobody gave him a chance. Everybody underestimated him. It was hard to take him seriously. I can’t remember my exact response, but I’m sure I told him to go for it. After all, what difference would it make? It wasn’t like he was going to win.
Now, 16 years later, I don’t expect to be receiving a call from Premier McGuinty asking my advice. But if I did get such a call, I’d tell him it was time. To go. Now."
*

First off, what utter disingenuous pap from Skyvington, attempting to smear Mulroney by equating him to that scumbag Liberal Dalton McGuinty! Oh, come on, man!! Nice try, but your bias is evident in your first line!

If anything, Skyvington should be looking at a more apt comparison: Liberal Jean Chretien's disgusting scandal-plagued years - that's the proper McGuinty comparator, not Mulroney! Skyvington also could have used the socialist stench of Bob Rae's years as Dipper premier, as a scandal-plagued comparator to McGuinty - but, Skyvington chose not to focus on that socialist-paradise-fiasco either!! hahah

But as far as scandals go, McGuinty's Liberals take the cake for expensive policy disaster after flicking expensive fiasco-laden ideological policy disaster, as mentioned by Skyvington.

I do find it odd, if Skyvington was in some way associated with the OMA in the past, that he today has managed to overlook what I think is Dalton McGuinty's most horrendous crime: the McGuinty Liberal government's direct complicity [as sole managers and funders of Ontario's single-payer health-care monopoly] not to submit their health-care monopoly to a public inquiry, when hundreds of Ontarians were dying in C.difficile outbreaks throughout Ontario in 2008.

McGuinty's Liberals, under George Smitherman, hid from a public inquiry in 2008, while giving Ontarians promises (falsehoods, we would later learn) that the Liberals 'knew all there was to know about C. diff'; that there was no need to 'waste money' on any damn inquiry; that Ontarians didn't need to worry; that Dalton McGuinty and his Liberal gang of serial liars had 'everything under control'...

'Under control' - until 2011, when dozens more patients died in Niagara in another C.difficile outbreak... [under circumstances which should have been previously anticipated and prepared for] ...had McGuity's Liberals not covered-up their health-monopoly from public scrutiny back in 2008.

Dalton McGuinty blatantly lied in 2008 when he publicly stated that Ontario's "hospitals now know how to protect against the spread of C. difficile" .
If McGuinty's state-monopoly-run hospitals were prepared, then, where was this 'protection' in 2011, for Niagara's C. diff patient-victims??!

No-one (...especially from the Jim Bradley-Friendly St.Catharines Standard..!) ever bothered asking McGuinty to explain his false and negligent 2008 reasurrance - even when more patients began dying in Niagara in 2011!!

The St.Catharines Standard couldn't even be bothered to pursue their buddy Jim Bradley for an interview during Niagara's Liberal Summer of C.diff Death.
Instead of covering Jim Bradley, the Standard's disgusting wrong-righters covered-up for Jim Bradley.
With great skill, they managed to make it look like Ole Liberal Jimmy had nothin' to do with all these deaths... nuthin' at all...

[If McGuinty and his Liberals had been somehow 'impeached'  - or better yet, jailed - on this issue, then we wouldn't have had the costly Power Plant fiaso. We could have had more funds for healthcare, instead of having Dalton still here, wasting millions to save the asses of his Liberal gangmembers.]

Maybe Skyvington or some other Spectator reporter can re-examine the direct connection between what McGuinty's secretive Liberals did in 2008, and how that arrogant decision subsequently - and detrimentally - impacted the C. difficile outbreak and patient deaths in Niagara, only 3 years later, in 2011.

After all, Hamilton Spectator reporters Naomi Powell and Joan Walters had already begun this investigation back on July 4, 2008 (...perhaps Skyvington can read it, and ponder this story's sad, long, deadly arc (which is still unresolved today, in 2012) while the Liberal perpetrators walk around scot-free, still in power...) A lot more has been revealed about McGuinty's operating procedures since 2008 - so, where is the follow up on this story?

You can bet that no Niagara press, such as the St.Catharines Standard, will bother looking into that! If they can't somehow blame harris, or Diefenbaker (or Mulroney - eh, Skyvington?!) then, they're not interested. The point is not to make Liberals look bad.
The local Niagara Liberal MPP, the disgusting Dishonourable Jim Bradley, literally disappeared from public view  in 2011 while scores of C. diff patients were dying in Bradley's own Liberal-monopoly-underfunded hospitals.

All these other Liberal scandals were about wasted money and Liberal lies - bad enough, yes, to boot McGuinty out of power - but... McGuinty's secrecy, and outright callous brute-force state-monopolist thuggish response in regards to the C.diff outbreak already underway in 2008, ended up costing other Ontario patients their lives in 2011.

McGuinty going now, or not going now, should not absolve him, or his Liberal majority government's health-monopoly-pushing ministers, of their direct role in the deaths of those Niagara patients.

McGuinty and his Liberals, such as Niagara MPP's Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor, pushed a single-payer monopolist health-care utopia when they were campaigning; then, when elected, they were negligent in not submitting their monopoly to a public inquiry after hundreds of C.diff outbreak patients had already died - under the Liberal's own watch.
Ontario's Liberals played politics with their health-care monopoly, and they decided instead to hide their monopoly from scrutiny, even when they knew the risk that subsequent patients would die. This was a perverted Liberal ideological decision, where Liberal politics were prioritized above patients - patients who were forced into and stuck within a no-choice, state-run health-care monopoly.
In other words - this was a brutal and deadly example of Liberal healthcare duplicity.
*
 

McGuinty tries to hide from his Liberal health-care obligations

Lee Greenberg wrote in "Ontario Liberals back health ‘innovation fund’",  Ottawa Citizen, Jan.15, 2012): 

" An idea designed to supplement a 10-year, take-it-or-leave-it health funding deal tabled by the federal Conservatives last month will receive key backing by Premier Dalton McGuinty at this week’s meeting of premiers and territorial leaders.
McGuinty officials say the Ontario premier likes Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall’s idea to create a separate ‘innovation fund’ that would add more cash to the criticized deal while also targeting specific health reforms.
Ontario has said it would like to see additional funds available for seniors and home care. It is unclear whether McGuinty will be able to convince his colleagues to adopt similar goals.
Typically, the outcome of meetings between premiers is pre-ordained. The two-day meeting in Victoria, B.C. is a rare example to the contrary. “I think there’s a little more movement at this one,” said a senior Ontario official.
Ontario officials would like to see unified support behind Wall’s idea, leading to a stronger bargaining position with the federal government.
“The hope would be that we would put some meat on the bones,” the official said. “We need to define what it will cover and how much it will be worth. I think that’s one of the most interesting things that will come out of this (session).”
Ontario officials wanted a new federal health accord with six-per-cent annual hikes in each year of a 10-year deal. Instead, they got six per cent in the first three years and a promise to tie the increase to grwoth in the GDP thereafter.
McGuinty has said that proposal, presented by federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty as both a preliminary and final offer, is “less than ideal.”
The country’s largest province is seeking both more cash (the federal government funds less than one-quarter of all health spending in Ontario) and more unified goals, similar to the emphasis placed on wait times in the current health accord, which expires in 2014.
“There may an opportunity for us now to develop a consensus in terms of creating a transformation fund or an innovation fund the way we did with (former) prime minister (Paul) Martin,” McGuinty said on Friday. “Where the feds supply some additional funding and in return for that, we agree to pursue innovation in some distinctive areas. I’m hoping we can develop a consensus around that.”
McGuinty’s health minister, Deb Matthews, says Flaherty’s “bombshell” ultimatum will undo considerable national momentum on health reforms.
“They’re cutting back transfers to the provinces just as the demographic shift will be moving into full gear. It’s a very poorly thought-out proposal,” she said.
“I learn, and my officials learn, from practices in other provinces. When I go to a (meeting) with other health ministers I come back with a lot of good ideas from successes they’ve had in other provinces.”
Ironically, many provinces have in the past bucked at receiving funding with strings attached, says health reform expert Dr. Michael Rachlis. Now that the federal government has removed conditions on funding, some, like Ontario, are complaining.

