It's funny how the St.Catharines Standard Bradley Bootlicker had absolutley no coverage of the Niagara LHIN's pathetic healthcare performance, as was outlined in a Feb.19, 2013 Hamilton Spectator story.
The Spectator story noted that "during the most-recently reported quarter, the Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant LHIN registered either the second-worst or third-worst performance out of 14 LHINs in each of the three categories".
Isn't it funny that, say, the Standard's Don Fraser wasn't immediately sent out in the rain on his waterskis to interview Niagara's Liberal healthcare-monopoly-pushing-hack, Ole Jim Bradley, for his comments on his Liberal health-care monopoly's abysmal record!
Isn't that what would have happened, had some Conservative been our local MPP?! Sure it would have!!
If it was anyone else but Ole Liberal Jimmy, Wendy Metcalfe's self-appointed laughable wrong-righters would have been falling over themselves to ambush the politician and demand answers!!
But, hey - this is Ole Liberal stalwart MPP Jim Bradley were talkin' 'bout, after all: Niagara's local press is loathe to ask their BestBoyJim anything, especially if it means it might make Ole Buddy Jimmy look bad.
Niagara's pathetic excuse for reporting, known as the St.Catharines Standard, ignored the LHIN report!!
How many days will it take for the Standard to contact their buddy Bradley for answers??! [nothing yet, by Feb.25...!!]
What, are Standard staffers holding marathon midnight meetings, trying desperately to craft and assemble a puffball question or two, sanitized enough so as not to only make Ole Jimmy look good even in these circumstances, but to create the impression that Ole Monopolist Jimmy really has nothing whatsoever to do with this - with any of it!!
So, go to it, Bradley Shoeshiners!! Get your rhetorical can of partisan paste out, and lovingly start rubbing Bradley's boots!!
And remember: just don't tell sicko Michael Moore about any of this, and, don't dare ask Liberal MPP Jim Bradley for answers about why, as the Spectator reported -
• The HNHB [Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant] LHIN had the second-longest 90th percentile wait time (33.4 hours) for ER patients admitted and the second-longest average wait time (16 hours) in the province. The Mississauga-Halton LHIN had the longest waits in both cases.
or why
• At Greater Niagara General Hospital, one in 10 ER patients eventually admitted to a hospital bed waited at least 51 hours in the emergency department
or why
• At St. Catharines General, one in 10 high-acuity patients spent at least 10 hours in the ER.
It is for the best that no one from the St.Catharines Standard demand health care accountability and answers from Liberal monopolists such as Jim Bradley! (Just as it was for the best that the disgusting St.Catharines Standard protected their buddy Jim Bradley and did not bother to pursue him, as dozens of Niagara C. diff patients were dying in Bradley's local Liberal health monopoly!!)
Gosh; over a period of what - two decades? - the Standard has never even been able to bring itself to ask Liberal GreenFear-monger and Environment Minister Jim Bradley for his definitive proof that green bolshevism cures AGW!!
The Standard has never bothered to specifically ask Ole Liberal Jim Bradley to publicly detail when exactly Bradley first learned about his cabinet colleague Bartolucci's secret G20 law!
And - now that we have Kathleen "I know nothing... nooooothhhing..." Wynne, the pantsuited McGuinty surrogate, telling us that she was never at any cabinet meeting where McGuinty's clandestine 'Project Vapour' gas-plant/vote-buying scheme was being discussed - the St.Catharines Standard will most certainly not bother to ask Niagara's vapourous ole Jim Bradley whether Ole Jimmy was there at McGuinty's cabinet table for those Bond-villain-esque Project Vapour meetings!
So, why would the Standard's LiberalFriendly reporter/stenographers bother to ask MPP's Jim Bradley or Kim Craitor about 51 HOUR WAIT TIMES in their own local Liberal-run local healthcare monopoly?!!!
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Showing posts with label wait times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wait times. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Monday, December 3, 2012
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!!)
*
... 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!!)
*
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
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!!
*
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!!
*
Thursday, December 22, 2011
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)
*
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.
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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.
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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!
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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!
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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.
*
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.
*
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
...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
*
"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
*
Friday, July 22, 2011
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
*
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Now 24 patients are dead in Niagara's C.difficile outbreak; yet local Liberal health-care monopolist Jim Bradley vanishes
As of July.17, 2011 24 patients have now died in the Niagara C. difficile outbreak.
Local Liberal health-care-monopoly pushing despot MPP Jim Bradley has vanished, hiding and avoiding any comments on this issue - the same way he hid from his last killer C. diff outbreak in 2008, which killed hundreds of Ontarians, and which McGuinty's Liberal scumbags refused to investigate.
Meanwhile, Bradley's Liberal doofus buddy MPP Kim Craitor does his disingenuous best to pretend that... somehow... ummm... Harris killed these patients, and not Dalton McGuinty! ha ha ha... Kimmy's a laugh-riot...
That's how these secretive Liberal scumbags roll: hide from scrutiny, with a lot of help from their leftist media and municipal buddies, and then pretend that their own failing monopolism, their own ideological single-payer, no-patient-choice health-fascism, has nothing at all to do with any of this.
The dead patients pile up in Niagara's Liberal under-funded health-monopoly, while Liberal secretive health-care-cutting scumbags continue to hide from scrutiny and from their own guilt.
*
Local Liberal health-care-monopoly pushing despot MPP Jim Bradley has vanished, hiding and avoiding any comments on this issue - the same way he hid from his last killer C. diff outbreak in 2008, which killed hundreds of Ontarians, and which McGuinty's Liberal scumbags refused to investigate.
Meanwhile, Bradley's Liberal doofus buddy MPP Kim Craitor does his disingenuous best to pretend that... somehow... ummm... Harris killed these patients, and not Dalton McGuinty! ha ha ha... Kimmy's a laugh-riot...
That's how these secretive Liberal scumbags roll: hide from scrutiny, with a lot of help from their leftist media and municipal buddies, and then pretend that their own failing monopolism, their own ideological single-payer, no-patient-choice health-fascism, has nothing at all to do with any of this.
The dead patients pile up in Niagara's Liberal under-funded health-monopoly, while Liberal secretive health-care-cutting scumbags continue to hide from scrutiny and from their own guilt.
*
Monday, March 14, 2011
McGuinty's sicko Liberal health-care: 'Come back when you're sicker'
Matt Gurney wrote in "Ontario tells patient to come back when she's sicker" (National Post, Mar.9, 2011):
"That the Ontario health-care system is under pressure isn’t news. But every so often another case comes along that proves, yet again, just how dysfunctional it is.
Jill Anzarut, a 35-year-old mother of two young children, has had the misfortune of becoming the latest Canadian whose story speaks to the system’s broader problems. Anzarut detected a lump in her breast and tests determined the lump was indeed a cancerous tumour — an aggressive kind. Worse, Aznarut’s genes mean she is at high risk of her cancer reoccurring. There is a drug, already used in other provinces and in some cases in Ontario, that has been shown to reduce the likelihood of the cancer returning. But Aznarut can’t get it in Ontario: She had the misfortune of catching her cancer too early to qualify.
Anzarut has fallen afoul of a quirk in Ontario’s policies on the use of the drug in question, Herceptin, which can cut in half the odds of cancer returning after a successful treatment. In Ontario, the drug can be prescribed for cases where the tumour is more than one centimetre in diameter. Anzarut, having caught it very early, has a tumour smaller than that.
How can this possibly be justified? How much money has been spent on public health campaigns stressing the importance of women performing self-exams for cancer, following up on any abnormalities and getting regular mammograms as a precaution? After all that effort, a young mother does everything exactly right, immediately seeks medical care and is told … sorry, you’re not quite sick enough to get the medicine best able to treat you. Perhaps she should go home and wait while the cancer cells invade her body, then come back later and hope she qualifies. Welcome to Ontario, where we value early warning so long as it’s not too early. You really gotta straddle a fine line with these life-threatening diseases, ya know.
For most of us, the absurdities of state-monopoly health-care usually mean inconvenience, delays and sometimes, added pain. For Anzarut, the cold inefficiencies of a ration-based system could cost her far more. But all is not yet lost, there is a review panel that can examine her case and grant an exemption. God knows if there was ever a case warranting an exemption, she’s it. If so, that will be good news not only for Anzarut, but the 100 or so women estimated to find themselves in a similar situation every year.
Some Ontario patients have been able to access Herceptin because they’re lucky enough to have some coverage under a private insurance plan. If the only way to survive in the public health-care system is to come packing private insurance, is that not a sign that the public system isn’t working?"
*
Yes - this is the health-care monopoly run by disgusting Liberal scumbags such as Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor.
This is their Liberal health-care duplicity exposed for all to see. Come back when you're sicker, say the sicko Liberals who control Ontario's sicko state-run, single-payer health-care monopoly.
Of course, this is just the kinda scenario that Ontario's smug Liberal scumbags loved to fearmonger about: you know, that... uh... "Harris did all this" [!] when of course we see it is McGuinty and his Lying Liberals who are actually doing what they claimed Harris would do! Y'all got that?!
Feh - it's only a 'hundred or so' women a year who find themselves in this situation: therefore - as Liberals love to say - they're just anomalies!
Who cares about them, when McGuinty's, Bradley's, Craitor's, and Deb Matthews' main priority is to serve Tommy Douglas' dead socialist ideology?!
These Liberal scumbags force Ontarians to pay for elusive health-care promises; then, when these promises turn out to be a monopolist political fraud, they also ban Ontarians from obtaining their own health care privately.
That should be criminal.
*
"That the Ontario health-care system is under pressure isn’t news. But every so often another case comes along that proves, yet again, just how dysfunctional it is.
Jill Anzarut, a 35-year-old mother of two young children, has had the misfortune of becoming the latest Canadian whose story speaks to the system’s broader problems. Anzarut detected a lump in her breast and tests determined the lump was indeed a cancerous tumour — an aggressive kind. Worse, Aznarut’s genes mean she is at high risk of her cancer reoccurring. There is a drug, already used in other provinces and in some cases in Ontario, that has been shown to reduce the likelihood of the cancer returning. But Aznarut can’t get it in Ontario: She had the misfortune of catching her cancer too early to qualify.
Anzarut has fallen afoul of a quirk in Ontario’s policies on the use of the drug in question, Herceptin, which can cut in half the odds of cancer returning after a successful treatment. In Ontario, the drug can be prescribed for cases where the tumour is more than one centimetre in diameter. Anzarut, having caught it very early, has a tumour smaller than that.
How can this possibly be justified? How much money has been spent on public health campaigns stressing the importance of women performing self-exams for cancer, following up on any abnormalities and getting regular mammograms as a precaution? After all that effort, a young mother does everything exactly right, immediately seeks medical care and is told … sorry, you’re not quite sick enough to get the medicine best able to treat you. Perhaps she should go home and wait while the cancer cells invade her body, then come back later and hope she qualifies. Welcome to Ontario, where we value early warning so long as it’s not too early. You really gotta straddle a fine line with these life-threatening diseases, ya know.
For most of us, the absurdities of state-monopoly health-care usually mean inconvenience, delays and sometimes, added pain. For Anzarut, the cold inefficiencies of a ration-based system could cost her far more. But all is not yet lost, there is a review panel that can examine her case and grant an exemption. God knows if there was ever a case warranting an exemption, she’s it. If so, that will be good news not only for Anzarut, but the 100 or so women estimated to find themselves in a similar situation every year.
Some Ontario patients have been able to access Herceptin because they’re lucky enough to have some coverage under a private insurance plan. If the only way to survive in the public health-care system is to come packing private insurance, is that not a sign that the public system isn’t working?"
*
Yes - this is the health-care monopoly run by disgusting Liberal scumbags such as Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor.
This is their Liberal health-care duplicity exposed for all to see. Come back when you're sicker, say the sicko Liberals who control Ontario's sicko state-run, single-payer health-care monopoly.
Of course, this is just the kinda scenario that Ontario's smug Liberal scumbags loved to fearmonger about: you know, that... uh... "Harris did all this" [!] when of course we see it is McGuinty and his Lying Liberals who are actually doing what they claimed Harris would do! Y'all got that?!
Feh - it's only a 'hundred or so' women a year who find themselves in this situation: therefore - as Liberals love to say - they're just anomalies!
Who cares about them, when McGuinty's, Bradley's, Craitor's, and Deb Matthews' main priority is to serve Tommy Douglas' dead socialist ideology?!
These Liberal scumbags force Ontarians to pay for elusive health-care promises; then, when these promises turn out to be a monopolist political fraud, they also ban Ontarians from obtaining their own health care privately.
That should be criminal.
*
Friday, March 4, 2011
Monopoly health care is not the only option
Matt Gurney wrote a column in the Mar.3, 2011 National Post about a Tim Hortons outlet in a Vancouver hospital being temporarily appropriated in order to house patients from the overcrowded ER.
Steven Grossman responded to the story with this letter, "Private health care not the only option", in the Mar.4, 2011 Post:
"Re: Double-Double Land Shouldn't Double As ER, Matt Gurney, March 3.
Matt Gurney does an excellent job depicting the scene at Vancouver's Royal Columbian Hospital (due to overcrowding, the hospital took over the building's Tim Hortons to accommodate patients) and he is validated in his claim that the hospital should be better equipped to handle a "busy day." However, he makes no effort to defend his proposal to fix the problem - allowing for private enterprise to enter the Canadian health-care system.
There are many reasons why hospitals run out of space, the most popular of which is the number of beds being taken up by patients who are awaiting a transfer to another facility, be it a long-term care home or a rehab facility. While he may be correct that our system needs help, the answer is not always to privatize just because it is the fashionable phrase of the day. Perhaps if we fix inefficiencies in our hospitals and use the resources already pumped into our system in a more appropriate way, we can avoid problems such as that of Royal Columbian Hospital from occurring without private health care."
*
Yet: is the answer always to 'socialize', to monopolize, to 'Douglasize', just because single-payer collectivism is the fashionable cult of the day?!
The Grossmans' and the Jeff Turnbulls' can go right ahead and try to "fix" Tommy Douglas' perverted monopolistic health-care "inefficiencies".
But these 'fixers' should have no right preventing any Canadian from arranging and obtaining their own non-government-controlled health-care.
The supposed-"fixing" of Tommy Douglas' monopolist problems should not infringe on the ability of citizens to obtain private coverage.
The "appropriate way" to "fix" the "inefficiencies" is through competition, not profit-hating collectivist rhetoric.