Rachlis, who authored the book Prescription for Excellence: How Innovation is Saving Canada’s Health Care System, said much of the Victoria get-together is posturing on the part of the provinces. He says the reductions in federal health spending are considerably less than portrayed by the provinces.
“This is all about the spin, about who can we blame for health care problems in the future,” he said. “They’re setting up the feds to be the bogeyman for having problems with their budgets.”
Ontario received $10.2 billion in federal health funding in 2010-11. The total health and long-term care budget was $45 billion that year. (The province received $97 million that same year in targeted funding for wait time reductions.)
Any reductions in health funding would hit Ontario particularly hard. Health currently accounts for 46 per cent of total government spending and is growing at a disproportionate pace. Left unchecked, experts warn it will take up 80 per cent of the provincial budget by 2030.
The McGuinty government has telegraphed significant reforms beginning in the upcoming March budget.
At the same time, the government has come under severe criticism for some of its spending practices. It gave doctors raises of up to 40 per cent over three years, for example, in return for specific reforms, but has done “virtually no work” to learn whether the hundreds of millions in spending has resulted in better service, according to Auditor General Jim McCarter.
Rachlis credits the province for good work on reducing wait times, but says the areas of reform it now wants targeted could have been acted upon decades ago."
*

Rachlis here has cut to the chase: Liberal hypocrites, such as McGuinty's lying scumbags in Ontario, are looking anywhere else but at themselves for the problems in their health-care monopoly-fiefdoms.

Dalton McGuinty, Jim Bradley, Kim Craitor, Deb Matthews: these Ontario Liberals are all about posturing  and duplicity.

Vote-buying Liberals were all about smugly waving the Canadian flag alongside the myth of endless "free" medicare, spouting homilies to Tommy Douglas, while at the same time officially demonizing and denouncing ANY "innovations" whatsoever within their health monopoly status-quo.

One needs only to look, for example, at the track record - a thirty-plus year record - of Ontario Liberal MPP Jim Bradley's utterly smarmy adherence to failing health-care monopolism; to Bradley's kneejerk reactionary maintenance of the single-payer statist status-quo; to Bradley's disdain and dismissal of even the slightest innovations.

Bradley's Liberals had eight years of majority government during which to "innovate": now, all of a sudden, Bradley's Liberal hacks are spinning it that Harper has somehow failed them?!?!?! [pot: meet kettle...]

The "problem" with health care in Ontario isn't Harper or Conservatives; the problem is anti-choice, anti-innovation statists like Bradley and his lying hypocrite Liberals.

*

Is monopoly health care legal?

Further to the subject of my detailed earlier post, Liberal Healthcare Duplicity ...

and further to my previous Romanow-related post...

The Jan.10, 2012, National Post editorialized in "Roy Romanow's one-note-tune":

Give Roy Romanow credit for one thing: consistency. For the past decade, the former Saskatchewan premier and head of the 2002 Royal Commission on health care has sung the same tune: The government health monopoly must be preserved at any cost.
Literally, any cost.
Mr. Romanow’s solution to whatever ails medicare — soaring costs, faltering health outcomes, slow uptake of new technologies and medications — is always the same: more federal money. Time and again, Mr. Romanow has stated that the monopoly public-payer system envisioned by those who favour a dogmatic reading of the Canada Health Act is the ideal around which all health policy should be focused.
Next week, the provincial premiers will convene a health-care summit in Victoria. By his own choice, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will not be there. (And given the way these meetings all turn into anti-Ottawa whine-fests, we don’t blame him.) Mr. Romanow is appalled by the PM’s hands-off approach. In an interview with Postmedia News, Mr. Romanow insisted that if the PM does not take an aggressive leadership role in talks about the future of medicare, public health care will weaken, private care will spread and the very fabric of our nation will be imperilled.
Reality check: Canada’s Constitution gives the federal government no role in setting health-care policy. None. For half a century, Ottawa has bought a place at the health-care table only by shipping billions annually to the provinces in the form of health transfers, and then slapping conditions on how the money is spent. In other words, the entire structure of the Canada Health Act — which leftists identify as one of the great pillars of our nation — is essentially based on extortion.
Then-prime minister Paul Martin bought a decade of relative health-care peace in 2004 by agreeing to give the provinces nearly $5-billion more each year through 2014. But with that agreement nearing its end, the old intergovernmental theatrics were beginning to boil once again in late 2011. So last month, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told his provincial counterparts what Ottawa was prepared to pay them annually after the current funding agreement expires: From 2014 to 2017, Ottawa will continue to raise its annual contribution to provincial health budgets by 6%. Thereafter, yearly contributions will rise only by the rate of economic growth and the rise in inflation — currently about 4%. Yet in no year will the provinces receive a rise of less than 3%.
This seems eminently fair to us — generous, in fact — especially since the feds are demanding less say over provincial health policy in return for the extra money they will be shipping the provinces.
This approach is not something new. The reduction in federal demands in return for larger health transfers began in earnest under the Liberals, who averted their eyes from the expansion of private health clinics in the 2000s — especially in Montreal and Vancouver — despite their opposition to the very same type of clinics when they popped up in Alberta during the 1990s. When Mr. Martin signed his decade-long funding agreement with the premiers in 2004, the new money came with few new obligations for the provinces — something (the admirably non-partisan) Mr. Romanow complained about at the time.
But so what if the provinces don’t all offer identical services and delivery models? Let them devise blended public-private systems that work best for their residents or for their budgets — and let provincial governments live with the political consequences of those choices. How does that threaten “national unity”?
It is time for Canada — and particularly for Canadian politicians — to get beyond the notion of health care as national symbol. The universal, government-funded health monopoly has been faltering for decades. Since Mr. Martin increased the provinces’ health transfers, each province has increased the per capita amounts it spends on hospitals, clinics and health workers, but waiting lists have continued to grow. And international rating agencies, such as the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation continue to rank Canada in the middle of the pack or below in health outcomes, such as survival rates from cancer and heart disease. That’s why people are going to private health clinics, despite their limited range of services.
This is not an argument for an “American-style” system: It should be remembered that every single European country permits private health insurance for those seeking better or faster treatment — even as those nations also provide a baseline of universal government-provided care.
The frozen-in-amber, don’t-change-a-thing attitude of Mr. Romanow is a relic of the 1990s. Canadian health consumers have moved on. And so should he.

Burton H. Kellock responded to the above editorial in "Is our health-care unlawful" (National Post, Jan.12, 2012):

Re: Roy Romanow’s One-Note Tune, editorial, Jan. 10.
I was delighted to read these statements in your editorial: “Canada’s Constitution gives the federal government no role in setting health-care policy. None,” and “the entire structure of this Canada Health Act (the CHA) is essentially based on extortion.”
I assume that is a reference to the fact that the CHA is based on federal/provincial transfer payments, which section 4 of the CHA makes conditional upon the provinces enacting provincial legislation in accordance with “criteria” mandated by Ottawa. These transfers are based upon an entirely fictitious unlimited federal spending power which, to quote section 6.8(a) of Professor Peter Hogg’s text book, Constitutional Law of Canada, “is nowhere explicit in the Constitution Act, 1867.”
In other words, the Canada Health Act is utterly unlawful. I am writing a book which demonstrates that all of the attempts to find legal support from the constitutionality of these transfer payments are not only without any foundation but face insurmountable legal obstacles including the fact that the Fathers of Confederation considered and then rejected the suggestion that the federal government should have any such power.
*

 Looks like McGuinty's local Liberal health-care monopoly-pushers Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor will have some 'splainin' to do about their own despotic single-payer-health-care's systemic failure... ...well, that's only if the local Liberal-friendly 'Wendy Williscraft/Mike Metcalfe' orchestrated Niagara press ever bother to ask them, that is...
*

Liberal MPP admits McGuinty's health-care delivery is all backwards

Further to Kim Craitor's supposedly new-found penchant for cost-cutting and private member's bills, when will we see his Liberal proposals to sell their LCBO liquor monopoly?!

Funny also, how Craitor is only now telling us (which he did not tell us before the Oct.2011 election) that:

 "We're spending a lot of money on health care, but we're not measuring whether patients are being cared for properly," said Craitor. "So, we're spending more and more, but what are we getting? When it comes to the delivery of health care, we've kind of done it backwards. We need to start putting patients at the front end. Patient care has to come first.""

...yet, no local press has bothered to question Craitor about his sweeping statements!

How can it be that over the course of 8 YEARS, in a majority-Liberal-controlled health monopoly, no Liberal has bothered to measure what their monopoly is spending our health-care taxes on?!

So now Craitor has revealed to us that, when his Liberals raised their health care tax and cut previous coverage, they, in effect, didn't know what they were doing!


Now Craitor tells Ontarians that McGuinty's despotic Liberal health-care-monopoly-pushers have been doing it all backwards for eight years!!!

Whaaaaaat?!

Where are Niagara's grand press barons, the Liberal-friendly amalgam of  'Wendy Williscraft/Mike Metcalfe', when it comes time to assessing the Liberal's ideological proclivity to enforce a backwards, unaccountable health-monopoly onto patients, while at the same time falsely pretending that they are putting patients first?!

Craitor should be interviewed and scrutinized by the national press for his statements. We cannot rely on Niagara's inbred Liberal-licking press for any non-status-quo analysis of Liberal health care policy and its corresponding hypocrisy.

Why hasn't Liberal Deb Matthews responded to Liberal Kim Craitor's statements?

Funny also, that McGuinty's Liberals just chopped $66-million from the research budget that serves universities and hospitals, yet, the St.Catharines Standard hasn't yet shown us a cartoon of Liberals Jim Bradley, Dalton McGuinty, and Brad Duguid, dressed in their red ermine robes, with toilet paper hanging out of their asses, being assaulted for setting fire to hospitals and schools. Don't hear the St.Catharines Standard now wailing about how Jim Bradley is against health care research, because... well... Jimmy's a Liberal, and therefore, can do no wrong!!

Just imagine the Standard's (...and Jim Bradley's!) smug, unending, outrage if a conservative had done this!!
*

Health-care status-quo is working just fine for secretive Liberal Jim Bradley!

Further to this previous post...

Fred G. Peet wrote in  "Health-care status quo not working" (National Post, Dec.28, 2011):

"Re: In Defence Of Public Health Care, letter to the editor, Dec. 23.
In defending the current one-payer medical system in Canada, Linda Silas, president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, talks about medical care for the poor. However, she avoids mentioning the person who has carefully put money aside for a medical rainy day only to find that they are unable to spend it on their own care when that rainy day arrives, thanks to the Canada Health Act. We thus have the absurd situation that a person can spend their own money on health care for their dog or cat but not for themselves.
Second, she claims that choice means fend for yourself. She avoids raising the possibility that a government monopoly may not be the most efficient way of delivering health care, even within a singlepayer system.
Lastly, she refers to medical public policy being based on research and evidence. She ignores the public policy that reduced the number of student seats in medical schools in the mid-1990s, leading to today's current doctor shortage.
It is time to fix the Canadian medical system, in spite of the views of Ms. Silas, and that fixing can begin with an overhaul of the Canada Health Act."
*

The health monopoly's workin' fine, if ya ask Ontario Liberal MPP Jim Bradley [...well, ya gotta find Secretive Ole Jimmy first, though...]
Why, 37 patients died during two C.difficile outbreaks in Bradley's own region, yet Ole Jim had nothin' to say about it!!
And better yet, no-one from the press even bothered to ask Jimmy about it!!
How about that, eh?!!
The health-care status-quo sure is working for Jim... bigtime... with blindfolds on...
*

Who is responsible for Tommy Douglas' negligence?

Further to this previous post...
Sidney Braun wrote in "National spirit not part of health care" (National Post, Dec.24, 2011):

Re: In Defence Of Public Health Care, letter to the editor, Dec. 23. Linda Silas, president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, fails to recognize her own "evidence-empty" (and very tired) arguments and alludes to facts and reasons, but lists none. Funding for health care is already divided between the public, insurance and private/corporate purse. Health care isn't about national spirit - it is about delivering quality care to those who need it. The problem is not in the funding but rather in the delivery, which is due to lack of accountability. Publicly funded and privately delivered health care is what we need to really ensure that quality care in a timely fashion is indeed provided for those who need it. If publicly funded and privately delivered care costs less, why is that not the Canadian way?
*

Canada's reactionary political enforcers of status-quo  health-care, and their sycophantic self-appointed higher-moral-standard-bearing symbionts, have a very comfortable monopoly they insist on protecting and propagating.
Isn't the argument now really about private-parallel, ie, privately-funded/privately delivered , NOT about publicly-funded/-privately-delivered ?!
The latter is essentially what we already have now.
This is about going beyond monopolist, state-controlled, single-payer health-care; it is about introducing privately-funded/privately delivered health care, in other words: non-state-funded health care, parallel with the state's public (but non-monopoly) care.
But it's not surprising that the status-quo-enforcing monopolists are still agitating even against relatively innocuous improvements within the publicly-funded/privately-delivered category.
Let's recall that reactionary Liberals even demonized their own health minister Pierre Pettigrew for daring to suggest that provinces in Canada should be allowed to mildly experiment with health care in the publicly-funded/privately-delivered realm!! (see here, pg.17-20) And the same reactionary leftists also demonized John Tory for essentially saying the same thing.
Neither Silas, nor Liberal monopolists such as Deb Matthews, nor Jim Bradley, nor Kim Craitor, have yet explained who is accountable for the deaths of dozens of C. diff victims in Niagara's McGuinty-run-public-health-monopoly this year.
No one's accountable when the state's monopolists are in charge.
*
see also here
*

Tommy Douglas responsible for C.diff patient deaths

Lorne Gunter wrote in "Leaving Canada's health care myths behind" (National Post, Dec.21, 2011):