Just look at Ontario's monopoly-pushing Liberal MPP Jim Bradley: he's been... ummm... "fixing" health-care in Ontario for over thirty years - and look at the great job he's done...
[Can you imagine McGuinty or Bradley ever running a coffee shop?! They'd be hollering for government subsidies within a week.]
*
It is hilarious pathetic pathetically hilarious that the socialist Jack off Layton would go on to actually use this Hortons incident in a campaign ad, first airing Mar.30,11 - in a federal election, linking Harper to this incident! Har har har!
Which party is in power in B.C., Jackoff?
Who is the premier in B.C., Jackoff?
Why isn't the Liberal premier (Campbell or Clark, don't matter...) of British Columbia mentioned in Jackoff's ad?!! Has Jackoff demanded answers from those people - Liberals - who are actually in charge of B.C.'s health monopoly?!
Jackoff has utterly jumped the shark here - his assumption being that voters are too stupid to know that the provincial premiers are responsible for health care - in the same way McGuinty is fully responsible for health care in Ontario. I haven't heard Jackoff lambasting Liberal McGuinty in Ontario - and Jackoff lives here.
With this ad, Layton has demonstrated the disdainful and disingenous gimmickry of his scummy socialism.
Steven Grossman responded to the story with this letter, "Private health care not the only option", in the Mar.4, 2011 Post:
"Re: Double-Double Land Shouldn't Double As ER, Matt Gurney, March 3.
Matt Gurney does an excellent job depicting the scene at Vancouver's Royal Columbian Hospital (due to overcrowding, the hospital took over the building's Tim Hortons to accommodate patients) and he is validated in his claim that the hospital should be better equipped to handle a "busy day." However, he makes no effort to defend his proposal to fix the problem - allowing for private enterprise to enter the Canadian health-care system.
There are many reasons why hospitals run out of space, the most popular of which is the number of beds being taken up by patients who are awaiting a transfer to another facility, be it a long-term care home or a rehab facility. While he may be correct that our system needs help, the answer is not always to privatize just because it is the fashionable phrase of the day. Perhaps if we fix inefficiencies in our hospitals and use the resources already pumped into our system in a more appropriate way, we can avoid problems such as that of Royal Columbian Hospital from occurring without private health care."
*
Yet: is the answer always to 'socialize', to monopolize, to 'Douglasize', just because single-payer collectivism is the fashionable cult of the day?!
The Grossmans' and the Jeff Turnbulls' can go right ahead and try to "fix" Tommy Douglas' perverted monopolistic health-care "inefficiencies".
But these 'fixers' should have no right preventing any Canadian from arranging and obtaining their own non-government-controlled health-care.
The supposed-"fixing" of Tommy Douglas' monopolist problems should not infringe on the ability of citizens to obtain private coverage.
The "appropriate way" to "fix" the "inefficiencies" is through competition, not profit-hating collectivist rhetoric.
Just look at Ontario's monopoly-pushing Liberal MPP Jim Bradley: he's been... ummm... "fixing" health-care in Ontario for over thirty years - and look at the great job he's done...
[Can you imagine McGuinty or Bradley ever running a coffee shop?! They'd be hollering for government subsidies within a week.]
*
It is
Which party is in power in B.C., Jackoff?
Who is the premier in B.C., Jackoff?
Why isn't the Liberal premier (Campbell or Clark, don't matter...) of British Columbia mentioned in Jackoff's ad?!! Has Jackoff demanded answers from those people - Liberals - who are actually in charge of B.C.'s health monopoly?!
Jackoff has utterly jumped the shark here - his assumption being that voters are too stupid to know that the provincial premiers are responsible for health care - in the same way McGuinty is fully responsible for health care in Ontario. I haven't heard Jackoff lambasting Liberal McGuinty in Ontario - and Jackoff lives here.
With this ad, Layton has demonstrated the disdainful and disingenous gimmickry of his scummy socialism.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
De-politicize, De-centralize and De-monopolize Ontario's health-care
Tom Blackwell reported in "Ottawa must step in to fix health care, doctors say" (National Post, Mar.1, 2011):
"In a challenge likely to fall flat with the decentralist Harper government, Canada's doctors association urged Ottawa to get off the sidelines and take an active role in fixing Canada's "deeply troubled" health care system.
Government-run health care is one of the biggest institutions of any kind in North America, noted Dr. Jeff Turnbull, president of the Canadian Medical Association, in a speech Monday to the Empire Club of Canada in Toronto. The system is splintered, however, into 14 divisions -- run by the provinces and territories -- with "14 different IT systems, 14 different purchasing departments, no clear system for sharing best practices and no evaluation of outcomes," he said.
The federal government's voice has not been heard loudly in recent months as provinces experiment with sometimes controversial changes to the system, including opening the door wider to private medicine. Dr. Turnbull suggested national authorities must play a much bigger part, developing a "health care action plan" that would ensure better use of health workers, apply electronic medical records across the system and launch new measures to make medicare more accountable to the public and patients.
Just as the Canada Health Act set out the principles of the health-care system a few decades ago, a "bold vision" is needed from federal politicians again to revive the faltering system, he told an Empire Club luncheon.
"We ask the federal government to demonstrate courage and leadership," Dr. Turnbull said. "We find ourselves at a crossroads and the decisions we take today will be judged by future generations."
In a question and answer session later, the CMA president admitted the group's call for a federal health-care plan has received a "muted" response from federal politicians of all stripes, which he attributed to a fear of being tripped up by the politically sensitive issue.
The idea would certainly seem to clash with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's generally decentralist thrust in governing, and the Conservatives' apparent willingness to let provinces shape their own distinct health systems.
Recent developments involving private clinics in Quebec, B.C. and elsewhere -- some of which opposition politicians have labeled violations of the Canada Health Act -- have generally met with little comment from Leona Aglukkaq, the federal Health Minister.
Jenny Van Alstyne, a spokeswoman for the minister, refused Monday to directly respond to Dr. Turnbull's proposal, but suggested the government is not keen to tell the provinces what to do.
"We continue to work with the provinces, territories and health-care professionals to look for ways to improve the health care system," she said in an emailed response to questions Monday.
Ms. Alstyne said the government is "committed to a universal and public health care system and to the Canada Health Act." She added the Conservatives will not balance the budget by cutting health care, and have increased health transfers to the province by over 30% since coming to power.
Other recent CMA presidents have spoken out about the need to try different ways of delivering government-funded health care, including giving private operators more opportunities to provide services.
Dr. Turnbull said he believes discussion of the private-public balance has needlessly polarized the debate, and can be worked out once a plan has been developed to make the system more cost-efficient and effective.
Meanwhile, the group Canadian Doctors for Medicare released a report Monday that it says shows that it is a myth that rising costs are making the health care system unsustainable.
In fact, the organization said, public spending on health has remained at a fairly constant level as a portion of the total economy, accounting for 4%-5% of gross domestic product for much of the past 30 years. It has taken up a larger portion of provincial budgets, but that is mainly because of cutbacks in other program areas and tax cuts, the report said.
On a per capita basis, though, costs have clearly risen sharply, from a provincial average of $1,091 in 1985 to $3,662 in 2010 in current dollars, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information."
*
Seems like Turnbull is advocating nothing but more failing statism. (wasn't Turnbull's conference, BTW, the one which was advertised as "you're health care"??)