I was reading a fascinating piece on Canadians’ newfound national confidence in Maclean’s on Monday when a story moved on the newswires reporting that six of 10 provinces are unhappy with federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s new health-care transfer plans. It may be a bit of a stretch, but I think the two are related.
The contrast between the two shows how ordinary Canadians have escaped the insularity and smugness that have driven our elites’ image of Canada for at least four decades. No longer do we find it necessary to define ourselves through comparison with other countries, notably the United States, or by constantly reassuring ourselves that being a “soft power” makes us morally and intellectually superior.
Nicholas Kohler’s Maclean’s article claims Canadians are among the most optimistic people in the world about the future of their nation; 86% of us believe Canada is the greatest country in the world, 87% that it is the best place in the world in which to raise kids.
In a way, that’s not surprising. Majorities in most countries like to think their nation is best. But what makes it remarkable is how our sanguinity stacks up against that of other countries’ residents. Just 61% of Americans think the United States is the best place to bring up children, while 50% of Brits believe Canada is a better place for families than the U.K.
And while just 42% us of believe Canada’s best days lie in the future, rather than the past, that is considerably higher than the 36% of Americans who believe the same. Fifty-eight percent of the British are convinced their glory days are gone.
This new pride has been emerging for a while, but I think it broke through in a big way at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010. Athletically, we nearly won the thing outright. But it was culturally where we truly shone. The performers at the opening and closing ceremonies, and at various venues, were all world-class and all Canadian. But they didn’t make a big deal about being Canadian. They let their talent do the boasting.
The street parties were hip, the organization second-to-none. And we, as hosts, were neither apologetic about our success nor sneering about how this showed our way of doing things is ethically purer. We simply welcomed the world in, offered guests as good a party as they would find anywhere, then joined them in the fun.
That’s the new Canadian spirit.
Now contrast that with the way six of 10 provincial finance ministers reacted to Mr. Flaherty’s plan to solidify federal health-care transfers through 2024. The federal Finance Minister announced Monday that the federal government would continue to increase its annual health-care transfers to the provinces by 6% a year until 2017. By that year, Ottawa will be shipping the provinces about $38-billion annually to help pay for doctors, nurses, hospitals and medical equipment. Thereafter, the increases would be tied to economic growth (currently about 4%), but will never fall below 3%, no matter how bad the economy gets.
Admittedly, Ottawa sprang this “deal” on provincial governments without warning. The current 10-year health funding arrangement runs out in 2014 and the provinces had expected to have until then to make their case for more money. Mr. Flaherty and the Harper government were eager to prevent a lot of drama and political grandstanding, so they short-circuited the process.
Manitoba NDP Finance Minister Stan Struthers whined: “This is not fair, it is un-Canadian.” His Ontario counterpart, Dwight Duncan, mewled that Ottawa’s plan “destabilizes the federation” and puts at risk “access to quality health care, from sea to sea to sea, in French and English.” (Funny. I thought the point of the health-care system was to make Canadians well, not to promote bilingualism.)
Clearly many of our politicians haven’t caught on to the new confidence and independence most ordinary Canadians are feeling. Having emerged from the shadow of the United States, we no longer feel the need to define ourselves as a nation by claiming our health care is morally superior to theirs.
Provincial politicians, though, seem mired in the notion that our single-payer system is sacred. The only solution they can imagine for its shortcomings is more money from Ottawa, when what is really needed is for them to move on. Take the cash Mr. Flaherty is offering, experiment with new delivery models, permit Canadians greater health care choice and get with the new national spirit.
*

In response to Gunter's above story, Linda Silas wrote "In defense of public health care" (Dec.23, 2011, National Post):

Re: Leaving Canada's Health-Care Myths Behind, Lorne Gunter, Dec. 21.
Lorne Gunter accuses provincial politicians of wanting to keep the single-payer health-care system for no particular reason. I am so tired of evidence-empty arguments calling for more corporate involvement in health care. Let's debate the merits of a single-payer public provider versus a parallel for-profit, based on fact and reason.
The national spirit that created medicare is one of a caring society, so that the sick and the poor do not have to worry that they will not get timely quality care because their health-care provider is working at the rich person's hospital.
Choice means fend for yourself and since when has that been our national spirit or even an option for those who want to see public policy based on research and evidence?
*

We're tired of an unaccountable Tommy Douglas recklessly staggering around Canada, killing patients at will, while forcing them into Silas's single-payer socialist nirvana. Silas isn't talking of 'public' health care, as the headline suggests, she is propagandizing about monopoly health care. Leftists like to use the term 'public', as it doesn't sound so authoritarian, though, of course, it is, seeing as it is being used as an euphemism for no-choice.
The public should be entitled to the health care of their choice.
Silas trots out the ole 'national spirit' canard (another example of Keith Martin's noted head-in-the-sand tactic) and can find no 'corporate reason' to show why Tommy Douglas' zombie killed some 40 C.diff patients in Niagara, despite all the phony promises, all the deceptive research, all the false assurances, all the incompetent unaccountability, in Niagara's 'poor people's' monopoly hospitals, run by monopolists Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor.
It's as if patients must first shove the Constitution and the Canada Health Act in front of the faces of these despotic agents of Tommy Douglas, for them to see that they have no right to force a statist health monopoly upon the public.
Choice does mean choice - but Silas has no idea of the concept: Silas' status-quo is despotism; is the demonization of choice; is the absence of choice; is forced dependence on the state, mandated by the state.
That's exactly what statist Liberals Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor want in Niagara, and exactly why - when their monopolist health charade goes haywire, and when they no can no longer slough off the blame on "harris" boogeymen, or on some fictitious 'privatization', or on some dreaded "Americanization" red-herring - they simply vanish with their rhetoric while Tommy's dead continue to pile up in Niagara.
Yeh... that's the ticket: Ole Tommy did it.
*
see also here; here
*

Liberal Dwight Duncan's tiresome health-accord fear-mongering

Further to my previous post...

Debt-ridden Liberal Dwight Duncan hasn't been able to spin the health-transfer accord the way McGuinty's greasy Liberals had wanted him to. Here are some of the perspectives on monopolist-pusher Duncan's irresponsible recent foot-stamping and deceptive fear-mongering:

On Dec.20, 2011 Sun Media's Mark Dunn  reported in "Ont., Que. need to fix health system or feel the pain: Expert":

"Ontario and Quebec are the most vocal critics of a new health funding formula because their own budgets are hemorrhaging red ink, says an expert on finances from the western home of medicare.
"It's much easier to blame the federal government for their problems than to actually sit down and address their own situation, their own spending," says Janice MacKinnon, a former finance minister in Roy Romanow's NDP government.
Now a University of Saskatchewan fiscal policy professor, MacKinnon says Canada's two largest provinces are failing at righting their economies.
She described Monday's no-strings deal as "very fair" and "reasonable" compared to the present transfer agreement that calls for annual transfers of 6% - a figure Finance Minister Jim Flaherty says is unsustainable.
Ontario and Quebec finance ministers hyperventilated over the deal that gives the provinces five years to fix their systems before the new funding arrangement kicks in - one that ties funding to GDP growth and never slips below 3%.
Both provinces are broke and the economic outlook is grim - hence the provinces wagging a finger on one hand and stretching out the other hand for more cash.
MacKinnon says the 2004 original deal was flawed from the outset because the biggest chunk went to salaries, with some of it used to lower wait times, but not to the broader issue of fixing the health system.
With an aging population and all that comes with that demographic, MacKinnon says provinces are out of touch with health needs and service delivery.
She points to the cost of MRIs, hip and knee replacements and other ailments that develop with age. A Saskatchewan study suggested millions in savings if some of those procedures were conducted outside hospitals.
"You really have to get serious about changing your system to make it more affordable," she said".
*
Note that the same above story was also carried in the Dec.21, 2011 St.Catharines Standard, buried back on page B6, but did not include the last four paragraphs!! Why - was there something MacKinnon said which would upset secretive Niagara health monopoly pusher Jim Bradley? Like that Bradley's and Kim Craitor's monopolist Liberals "are out of touch with health needs and service delivery"??

MacKinnon - and she's an NDP eer! - is saying that Flaherty's deal was very fair and reasonable - yet, Jim Bradley's and Kim Craitor's Liberal status-quo-pushing, health-care-monopoly-enforcing statists are already moaning and whining about it. As is now usually the case, the St.Catharines Standard hasn't yet bothered to interview their local MPP, Jim Bradley, about the new health accord!

Janice MacKinnon, writing in the National Post back on July 14, 2004 noted:
“One of the greatest threats to medicare is posed by those who cling tenaciously to the status-quo and claim they are defending Tommy Douglas’s vision of medicare by doing so. Too often in politics, what we cherish most we inadvertently destroy by believing that protecting something means freezing it in time, when in fact protecting it may require dramatic change”. (see here, pg. 30)

Ignorant Ontario Liberals such as Jim Bradley and former health minister George Smitherman ended up being the poster-boys 'threatening and destroying the vision of medicare'; a prescient MacKinnon may well have been writing about them in 2004, considering what these Liberals ended up doing in Ontario from 2004 on! Their Liberal majority government was all about clinging tenaciously to some faded, failing, monopolist, anti-patient-choice status-quo mythology of the untouchable Saint Tommy Douglas. McGuinty's Liberals were status-quo-enforcing reactionary thugs, and Good Ole Nice Guy Jim Bradley was one of the leading proponents. Duncan is in denial about how his Liberals have destroyed health care in Ontario.

*

On Dec.20, 2011, the CBC reported on Dwight Doofus Duncan's deceptive Liberal fear-mongering claim that "health cuts will hurt hospitals";  to which here were some of the reader's replies:

EdmundBurke wrote:

EVER INCREASING HEALTH CARE COSTS UNSTAINABLE
Linking health care increases to the GDP is a pragmatic, bold, fiscally responsible alteration in the right direction; however, an even more contemplative small-c fiscally responsible conservative modification that would be attentive to the $580 billion debt and the $30 billion deficit would be to implement it immediately. Implementing it in 2017/18 will make it more difficult to eliminate the deficit, and would save billions in interest payments.
It's nauseating to listen to the fiscally unaccountable extremist on the far-left moronically screaming about limiting the increments in health care spending. Socialist provincial functionaries like Ontario's Duncan, who refuses to make any significant cuts to eliminate his $16 billion deficit must analyze their own socialistic-inspired, financially moronic budgets that are spending their provinces into insolvency.
A genuine small-c fiscal conservative would begin the process to re-write the Canada Health Act that currently places control of our top-down, government-rationed system in hands central planning, incompetent bureaucrats.
Government must welcome inclusion by the more efficient private sector, or permit the provinces to compete by experimenting to uncover cost savings. Health care cost $135 billion a year that are filtered through layers of expensive and wasteful bureaucracy before any of it ever gets to the actual health-care providers. Since 1998 federal health transfers to the provinces increased at an average annual rate of over 10%. Total health spending accounted for 11.4 per cent of Canada's GDP in 2009 compared with an average of 9.5 per cent across OECD countries. Canada's health spending per person was valued at $4,363 U.S., with the OECD average being $3,223 U.S. Rather than criminalize the purchase of private health care; the government must permit a parallel system similar to that allowed in every other Western democracy.
*

Mr. Right 2U wrote:

This guy is too much!
He has the audacity to refer to Mike Harris, and the cuts he had to made to villify the feds.
So let's review his train of thought.
Mike Harris had the federal transfer payments cut by a liberal government.
That was Harris' fault.
Dalton McGuinty is having the federal rates cut-in five years from now, and he instantly points back to Mike Harris.
Am I missing something here?
You can't blame the person who faced immediate cuts for what someone else deprived him of. (Paul Martin)
But you can blame the feds for cuts (in 5 years from now) for what the premier must budget for come 5 years from now. (Stephen Harper).
The double talk coming from politicians these days is indicative of the way the view the voter.
Hint: We must all be forgetful idiots in thier eyes.
Hey Duncan! You can fool some of the people some of the time. But quit trying to fool everyone all the time.
You hopefully, will be unemployed when the reduced inflationary payments come along. If for some bizarre reason you are still there, I hope you take back all you have said about Mike Harris and eat a little humble pie.
You have hidden from reality for years. Paying off workers to get yourself elected. Now you face what others have faced, and you cry like a little baby.
Maybe, just maybe, if you had read the winds and could see past your rose-coloured glasses, you would have known and accepted the facts of constantly increasing costs to satisfy a blaoted and over-paid labour force was not in the best interest of Ontario. Rather, the best interest of your party.
What a patriot you must be!
I can hardly wiat for your next twisted take on reality. It's like watching the muppet show, only not funny.
*

Paul Young wrote:

Duncan has no clue about healthcare and its funding and/or what is wrong with healthcare?

Let's look at some facts about healthcare:

1. LHIN - why was this Agency created? Well, because McGuinty wanted take responsibiliites from MHO and created LHIN. So why did McGuinty not fixed the root causes at MHO. I am all for ensuring moneys get to healthcare, but i am not for duplicate departments that can be eliminated by streamlining business process and/or creating better compliance/governance models at MHO.

2. eHealth is a good idea, but poorly implemented. I am all for technology, especially if it helps with managing healthcare costs. However, eHealth has been poorly managed with lack of cost controls and oversight.

3. Drug costs - the government needs to work with drug companies, especially on drug costs.

4. CEO Hospitals/administration need to have the salaries/benefits reviewed and look at ways to better align it to performance. Performance metrics should included wait times, bed utilization, etc.

5. Where is the drummond report in his discussion? Drummond has already stated that there are waste in govt

McGuinty and Duncan only know one thing that is tax and spend. McGuinty and Duncan managed government by throwing money at the symptoms, not the causes. This is how mcguinty has dealt with governing Ontario since 2003. I am tired of blaming Harris, especially when Ontario receives higher transfer payments and equalization payments, which Harris never received. It is easy to blame Harris, but what did McGuinty do once in office how about the health premium tax. So, McGuinty needs to take a hard look at himself because he has been a failure to Ontario. There is a reason McGuinty has the name quick hits!
*

slightly right wrote:

waaaaaah wahhhhhhhh. Cripes Duncan the slow down in spending will not happen for 5 years and your blaming the Feds now! Three percent is plenty and you know it. Just because you are in the hole spending like a mad man on "green jobs" and other make work programs do not blame lack of coin for a provincial responsibility on anyone but you and your budgets!

Every Canadian can see through you and your other have not Provinces complaints. You do not appreciate the Billions you get plus the built in increases for what there are. Its what Canada can afford to give you for Increased payments year after year.