Turnbull has mis-diagnosed the political problem facing health-care: that health-care is a single-payer state-controlled monopoly, being manipulated as a social program for political purposes.
Turnbull writes a prescription for more big-government centralist statism and more state socialism, simply ignoring that his consolidationist prescriptions were already tried before - and failed!
"In a challenge likely to fall flat with the decentralist Harper government, Canada's doctors association urged Ottawa to get off the sidelines and take an active role in fixing Canada's "deeply troubled" health care system.
Government-run health care is one of the biggest institutions of any kind in North America, noted Dr. Jeff Turnbull, president of the Canadian Medical Association, in a speech Monday to the Empire Club of Canada in Toronto. The system is splintered, however, into 14 divisions -- run by the provinces and territories -- with "14 different IT systems, 14 different purchasing departments, no clear system for sharing best practices and no evaluation of outcomes," he said.
The federal government's voice has not been heard loudly in recent months as provinces experiment with sometimes controversial changes to the system, including opening the door wider to private medicine. Dr. Turnbull suggested national authorities must play a much bigger part, developing a "health care action plan" that would ensure better use of health workers, apply electronic medical records across the system and launch new measures to make medicare more accountable to the public and patients.
Just as the Canada Health Act set out the principles of the health-care system a few decades ago, a "bold vision" is needed from federal politicians again to revive the faltering system, he told an Empire Club luncheon.
"We ask the federal government to demonstrate courage and leadership," Dr. Turnbull said. "We find ourselves at a crossroads and the decisions we take today will be judged by future generations."
In a question and answer session later, the CMA president admitted the group's call for a federal health-care plan has received a "muted" response from federal politicians of all stripes, which he attributed to a fear of being tripped up by the politically sensitive issue.
The idea would certainly seem to clash with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's generally decentralist thrust in governing, and the Conservatives' apparent willingness to let provinces shape their own distinct health systems.
Recent developments involving private clinics in Quebec, B.C. and elsewhere -- some of which opposition politicians have labeled violations of the Canada Health Act -- have generally met with little comment from Leona Aglukkaq, the federal Health Minister.
Jenny Van Alstyne, a spokeswoman for the minister, refused Monday to directly respond to Dr. Turnbull's proposal, but suggested the government is not keen to tell the provinces what to do.
"We continue to work with the provinces, territories and health-care professionals to look for ways to improve the health care system," she said in an emailed response to questions Monday.
Ms. Alstyne said the government is "committed to a universal and public health care system and to the Canada Health Act." She added the Conservatives will not balance the budget by cutting health care, and have increased health transfers to the province by over 30% since coming to power.
Other recent CMA presidents have spoken out about the need to try different ways of delivering government-funded health care, including giving private operators more opportunities to provide services.
Dr. Turnbull said he believes discussion of the private-public balance has needlessly polarized the debate, and can be worked out once a plan has been developed to make the system more cost-efficient and effective.
Meanwhile, the group Canadian Doctors for Medicare released a report Monday that it says shows that it is a myth that rising costs are making the health care system unsustainable.
In fact, the organization said, public spending on health has remained at a fairly constant level as a portion of the total economy, accounting for 4%-5% of gross domestic product for much of the past 30 years. It has taken up a larger portion of provincial budgets, but that is mainly because of cutbacks in other program areas and tax cuts, the report said.
On a per capita basis, though, costs have clearly risen sharply, from a provincial average of $1,091 in 1985 to $3,662 in 2010 in current dollars, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information."
*
Seems like Turnbull is advocating nothing but more failing statism. (wasn't Turnbull's conference, BTW, the one which was advertised as "you're health care"??)
Turnbull has mis-diagnosed the political problem facing health-care: that health-care is a single-payer state-controlled monopoly, being manipulated as a social program for political purposes.
Turnbull writes a prescription for more big-government centralist statism and more state socialism, simply ignoring that his consolidationist prescriptions were already tried before - and failed!
We are today at a "crossroad" - dealing with the socialist health-care charade perpetrated by Tommy Douglas' generation!
Turnbull can't bring himself to even use the term 'monopoly' when describing his statist health care ideals and how they relate to the moribund and outdated CHA.
And why is Turnbull not asking Disastrous Dalton's Liberal hacks about what they have done to health-care in Ontario?!
Turnbull can't bring himself to even use the term 'monopoly' when describing his statist health care ideals and how they relate to the moribund and outdated CHA.
And why is Turnbull not asking Disastrous Dalton's Liberal hacks about what they have done to health-care in Ontario?!
Isn't that interesting?!
Why isn't Turnbull asking for Liberal McGuinty's... um... "bold vision"?!
Why should 'Ottawa step in'??
Isn't health care a PROVINCIAL responsibility? (Turnbull knows it is...!)
Why isn't Turnbull asking for Liberal McGuinty's... um... "bold vision"?!
Why should 'Ottawa step in'??
Isn't health care a PROVINCIAL responsibility? (Turnbull knows it is...!)
Do the '14 divisions' want 'Ottawa to step in', and take over their constitutional health-care responsibilities? Is this kind of massive monopolist health-care centralization Turnbull's suggested cure?!
No thanks.
See also "Medicare's head is still buried in the single-payer-status-quo sand"
*
No thanks.
See also "Medicare's head is still buried in the single-payer-status-quo sand"
*
Monday, February 21, 2011
Thank-you for shooting us, Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor
Nancy Huizinga wrote in "Our wonderful health care system in action" (St.Catharines Standard, Feb.19, 2011) :
"Thank you Premier Dalton McGuinty, for making my elderly father, who fell and broke his hip to wait at the emergency room at St. Catharines General Hospital for seven hours to get an x-ray, another four hours for a doctor to come and assess him and another two days before he had an operation.
Thank you Dalton for the shortage of nurses and cutbacks, resulting in health care that is sad and pathetic. I requested that a doctor speak to us after surgery and that didn't happen. I requested to have my dad awake for surgery and to speak to the anesthesiologist, but that didn't happen.
Thank you Dalton that during my dad's two-and-a-half week stay, we haven't seen a doctor once.
Thank you Dalton that since my dad is very frail, the hospital decided to give up on him and consider him as palliative care, which he is not, but would like him out of the hospital regardless.
Thank you Dalton for wanting my dad to be discharged before he regains his strength back, because if he isn't discharged within three weeks from his admittance to this hospital, he will lose his bed at the long-term care home and would have to look and wait for a new long-term care home to be available.
Thank you Dalton for giving us no choice. Therefore, our dear and frail dad was transferred to his long-term care home. We pray to our dear Lord that He will look after him because our wonderful health-care system that you developed certainly doesn't!
Thank you Dalton, because of everything that happened, or didn't happen, my dad passed away!
Thank you Dalton. This is something for all of us "boomers" to look forward to. You might as well just shoot us, because your health-care system is a crime.
Thank you for nothing".
*
Thanks should also go to local Liberal politicians Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor, whose duplicitous Liberal government-run health-monopoly underfunded the NHS and created the LHIN disaster in Niagara.
Why isn't Liberal MPP Jim Bradley publicly commenting on these continual horror stories emanating from his local Liberal-under-funded health-monopoly, in his own riding?!
Where is Jim Bradley hiding?! Will any St.Catharines Standard reporter bother to track down Good Ole Jimmy for a comment?! hahaha - as if...
Remember how a Smug Ole Jimmy, when in Opposition, used to huff and puff with sanctimonious feigned-outrage about Harris' alleged cuts?
And then remember how in May 2004, under finance minister Greg Sorbara, McGuinty's Liberals immediately announced that they were going to CUT Harris' health-care spending - which the Liberals themselves admitted was GROWING at 8% per year?!! (yes - you read that correctly: health-care spending under Harris was growing at 8% per year - and McGuinty's Liberals were complaining about this and planning to stop that!!)
Remember, these were McGuinty's Liberals - including the Niagara comedy-duo of Jimmy'n'Kimmy, Niagara's own FLICKIN' Frick'n'Frack - who not only under-funded their despotic single-payer health monopoly, but who also CUT previously-covered health-care, and who then raised a massive new health-tax!!
McGuinty's Liberal-enforced single-payer health-care monopoly is a crime, but you can bet that the local municipal Liberals, such as Jim Diodati and Vance Badawey, will do anything to avoid investigating that.
It's all the NHS's fault, you see... oh, and Harris's too... hahahaha !
Bed shortages and under-funding can't have anything to do with McGuinty's health-care monopolism!!
McGuinty's LHIN's have nothing to do with any of this!
Smitherman's Commitment To The Future Of Medicare Act has no bearing on any of this, either!!
Why - if you listen to Kim Craitor - Liberals aren't even involved in any of this - it's all Harris's fault!! What's McGuinty got to do with any of this?!
What's Jim Bradley got to do with any of this?
Nothin' - ya hear!?!!!
*
"Thank you Premier Dalton McGuinty, for making my elderly father, who fell and broke his hip to wait at the emergency room at St. Catharines General Hospital for seven hours to get an x-ray, another four hours for a doctor to come and assess him and another two days before he had an operation.
Thank you Dalton for the shortage of nurses and cutbacks, resulting in health care that is sad and pathetic. I requested that a doctor speak to us after surgery and that didn't happen. I requested to have my dad awake for surgery and to speak to the anesthesiologist, but that didn't happen.
Thank you Dalton that during my dad's two-and-a-half week stay, we haven't seen a doctor once.
Thank you Dalton that since my dad is very frail, the hospital decided to give up on him and consider him as palliative care, which he is not, but would like him out of the hospital regardless.
Thank you Dalton for wanting my dad to be discharged before he regains his strength back, because if he isn't discharged within three weeks from his admittance to this hospital, he will lose his bed at the long-term care home and would have to look and wait for a new long-term care home to be available.
Thank you Dalton for giving us no choice. Therefore, our dear and frail dad was transferred to his long-term care home. We pray to our dear Lord that He will look after him because our wonderful health-care system that you developed certainly doesn't!
Thank you Dalton, because of everything that happened, or didn't happen, my dad passed away!
Thank you Dalton. This is something for all of us "boomers" to look forward to. You might as well just shoot us, because your health-care system is a crime.
Thank you for nothing".
*
Thanks should also go to local Liberal politicians Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor, whose duplicitous Liberal government-run health-monopoly underfunded the NHS and created the LHIN disaster in Niagara.
Why isn't Liberal MPP Jim Bradley publicly commenting on these continual horror stories emanating from his local Liberal-under-funded health-monopoly, in his own riding?!
Where is Jim Bradley hiding?! Will any St.Catharines Standard reporter bother to track down Good Ole Jimmy for a comment?! hahaha - as if...
Remember how a Smug Ole Jimmy, when in Opposition, used to huff and puff with sanctimonious feigned-outrage about Harris' alleged cuts?
And then remember how in May 2004, under finance minister Greg Sorbara, McGuinty's Liberals immediately announced that they were going to CUT Harris' health-care spending - which the Liberals themselves admitted was GROWING at 8% per year?!! (yes - you read that correctly: health-care spending under Harris was growing at 8% per year - and McGuinty's Liberals were complaining about this and planning to stop that!!)
Remember, these were McGuinty's Liberals - including the Niagara comedy-duo of Jimmy'n'Kimmy, Niagara's own FLICKIN' Frick'n'Frack - who not only under-funded their despotic single-payer health monopoly, but who also CUT previously-covered health-care, and who then raised a massive new health-tax!!
McGuinty's Liberal-enforced single-payer health-care monopoly is a crime, but you can bet that the local municipal Liberals, such as Jim Diodati and Vance Badawey, will do anything to avoid investigating that.
It's all the NHS's fault, you see... oh, and Harris's too... hahahaha !
Bed shortages and under-funding can't have anything to do with McGuinty's health-care monopolism!!
McGuinty's LHIN's have nothing to do with any of this!
Smitherman's Commitment To The Future Of Medicare Act has no bearing on any of this, either!!
Why - if you listen to Kim Craitor - Liberals aren't even involved in any of this - it's all Harris's fault!! What's McGuinty got to do with any of this?!
What's Jim Bradley got to do with any of this?
Nothin' - ya hear!?!!!
*
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Jim Bradley's dreadful silence regarding his Liberal Mess at the NHS
Frank Iker wrote in "Dreading going to ER" (St.Catharines Standard, Feb.5, 2011) about the "disconcerting" 8 1/2-hour wait time at the NHS's St.Catharines ER, seeing that the provincial "benchmark" is supposed to be 4 hrs. (don't tell Michael Moore)Iker asks "What is our local Niagara Health System doing to improve our emergency health care?"
Interestingly, Iker DOES NOT ask the much more relevant questions of:
- what is our Liberal-controlled LHIN doing to improve emergency care?
and
- what is local Liberal health-care-cutter Jim Bradley doing to "improve" emergency care?!As if it is not pathetic enough that the McGuinty Liberals' role in the ER closures was completely glossed over in Grant Lafleche's previous article, (which Iker was responding to here); but Iker himself seems to miss the point as well! There was no mention of any Liberal role or responsibility in Iker's letter, either!
Wow: it's as if McGuinty's Liberals had nothin' to do with these here wait-times and ER closures and budget-cuts! hee hee!
The NHS is in deficit 'cuz... well... they're just wastrels wallowing in cash, as Smitherman once said; Liberal underfunding of the NHS had nothing to do with it!! ha ha ha ha!
(We all know [!] that it was now-fired-NHS-CEO Debbie Sevenpifer who not only personally caused the long NHS health-care wait times, but also the deficits!! Yes she did! har har har! All by herself!! Yep!! Liberals had nothing to do with any of that!! Nothing... ya hear?!)
That McGuinty's secretive Liberal government enforces a despotic health monopoly in Ontario, and that local Liberal strongmen Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor are staunch single-payer monopolists, apparently has no bearing on the issue!
When McGuinty's Liberals export patients to Buffalo for health-care that (strangely!) is unavailable in Liberal-monopoly-controlled Ontario, so what that McGuinty is sending patients to the same Buffalo hospitals which would be illegal if they were located across the river in McGuinty-stan?! What's that got to do with it, right?!! hahhaha
We must not pretend - whether purposefully, or through Bradley Syndrome - that Jim Bradley's Liberals are somehow disconnected, and are held harmless, from responsibility for their monopolist Mess at the NHS.
The Liberals must be held fully accountable for what happens in their state-controlled health-monopoly.
The Liberals fully control the LHIN's, which fully control the NHS; Bradley and Craitor are Liberals.