Yes -- you are a have not right now---- you put your hand out more than you chip in. Yes it will change but wow guy its a increase not a reduction/cut back!
*

savant1 wrote:

Duncan and McGuinty don't know how to spend wisely.
With a provincial debt that they have doubled to $220 billion and which is growing by $59 million each day I would have thought the Ontario liberals would want to do more than rob Canadian taxpayers, inflate energy costs with a "green" initiative and avoid government economies.
Remember:

1) the billion dollar scandal at eHealth continues. 109 staff still receiving $100 K salaries.
2) the provincial budget deficit adds $16.7 billion annually to the current $302 billion debt..
3) the 'golden parachute' severance contracts for disgraced public service executives such as Eleanor Clitheroe continue.
4) the Samsung Korea windmills guarantee exhorbitant feed-in tarriffs for electricity
5) granting of war measure powers to police in Toronto during the G20 resulted in civil liberties breaches.
6) additional schemes have increased the "cost of government" 77 % in 7 years.
7) enabling Stewardship Ontario to attach an eco-fee on dangerous products like aspirin, cement, fertilizers..
8) not enforcing spending controls at the OLG until breeches were uncovered by the ombudsman.
9) granting a 14% salary increase to Ontario MPP's in the middle of a recession.
10) creation of 13 LHINs to employ failed liberal politicians. None have treated a patient yet but each CEO is paid handsomely.
*

DBT1979 wrote:

What hurts hospitals is that they refuse to take my money. I'm not saying get rid of the social safety net or not provide care to people who can't afford it. I'm suggesting that if I want to spend my hard earned money on healthcare, I should be able to.

If you want to spend your money on a second car or a 500,000 house in Toronto, you can choose that option for your family.
*

Readers in the Dec.22, 2011 National Post also responded with views on Dwight Duncan's Doofusry:

Tony Beckett wrote:

Re: New Health Rule Angers Premiers, Dec. 20.
On my way to the fitness facility in the hotel where the ministers of Finance were meeting on Monday, I just missed the interviews and palavers. As an ex-provincial budget bureaucrat who tried to limit increases to health budgets in Ontario and British Columbia, I was pleased with the approach proposed by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. Phasing out the existing 6% annual increases after several years and capping future increases to GDP increases with a floor of 3%, is very generous.
I was appalled by the whinging of provincial finance ministers, even if they were perhaps only crocodile tears, given that healthcare funding has become governments' largest expenditures. I hope that the disproportionate future increases will remain affordable to taxpayers, given demographic and economic factors.
As part of governments' needs to review expenditures, they should pay particular attention to future capital and equipment costs, fiscal year-end splurges, regional health authority empire-building, the pay and benefits of health-care workers, overmedication of seniors and creative billing by some physicians to medical service plans.
Health-care costs can and must be controlled, and incentives provided to those who show the way.

and

Jeff Spooner wrote:

After Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced that the federal government would no longer be a bottomless pit when it came to health-care funding, Ontario's Finance Minister Dwight Duncan gave the most over-the-top reaction. If you believe his rant, the Conservatives were destroying federal and provincial relations and that they didn't care about the health of all Canadians.
The reality, of course, is that without the impetus of a control on federal transfers, many of the provinces would continue to drag their heels on any meaningful innovation in how health care is delivered. Canadians now will have the opportunity over the next five years to see which provinces are making an effort to move forward and improve health care for their citizens, and which provinces continue to whine. My bet is that Ontario will be in the latter group.
*

Yes: Liberals Dalton McGuinty, Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor were and still are in that latter group, whose failing and arrogant idea was to stifle health care development by thuggish statist fiat and by ideological monopoly-forcing demagoguery.
Let's hope, though, that Ontario's Liberal goons are gone before five years.
***
See also here
***

Despite the above reactions to the fed's transfer proposals, it was revealing (and disgusting) how Niagara This Week's editor Mike Williscraft came up with fresh McGuinty-bootlickery in his Dec.24, 2011 'piece of Justin Trudeau' column "A glimpse into Santa's Christmas mailbag".

Williscraft's column should have more accurately been titled "A glimpse into the making of Liberal-friendly propaganda".

With this shallow column, Williscraft has clearly already begun crafting next year's narrative propaganda of  'poor ole Liberals are victims of federal health cuts', which his favoured Liberal party obviously wants Williscraft to peddle.

So - like Dwight Duncan -  that's what Williscraft is also trying to do.

Williscraft DIDN'T actually bother to ascertain what NHS supervisor Kevin Smith's REAL thoughts were; the slick Williscraft propagandized HIS OWN Liberal-friendly narrative, and falsely attributed it to the NHS's Smith, all disguised, of course, as a "Christmas wish story".

'Why, it's fake, ya see; it ain't real' Williscraft will say. But that's the beauty of Williscraft's propaganda.

Williscraft didn't have the nuts to actually get Kevin Smith to say the words which pamphleteer Williscraft shoved into Smith's mouth: that would then have become an actual worthy story; what Williscraft did here was turn McGuinty's real Liberal health care fiasco into a propagandist's joke.

Williscraft didn't actually bother contacting Smith, nor Jim Bradley, nor Kim Craitor, nor Dalton McGuinty, nor Dwight Duncan, nor Deb Matthews, nor any of the Liberal-appointed LHIN lackeys for their REAL comments and reaction to the REAL health transfer story.

Williscraft -strangely hahaha!- couldn't even find any imaginary 'lump of coal' commentary to shove into any real Liberal's mouth, within his fake-wish column, either..!

Williscraft made light of Niagara's health issues using his faux-wish column to further what must be his pet agenda (to propagandize for McGuinty and protect his incompetent Liberals from blowback to their killer C. diff fiasco, by falsely involving Smith, as if his comments were funny, or reflective) thereby dumping McGuinty's eight-year-long Liberal culpability in Niagara's health mess conveniently onto the federal government.

This facile approach of the Liberal-licking Niagara media is becoming patently obvious; eventually Niagara This Week's Williscraft and the St.Catharines Standard's Wendy Metcalfe will have to ferret out Jim Bradley's Liberals, and to actually begin holding them responsible for their constitutional health care responsibilities.
*

...and in this corner, Ole Dwight 'The Deficit' Duncan!

This article, "New health rule angers premiers" (National Post, Dec.20, 2011), noted some reactions by delegates at the federal-provincial health-transfer-payment talks:

"This is not fair, it is unCanadian," said Manitoba Finance Minister Stan Struthers. "It is not so much creating wealth as it redistributing wealth, and we are redistributing wealth from some of provinces who have a very limited capacity, to some of the richest provinces."
Mr. Struthers called the move "a slap in the face" by Ottawa.

Ahhh, yes: the good ole I'll slap ya in the face cuz you're "Un-Canadian" canard!

Wow: this is the same kind of jingoistic deceptive-nationalistic-rhetoric, the same ole kind of crap which MPP Good Ole Jim Bradley and his smug McGuintyite Liberals used to regularly spew in Ontario! Can the smug socialist rhetoric of "Slippery Slope"; of "Americanization"; of  "Two-tier"; of  "Hidden Agenda"; of "Ole Tommy Douglas is spinning in his grave", be far behind?!?

Status-quo Struthers, the 'Great Re-Distributor', is exactly the kind of obstructive reactionary which former Liberal MP Keith Martin wrote of, who stick their head in the sand while prosletyzing at the crumbling altar of Tommy Douglas.