It's dreadful that many Ontarians fail to recognize that.
*
Friday, January 28, 2011
Long ER wait times have nothing to do with McGuinty's Liberals!
Grant Lafleche wrote in "ER back-ups causing longer wait times" (St.Catharines Standard, Jan.28, 2011):
"It was a long 8 1/2 hours for Jim Brady. He understood why his daughter was not at the top of the triage list at the St. Catharines General emergency room.
But the wait seemed like forever, and was one he had hoped to avoid if possible.
"If we know the ER is really busy at, say, 11 or 12 at night, we'll not bring her in until around 2 in the morning to try and avoid the wait," Brady said.
There was no avoiding the wait.
Brady called ahead, but the hospital would not tell him how long the wait time was. His daughter was suffering from serious nausea. She was treated during a previous hospital visit, but the doctor said to come back if the problem returned.
It did, so Brady brought his daughter in last week.
"That's when we saw the sign," he said. "It said the wait was 8 1/2 hours. I understand they are busy, and the life-threatening cases have to go first. But 8 1/2 hours seems too long under any condition."
Unfortunately, the wait times at Niagara ERs have been longer than usual for non-urgent cases, said Anne Atkinson, vice-president of patient services for the Niagara Health System.
Atkinson said the volume of patients has not increased. But what has changed is the number of patients needing cardiac care and those who need to be admitted. That's led to a shortage of beds to move patients into the hospital, meaning many of those patients end up staying in the ER.
"We've cancelled all elective surgeries for the week," she said, although emergency surgeries and cancer-related surgeries will go ahead as scheduled.
While she sympathizes with people like Brady, she said it is not possible for the NHS to post real-time wait times on the Internet or tell people when they call.
"We need staff to be taking care of patients," she said.
Besides, the wait times at the ER are often event-specific. The wait time might be relatively short, but can change quickly because of a car accident, for example.
Atkinson said the ER also does not want to discourage patients from coming in if they need emergency care because of a potentially long wait. If someone needs emergency care, she said that person needs to go to the ER.
Nevertheless, she said the NHS continues to encourage people with non-life-threatening conditions -- like broken bones, fever, cough or sprains -- to use the urgent care centres, like the one on Ontario St. in St. Catharines.
Atkinson said typically, the wait time at the urgent care is about 2.3 hours. Right now, wait times at the St. Catharines ER are longer than the provincial benchmark of four hours, she said, a problem that's exacerbated by the severity of the conditions of current patients at the hospital."
*
Well, we know how Jim Brady feels, but how does Jim Bradley feel about this???
It's funny, eh, how there isn't ANY mention at all in Ole Slant Lafleche's article about how Jim Bradley - who just happens to be the local Liberal MPP whose government runs the hospital monopoly in St.Catharines - feels about what his Liberal policies have done to health care in Ontario!!
Was Liberal MPP Jim Bradley even asked by this slanted Standardreporter/stenographer/propagandist for a comment or explanation?!
Hahahaha... better just to leave Ole Jimmy outta this!!!
{The St.Catharines Standard Bradley Bootlicker should have a warning label on their LiberalFriendly TM biased stories, assuring readers that the story has been sanitized for the reader's political protection, and carefully crafted so that no Liberals were harmed by the Standard's slanted spin!}
Predictably, Jim Bradley conveniently isn't mentioned by the St.Catharines Standard - why should he be?!!! hahahahaaaaa...
It's not like Jim Bradley or his Liberals have anything to do with controlling the monopolist health care system which Brady's daughter had to - was forced to - wait in... right?!?! In about a half an hour, Brady could have gone to Buffalo, like so many other Ontarians have had to do. Don't tell Michael Moore though.
Gawrsh, just think of how sanctimonious and giddy Ole Jimmy Bradley and the slanted local press would be if this had happened during Mike Harris' watch: both Jim Bradley and Slant Lafleche would be sleeping in front of the evil-Conservative-with-the-hidden-agenda's home, protesting health-care-cuts and trying to get an interview!! No?!
But now... so what? The Standard's slanted spin is to not mention Ole Liberal Jimmy, and not to get Ole Jimmy involved, when the optics ain't good fer Ole Jimmy!!!
Seeing that it's Jimmy's Liberals who are now in charge...
[and have been for the last seven years, in case Kim It's-All-Harris'-Fault Craitor hasn't noticed]
...then this can be easily glossed-over and excused as just a wee wittle hiccup - as Smitherman used to say, these incidents aren't problems with monopoly health-care, these are just mere 'anomalies', hearsay, anecdotes, old wive's tales..! - in other words, it's no biggie! This isn't important enough for Bradley to be involved!
So what that some lowly Ontario patient waited for 8 hours for emergency care! Big Whoop... ya think Ole Liberal Jimmy gives a shit about patients?! Jim Bradley is busy Saving The PLANET!!!
Jimmy's more interested in lickin' Tommy Douglas' dead socialist ass; and the monopoly-cheering-press is more interested in keeping Ole Jimmy as far away from these frequently disturbing incidents as possible.
We all know the song, all together now: Jim Bradley has nothing to do with this!!
McGuinty's health minister Deb Matthews several days ago was dancing with glee in Brantford, telling their local hospital how great they were - even mentioning their low DEATH-RATES. Gary Chalk "reported"...
[...more like gushed.... by the way, Standard reporters: read Chalk's story as a lesson and marvel at its pure Liberal ass-kissing pageantry. This is how monopolist propaganda should be done!! Oh-rah-rah-raahhhh-Liberals-Yippee!!]
...in the Brantford Expositor earlier this week in "Minister celebrates - and washes hands" about Matthews saying: "You are the No. 1 hospital in Canada for the lowest death rate of patients. This doesn't just happen. All your indicators, all the patient safety indicators, infection rates, are very low here," she said to applause. "Congratulations!"
Yet this same Liberal Health Minister has never bothered to explain the high patient-death-rate in Niagara!! Neither did her predecessor Liberal Health Ministers David Caplan, nor did George Smitherman!
So, Deb: did the high patient death rate "just happen" in Niagara - or was that one planned?! Did the high death rate at the NHS have anything to do with your Liberal health care cuts?
How did all that "happen" Deb?
Feel free to contact the St.Catharines Standard with your "explanation". (Cuz the Standard won't bother asking a Liberal, they're just happy ass-kissing a Liberal, any Liberal...)
Yeah: Deb Matthews "washed her hands" all right: she washed her hands of explaining to Niagarans what transpired under her Liberal government's watch in the LHIN-controlled NHS.
No-one at the St.Catharines Standard has bothered to ask their buddy, Best Boy Jimmy, about that, so why the hell would the Standard bother to involve Ole Jimmy in some two-bit story about a long wait time?!! Feh - Jimmy's got priorities such as building useless arts centres and attending election fundraisers.
Why would the local yokels need an explanation from Jim Bradley about the bed shortages, surgery cancellations and outrageous wait times, in his own riding, in his own Liberal health monopoly? What does MPP Jim Bradley have to do with any of that?!
Like Deb Matthews, Jim Bradley has also "washed his hands" of any responsibility for what is happening in Niagara's Health System.
And the local ass-kissing press conveniently keeps handing Good Ole Jimmy more soap.
*
Here is a good editorial "Crisis in the ER" (National Post. Jan.28, 2011) (Same day as LeFleche's half-story appeared)
"This just in: Going to the emergency room is hazardous to your health. Not only do you have to worry about whatever afflictions may have brought you there in the first place, but also those you could pick up while you wait -- and wait, and wait.
That is the conclusion of a landmark paper authored by researchers at Dalhousie University, recently published in the international health-care journal BMJ Quality and Safety. According to the study, prolonged waits in the ER put patients at greater risk of suffering "adverse events," ranging from surgical complications, medication errors and c. difficile infections.
Among 982 otherwise healthy elderly patients tracked by the study, the risk of these incidents climbed by 3% for every hour spent in the ER. With average wait times of 20 hours in some provinces, this represents a substantial increase in mortality, not to mention an increase in system-wide pain, suffering and economic costs to the health-care system.
Why does this happen? Researchers theorize that a combination of factors, including immobilization for long periods of time, exposure to infectious disease, a disorienting environment and sometimes incompatible treatments from multiple health-care workers (some of them on different shifts), may increase susceptibility to hospital-induced problems. In the words of author Stacy Ackroyd-Stolarz, "It might push [patients] over the tipping point."
And sometimes that point isn't just illness, but death. Over the last year, there have been several shocking cases of patients dying in Canadian emergency rooms while waiting for treatment.
In December 2010, 41-year-old Marlene Stephens died after waiting an hour and a half at the William Osler Health Centre emergency room in Toronto. According to family members, she was experiencing respiratory problems, and crying out that she couldn't breathe, but was ignored.
In October 2010, at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital in Montreal, a 64-year-old diabetic man, Andre Desjardins, died after a seven-hour wait in a wheelchair, during which he was denied a stretcher, because none were available. In February 2010, an elderly Alzheimer's patient died after a two-hour wait in the same ER.
And then there is the case of Montreal resident Mieczyslaw Figiel. In February 2010, he died in a corridor at Maisonneuve-Rosemont, after his family banged on the window of the ER triage station in a desperate attempt to get help. Nearly one year later, a coroner's report confirmed that the ER was so overcrowded that patients were not being seen until the following afternoon. In the past year, the number of 48-hour waits in Quebec's ERs increased by 15%.
Studies already have concluded that prolonged wait times for surgery can bring on secondary health problems, such as depression or dependency on pain medication. Waiting can also exacerbate the patient's underlying condition, requiring more serious intervention than if the problem had been promptly corrected. Governments promise to remedy the situation--usually by throwing more tax dollars at the problem, yet the queues only get longer. Despite constant increases in health spending, Canadians are waiting 96% longer for surgery in 2010 than they did in 1993, according to the most recent edition of an annual report on treatment wait times, Waiting Your Turn, published by the Fraser Institute think-tank.
More money is not going to cure this condition. According to Nadeem Esmail, the Fraser Institute's former director of health policy, Canadians currently underwrite the developed world's second-most-expensive universal public health system. In an article published in 2009, he notes, "Only Iceland spent more on a universal-access health insurance system than Canada as a share of GDP, while Switzerland spent as much as Canada.... Twenty-five developed nations [that] maintain universal health insurance programs spent less than we did; as much as 38% less as a percentage of GDP in the case of Japan."
Instead of propping up a state-run, monopoly-payer system, in which care is rationed from the ER to the OR, governments should allow the private sector to lift the burden from our overcrowded public hospitals. A mixed-delivery system, such as exists in Europe, where wait times are nowhere near Canadian levels, would create competition and open up more facilities and opportunities for treatment.
To those politicians who cling to an ideology of enforced "equality," we say this: How long do patients have to wait before they get choice in health care? How many have to suffer? How many more have to die?"
Maybe, one day, someone from the St.Catharines Standard will actually pull their head out of Jim 'The Monopolist Enforcer' Bradley's butt, and ask Jimmy those same questions.
I wonder what the wait-time will be before that ever happens.
*
"It was a long 8 1/2 hours for Jim Brady. He understood why his daughter was not at the top of the triage list at the St. Catharines General emergency room.
But the wait seemed like forever, and was one he had hoped to avoid if possible.
"If we know the ER is really busy at, say, 11 or 12 at night, we'll not bring her in until around 2 in the morning to try and avoid the wait," Brady said.
There was no avoiding the wait.
Brady called ahead, but the hospital would not tell him how long the wait time was. His daughter was suffering from serious nausea. She was treated during a previous hospital visit, but the doctor said to come back if the problem returned.
It did, so Brady brought his daughter in last week.
"That's when we saw the sign," he said. "It said the wait was 8 1/2 hours. I understand they are busy, and the life-threatening cases have to go first. But 8 1/2 hours seems too long under any condition."
Unfortunately, the wait times at Niagara ERs have been longer than usual for non-urgent cases, said Anne Atkinson, vice-president of patient services for the Niagara Health System.
Atkinson said the volume of patients has not increased. But what has changed is the number of patients needing cardiac care and those who need to be admitted. That's led to a shortage of beds to move patients into the hospital, meaning many of those patients end up staying in the ER.
"We've cancelled all elective surgeries for the week," she said, although emergency surgeries and cancer-related surgeries will go ahead as scheduled.
While she sympathizes with people like Brady, she said it is not possible for the NHS to post real-time wait times on the Internet or tell people when they call.
"We need staff to be taking care of patients," she said.
Besides, the wait times at the ER are often event-specific. The wait time might be relatively short, but can change quickly because of a car accident, for example.
Atkinson said the ER also does not want to discourage patients from coming in if they need emergency care because of a potentially long wait. If someone needs emergency care, she said that person needs to go to the ER.
Nevertheless, she said the NHS continues to encourage people with non-life-threatening conditions -- like broken bones, fever, cough or sprains -- to use the urgent care centres, like the one on Ontario St. in St. Catharines.
Atkinson said typically, the wait time at the urgent care is about 2.3 hours. Right now, wait times at the St. Catharines ER are longer than the provincial benchmark of four hours, she said, a problem that's exacerbated by the severity of the conditions of current patients at the hospital."
*
Well, we know how Jim Brady feels, but how does Jim Bradley feel about this???
It's funny, eh, how there isn't ANY mention at all in Ole Slant Lafleche's article about how Jim Bradley - who just happens to be the local Liberal MPP whose government runs the hospital monopoly in St.Catharines - feels about what his Liberal policies have done to health care in Ontario!!
Was Liberal MPP Jim Bradley even asked by this slanted Standard
Hahahaha... better just to leave Ole Jimmy outta this!!!
{The St.Catharines Standard Bradley Bootlicker should have a warning label on their LiberalFriendly TM biased stories, assuring readers that the story has been sanitized for the reader's political protection, and carefully crafted so that no Liberals were harmed by the Standard's slanted spin!}
Predictably, Jim Bradley conveniently isn't mentioned by the St.Catharines Standard - why should he be?!!! hahahahaaaaa...
It's not like Jim Bradley or his Liberals have anything to do with controlling the monopolist health care system which Brady's daughter had to - was forced to - wait in... right?!?! In about a half an hour, Brady could have gone to Buffalo, like so many other Ontarians have had to do. Don't tell Michael Moore though.
Gawrsh, just think of how sanctimonious and giddy Ole Jimmy Bradley and the slanted local press would be if this had happened during Mike Harris' watch: both Jim Bradley and Slant Lafleche would be sleeping in front of the evil-Conservative-with-the-hidden-agenda's home, protesting health-care-cuts and trying to get an interview!! No?!