But socialist Struthers is not alone: Ontario's status-quo-monopolist Liberals - naturally - also were whining:

Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, the most outspoken critic of the proposals so far, said the new formula will cost his province $400-million in health funding. "It means less access to quality health care, from sea to sea to sea, in French and English, in Ontario, Quebec and all of these provinces," he said.
"This, in my view, destabilizes the federation to some extent and will make it still more difficult for us to provide the basic services we're required to and at the same time get back to balanced [budgets]."
He took particular issue with how Mr. Flaherty "put the document in front of us and said, 'This is how it is going to be.' And that's just no way to do business."

Wow!! Talk about a hypocritical 'piece of Justin Trudeau'! Duncan reeks of it!!

Duncan, McGuinty, and Bradley shoved a lot of things onto Ontarians, simply telling us 'that's how it's going to be'!! What Liberal hypocrites!

Duncan and his greaseball Liberals FORCED a new health tax onto Ontarians!

Duncan and his single-payer-health-monoply-enforcing Liberals arrogantly DE-LISTED previously-covered health services! Ontario patients had no say!!

They forced the LHIN's onto Ontario!

They forced a Green Energy fiasco onto Ontario!

They forced their secret G-20 law onto Torontonians!

For hypocrite Liberals such as whiny Ole Dunco, that was wthe Liberal way of 'doing business'!

Duncan and his negligent Liberals have "de-stabilized" healthcare in Niagara, forcing cuts and HIP plans onto the NHS, to the point where we've had nearly 40 patients killed this year in two C.diff outbreaks - with no explanation from Duncan 's Liberals why this had happened, seeing as the Liberals had been geting ALL their promised billions already, under the current accord, since 2004.

As the Dec.21, 2011 National Post  pointed out:

"In 2004, when these same provinces agreed to the current funding formula with then-prime minister Paul Martin, it was on the understanding that they would use the 10-year accord to find ways to make health-care funding sustainable. That didn't happen, and now they want another decade to delay making the kind of tough choices needed to sustain medicare, while someone else picks up the tab. But all reasonable people know that the status quo can't last forever."

Yet, Duncan's duplicitous Liberals smugly forced their failing ideological status-quo health monopoly onto Ontarians, spinning yarns that it would last forever.
*
see reaction from Kelly McParland; from Christine Blizzard
*

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.

Profligate McGuinty wants more federal cash

John Ivison in  "Reality tempers health discord" (Dec.14, 2011 National Post) reported how Newfoundland is demanding that the federal government pay 25% of their health care costs (a 49% increase in health care transfers) because of the province's greying population.

Compare Newfoundland's demands today in 2011 to what Newfoundland's premier Danny Williams was saying in 2004, (during the health care transfer talks under Paul Martin) as Ivison himself reported in his story "Money will not fix what ails system: Summit was a missed opportunity" (National Post, Sept.17, 2004):

"...Williams, who had previously said that the whole process was a "farce" that could "destroy health care for a generation," was much more emollient after the deal was signed. The vision of dollar signs he saw on the road to the conference centre persuaded him that they had reached an agreement of which everyone could be proud. He did say his province still had serious fiscal problems but told Paul Martin, "It's not your problem ...that's my problem, that's our problem and I don't expect you to fix and heal all those problems." Martin should put such provincial empathy down to sleep deprivation because Williams is unlikely to be as understanding when the premiers crash antlers with the Prime Minister over equalization payments next month..."

Have Newfoundland - or Ontario - bothered to solve their 'serious fiscal problems' yet, seven years later?! Or are the 'visions of federal dollar signs' still dancing in their heads?

McGuinty, the single-payer health-care monopoly-pushing premier Liberal liar of Ontario, is billions in the hole, with debt-rating downgrades looming in his now-have-not province. McGuinty's wasted billions on his Green Energy scams and eHealth charades; now duplicitous Dalton too wants more cash from the feds, to enable him to continue in his unaccountable ways?! Does a profligate statist such as Dalton intend to surrender any of the constitutional responsibility his province has over health care, in return for federal cash, or does he feel he's just damn well entitled to be given such largesse, without question or stipulation?!

Where does 'suck-and-blow' Dalton think this money comes from, anyhow?
*

Will Liberal Jim Bradley attack Liberal Bob Rae's health-care ideas?!

above: an article in the Sept.8, 2011 St.Catharines Standard. Liberal Bob Rae admits that private health care insurance is an option in Canada. He didn't even bother to coyly couch his new found health-care views with the phrase "non-profit"!!

Now, let's go back, (all the way back, to Apr.19, 2011!) to hear what the very same Liberal Bob Rae was telling the Toronto Star:

"The Liberals’ Bob Rae says Stephen Harper is dodging questions on how to repair medicare because the Conservative leader doesn’t fundamentally believe in universal health care.
“Mr. Harper is a right-wing guy, and right-wing guys don’t believe in the Canadian health-care system. They never have and they never will,” Rae declared as the Liberals sought to keep up their aggressive campaign on the key issue of health-care.
“Over the last five years, this government has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to advance the discussions with the provinces” on the future of the publicly funded health-care system, Rae said of the Conservatives. “Mr. Harper has stood by as an absentee landlord. He’s done nothing.”
The Liberals have made health-care a central focus of their election effort and are questioning whether a re-elected Conservative government would have enough money to pay for increases in medicare funding in the years ahead.
The federal-provincial agreement that provides funds from Ottawa for health-care expires in 2014 and Rae said Conservative priorities may leave little room to expand medicare transfers to the provinces. Complicating the Conservative budget choices are commitments to buy new F-35 jet fights, which the Liberals say would cost $30 billion, and $6-billion a year in further corporate income tax cuts. As well, the Liberals say the Conservative plan to balance the budget in three years hinges on unexplained budget cuts of $11 billion.
“Mr. Harper has a long record of public statements opposing universal public health care in favour of private, for-profit delivery of health services—and given the risky spending and cuts in his platform, there is no reason to trust him,” Rae, the Liberal candidate in Toronto Centre riding, said Tuesday.
The Liberals have resurfaced previous quotes from Harper questioning the federal government’s role in the universal health-care system.
But in the campaign, Harper has said his party is fully committed to improving medicare and upholding the Canada Health Act. He said a re-elected Conservative government would continue to increase health-care transfers to the provinces by six per cent annually.
“Everyone is committed to continuing a universal public health-care system that is fully financed,” Harper said. “That is this government’s No. 1 priority and that will be its position.”
The Liberals and New Democrats have also pledged to continue federal funding for health-care and to protect the Canada Health Act."
*
Isn't that precious!!
Look at Bob Rae's Liberal rhetoric just five-months ago; look at the Liberal U-turn now!!
This is the same hypocritical Liberal party which in 2004 shit on one of their own health ministers, Pierre Pettigrew, for daring to speak the truth about Canadian health-care! (see here, pg.17-20 )
You really have to wonder what these Liberals believe at any moment in time.
Where's the St.Catharines Standard report asking local Liberal big shots in Niagara to rationalize federal Liberal Leader Rae's grand health care plans?!!
Let's hear Andrew Gill denounce Bob Rae!!
Let's hear McGuintyite Jim Bradley rail on sanctimoniously about 'privatization', 'Americanization', 'slippery slopes' and 'two tier'!!
Let's hear McGuinty tell us how Rae is an agent of divisiveness; how Tommy Douglas is proverbially spinning in his grave!!
Let's hear Kim Craitor misunderstand that it was his federal colleague Bob Rae - a Liberal - (not "harris"!) talking about private health insurance!
I'm sure the St.Catharines Standard will be asking these local Grits to comment on Rae's... umm... 'hidden Liberal right-wing agenda'... won't they?!
Or maybe Niagara's Liberals will just be allowed to 'dodge the questions'!!
Certainly, Jim Bradley was an "absentee landlord" when 33 C.difficile-infected patients were killed in Bradley's Liberal health monopoly in Niagara, while Bradley hid from the issue all summer.
Come on, Liberals: defend your own years of failed monopolist deceptions and hypocrisy!
*

Is "the system", or is Dalton McGuinty, to blame for a Niagara C.difficile-infected patient's death?

Allan Benner wrote in "The system let him down" (St.Catharines Standard, Jul.21, 2011):

"FORT ERIE — In early March, Gary Ball was enjoying the last skiing trip of the winter.

Three and a half months later, he was dead.
Dozens of sympathy cards line a table in his Ott Rd. home in Stevensville. It was his dream home, where he hoped to spend more years living with Denise Ball, his wife of three years.
Now, an urn beside the fireplace holds his cremated remains awaiting burial. Along with a newspaper clipping of his obituary, Denise placed a few mementos beside the urn — items representing the things Gary loved in life, such as a small metal sculpture of a downhill skier and a softball he used while playing slo-pitch.
The 63-year-old retired teacher was always active and healthy, with the exception of mild asthma. He spent his winters downhill skiing and his summers playing baseball and taking care of his two hectares of wooded property.
That changed April 7, while he was out for his daily walk. Suffering extreme pain, he was rushed to Greater Niagara General Hospital and diagnosed with pancreatitis.
Denise said Gary believed he'd get the help he needed at the hospital, that he'd get better — not sicker.
"He believed in the system," Denise said.
"The system let him down."
When she visited Gary four or five days after he was admitted, she learned he'd been diagnosed with Clostridium difficile as well as pneumonia — both conditions were acquired while a patient at the hospital, she said.
"At that time, we didn't know what C. diff was. They weren't treating it like it was a big deal. But I went to his room one day and there was a tag on his door."
That was long before the first outbreak was declared May 28 in St. Catharines. Outbreaks in Welland and Niagara Falls were declared simultaneously June 23 — and it was long before hospital staff stepped up cleaning protocols to combat the outbreaks.
Besides being concerned about cleaning efforts at the time, Denise was also concerned about her husband's hygiene while in Niagara Falls.
"The man was there nearly a month. He was asked the very last day, would he like a shower or a bath," she recalled.
Gary was released from the Niagara Falls hospital April 25.
"He didn't look any better, but I was glad that he came home because I thought, well, I can take care of him," she said.
At home, his condition deteriorated until he was admitted to Welland hospital May 8, where he stayed until May 25.
In Welland, she said Gary felt more at ease than he had in Niagara Falls. She said one nurse took the time to sit with Gary, holding his hand and telling him he'd be OK.
But it was there that physicians found a 22-cm-long pseudocyst had formed on his pancreas.
"If it burst, all the arteries and the heart are behind it," Denise said, recalling a doctor telling her: "This is dangerous."
She said the doctor transferred Gary to the intensive care unit for 24/7 care.
Doctors knew that cyst needed to be drained, but due to Gary's weakened condition as a result of the C. difficile they didn't dare conduct the surgery, Denise said.
"The doctor told him, 'We can't even cut you open because you won't make it,'" she recalled.
"It was like hitting a wall."
The plan was to treat the C. difficile, and get him strong enough for an operation. But his condition got worse.
The couple were concerned about spreading the illness to others so they asked their friends not to visit. Instead, Denise used her iPod to videotape her husband and sent those videos to friends over the Internet to update them on his condition.
In the videos, she said Gary's slow and steady transformation is apparent — from a relatively healthy man weighing 170 pounds to a frail and weak 140-pound man.
"It worried him. He'd look in the mirror. He's not a big guy, but he lost 30 pounds," she said.
During his care, she said he developed additional conditions, including a swollen leg due to a blood clot, a hernia caused by coughing and diabetes from low hemoglobin levels.
Although Niagara Health System officials cannot discuss individual cases due to confidentiality policies, chief of staff Dr. Joanna Hope spoke generally about the ravages the disease can inflict.
"It can be extremely devastating, no doubt about it," she said during a media briefing about the outbreaks Wednesday.
"That's why every case is reviewed, so we can help families develop learning and as always in medicine, be better at dealing with the trials and tribulations of populations and human beings at large."
After Gary's release from Welland hospital, he had a few more attacks of pancreatitis June 11 and 16, Denise said. Each time, he was treated at the hospital and sent home.
June 26 was different. He was lying in bed about 11 p.m., and sat up suddenly describing a "whoosh" feeling. He staggered toward the bathroom and collapsed. Denise called 911, and the same paramedics who took him to the hospital April 7 arrived.
He was pronounced dead June 27 at GNGH, but Denise knows he actually died at home before midnight.
She watched the cardiogram as paramedics worked to save his life and saw the flatline on the monitor.
Although the official cause of death was pulmonary embolism, Denise said she's confident Gary would still be with her if the C. difficile hadn't prevented physicians from treating the underlying illness.
C. difficile has usually been associated with the elderly and frail, but her husband was anything but — healthy and active, with a love of gardening and the outdoors.
"Here was a healthy man, and it took him," she said. "C. difficile did not kill Gary, but having C. difficile caused all those other problems so he could never get to being healthy."
"Our hearts go out to that individual," said Sue Matthews, NHS interim executive director.
"This is a very, very difficult time for this patient's family," Hope added.
Although most people who have died with C. difficile during the outbreak have been older, Hope said that isn't always the case.
"C. difficile affects those people who don't have enough immunity to fight the problems they are facing, either acutely or on a chronic basis."
------------------
While older people have more difficulty fighting off the infection, NHS chief of staff Dr. Joanna Hope said the likelihood of catching C. difficile depends on the impact any underlying condition has on the patient regardless of their age.
"An epidemiologist is with us looking at our data," she said.
Preliminary information provided by the epidemiologist shows the average age of women who died with C. difficile is 80 years old, plus or minus 10 years, while the average age of men who died with C. difficile is 76, plus or minus 10 years. That information, however, "is first cut and may change," she added.
"If you have a younger person, say a 36-year-old with a cancer of the lymph nodes, they are very immune-compromised with a very aggressive chemotherapy and can easily develop infections."
Since the outbreaks began, 25 people have died.
In its official tally, the NHS states 24 patients have died because it does not include a community-acquired case."
*
I would say that the Liberal government of Ontario let this patient down: they control Ontario's anti-patient-choice monopolist system.
It's McGuinty and all of his sitting Liberal single-payer-health-care-monopoly-pushing MPP's who let not just this patient - but many, many others - down, with their bait-and-switch Liberal healthcare duplicity.
It's McGuinty and his Liberal health-monopolists who arbitrarily decide what health-care rations Tommy Douglas will toss our way.
*
Thankfully, no comments from any of  Niagara's Liberal monopolist MPP's were included in this story - since, of course, Liberals have nothing to do with any of the unpleasant fallout from their political negligence... especially with an election coming their way this October!
*
So remember folks, once again: Vote for Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor, and vote often - Jimmy'n'Kimmy will save health care from  McGuinty themselves harris. yah...
*