But now... so what? The Standard's slanted spin is to not mention Ole Liberal Jimmy, and not to get Ole Jimmy involved, when the optics ain't good fer Ole Jimmy!!!
Seeing that it's Jimmy's Liberals who are now in charge...
[and have been for the last seven years, in case Kim It's-All-Harris'-Fault Craitor hasn't noticed]
...then this can be easily glossed-over and excused as just a wee wittle hiccup - as Smitherman used to say, these incidents aren't problems with monopoly health-care, these are just mere 'anomalies', hearsay, anecdotes, old wive's tales..! - in other words, it's no biggie! This isn't important enough for Bradley to be involved!
So what that some lowly Ontario patient waited for 8 hours for emergency care! Big Whoop... ya think Ole Liberal Jimmy gives a shit about patients?! Jim Bradley is busy Saving The PLANET!!!
Jimmy's more interested in lickin' Tommy Douglas' dead socialist ass; and the monopoly-cheering-press is more interested in keeping Ole Jimmy as far away from these frequently disturbing incidents as possible.
We all know the song, all together now: Jim Bradley has nothing to do with this!!
McGuinty's health minister Deb Matthews several days ago was dancing with glee in Brantford, telling their local hospital how great they were - even mentioning their low DEATH-RATES. Gary Chalk "reported"...
[...more like gushed.... by the way, Standard reporters: read Chalk's story as a lesson and marvel at its pure Liberal ass-kissing pageantry. This is how monopolist propaganda should be done!! Oh-rah-rah-raahhhh-Liberals-Yippee!!]
...in the Brantford Expositor earlier this week in "Minister celebrates - and washes hands" about Matthews saying: "You are the No. 1 hospital in Canada for the lowest death rate of patients. This doesn't just happen. All your indicators, all the patient safety indicators, infection rates, are very low here," she said to applause. "Congratulations!"
Yet this same Liberal Health Minister has never bothered to explain the high patient-death-rate in Niagara!! Neither did her predecessor Liberal Health Ministers David Caplan, nor did George Smitherman!
So, Deb: did the high patient death rate "just happen" in Niagara - or was that one planned?! Did the high death rate at the NHS have anything to do with your Liberal health care cuts?
How did all that "happen" Deb?
Feel free to contact the St.Catharines Standard with your "explanation". (Cuz the Standard won't bother asking a Liberal, they're just happy ass-kissing a Liberal, any Liberal...)
Yeah: Deb Matthews "washed her hands" all right: she washed her hands of explaining to Niagarans what transpired under her Liberal government's watch in the LHIN-controlled NHS.
No-one at the St.Catharines Standard has bothered to ask their buddy, Best Boy Jimmy, about that, so why the hell would the Standard bother to involve Ole Jimmy in some two-bit story about a long wait time?!! Feh - Jimmy's got priorities such as building useless arts centres and attending election fundraisers.
Why would the local yokels need an explanation from Jim Bradley about the bed shortages, surgery cancellations and outrageous wait times, in his own riding, in his own Liberal health monopoly? What does MPP Jim Bradley have to do with any of that?!
Like Deb Matthews, Jim Bradley has also "washed his hands" of any responsibility for what is happening in Niagara's Health System.
And the local ass-kissing press conveniently keeps handing Good Ole Jimmy more soap.
*
Here is a good editorial "Crisis in the ER" (National Post. Jan.28, 2011) (Same day as LeFleche's half-story appeared)
"This just in: Going to the emergency room is hazardous to your health. Not only do you have to worry about whatever afflictions may have brought you there in the first place, but also those you could pick up while you wait -- and wait, and wait.
That is the conclusion of a landmark paper authored by researchers at Dalhousie University, recently published in the international health-care journal BMJ Quality and Safety. According to the study, prolonged waits in the ER put patients at greater risk of suffering "adverse events," ranging from surgical complications, medication errors and c. difficile infections.
Among 982 otherwise healthy elderly patients tracked by the study, the risk of these incidents climbed by 3% for every hour spent in the ER. With average wait times of 20 hours in some provinces, this represents a substantial increase in mortality, not to mention an increase in system-wide pain, suffering and economic costs to the health-care system.
Why does this happen? Researchers theorize that a combination of factors, including immobilization for long periods of time, exposure to infectious disease, a disorienting environment and sometimes incompatible treatments from multiple health-care workers (some of them on different shifts), may increase susceptibility to hospital-induced problems. In the words of author Stacy Ackroyd-Stolarz, "It might push [patients] over the tipping point."
And sometimes that point isn't just illness, but death. Over the last year, there have been several shocking cases of patients dying in Canadian emergency rooms while waiting for treatment.
In December 2010, 41-year-old Marlene Stephens died after waiting an hour and a half at the William Osler Health Centre emergency room in Toronto. According to family members, she was experiencing respiratory problems, and crying out that she couldn't breathe, but was ignored.
In October 2010, at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital in Montreal, a 64-year-old diabetic man, Andre Desjardins, died after a seven-hour wait in a wheelchair, during which he was denied a stretcher, because none were available. In February 2010, an elderly Alzheimer's patient died after a two-hour wait in the same ER.
And then there is the case of Montreal resident Mieczyslaw Figiel. In February 2010, he died in a corridor at Maisonneuve-Rosemont, after his family banged on the window of the ER triage station in a desperate attempt to get help. Nearly one year later, a coroner's report confirmed that the ER was so overcrowded that patients were not being seen until the following afternoon. In the past year, the number of 48-hour waits in Quebec's ERs increased by 15%.
Studies already have concluded that prolonged wait times for surgery can bring on secondary health problems, such as depression or dependency on pain medication. Waiting can also exacerbate the patient's underlying condition, requiring more serious intervention than if the problem had been promptly corrected. Governments promise to remedy the situation--usually by throwing more tax dollars at the problem, yet the queues only get longer. Despite constant increases in health spending, Canadians are waiting 96% longer for surgery in 2010 than they did in 1993, according to the most recent edition of an annual report on treatment wait times, Waiting Your Turn, published by the Fraser Institute think-tank.
More money is not going to cure this condition. According to Nadeem Esmail, the Fraser Institute's former director of health policy, Canadians currently underwrite the developed world's second-most-expensive universal public health system. In an article published in 2009, he notes, "Only Iceland spent more on a universal-access health insurance system than Canada as a share of GDP, while Switzerland spent as much as Canada.... Twenty-five developed nations [that] maintain universal health insurance programs spent less than we did; as much as 38% less as a percentage of GDP in the case of Japan."
Instead of propping up a state-run, monopoly-payer system, in which care is rationed from the ER to the OR, governments should allow the private sector to lift the burden from our overcrowded public hospitals. A mixed-delivery system, such as exists in Europe, where wait times are nowhere near Canadian levels, would create competition and open up more facilities and opportunities for treatment.
To those politicians who cling to an ideology of enforced "equality," we say this: How long do patients have to wait before they get choice in health care? How many have to suffer? How many more have to die?"
Maybe, one day, someone from the St.Catharines Standard will actually pull their head out of Jim 'The Monopolist Enforcer' Bradley's butt, and ask Jimmy those same questions.
I wonder what the wait-time will be before that ever happens.
*
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