Can someone explain to me why the Conservatives have decided to address the backlog of immigrants waiting to come to this country instead of the backlog of Canadians waiting for health care procedures?

When I read this press release from the National Citizens Coalition I had to check my calendar to make sure it wasn’t April Fool’s Day.

The National Citizens Coalition (NCC) today responded to the Liberal party’s majority victory in the Ontario election by setting out clear priorities for Dalton McGuinty and the Ontario government to follow over the next four years.

“Access to healthcare should be the top priority of the Ontario government over the next four years,” said NCC president Peter Coleman. “The first promise Premier McGuinty needs to keep is the promise to hire more nurses and doctors in this province. There are over 1 million Ontario residents who do not have a family physician, and the first step to improving access to Ontario’s healthcare system is to hire the number of medical professionals necessary to meet the needs of this ever growing province.”

Wow! If the NCC, an organization that came into existence to fight against public healthcare in this country, is throwing in the towel it’ll be a huge blow to the rightwing blowhards.

The NDP has added pharmacare to the CBC’s Great Canadian Wish List.

As I travel around the country, ordinary Canadians are pulling me aside and telling me that costs for prescription medication are taking over their lives.

I have heard from Randee, a law student who’s paying over $4000 a year to treat his diabetes. I’ve also heard from Martha who works full-time without benefits and is forced to pay more than $300 a month for her medication. And, I’ve received email from Fred in Omemee, Mary in Port Williams, Lance in Lashburn and countless others who are struggling to get the drugs they need.

Today, one in five Canadians are without adequate drug coverage and 3.5 million are without any coverage at all. The reality is - access to prescription drugs these days depends more on where you live and how much money you have, than it does on need.

Tommy Douglas’ vision brought us universal medicare. Help us take the next step and support my wish for affordable prescription drugs for every Canadian.

Join the facebook group.

It should come as no surprise that after Harper cut funding for medical marijuana research the conservative directed bureacrats in Health Canada would start interfering with those who use it.

Health Canada has been contacting doctors who prescribe medical marijuana for their government-approved patients, advising them to keep the dosages low.

Some users say that not only violates doctor-patient confidentiality, it’s also wrong for bureaucrats to make judgments about the medical needs of people they’ve never seen.

Adams, a licensed user who’s been smoking seven grams of marijuana daily, recently applied to Health Canada to increase the dose to 10 grams, with his doctor’s authorization. Official approval from Ottawa is needed so that Adam can legally grow the appropriate number of marijuana plants, set by Health Canada at five plants for each daily gram.

But a program official in Ottawa challenged Adams’ doctor in a telephone call, saying most patients need no more than five grams. Adams, who has severe arthritis and degenerative disc disease, later received a new licence for just five grams a day.

This is yet another example of how the Harper Conservatives use the levers of power to underhandedly undermine laws that they’re rigid ideology doesn’t approve of.

Via Canadian Journalist is a five year study by the Simon Fraser University on the media’s coverage of healthcare issues.

Canadian newspapers consistently miss the real stories about health issues and dwell on covering the more simplistic and sensational stories. That is the conclusion of a new five-year study conducted by six researchers connected to Simon Fraser University.

The researchers note that, rather than analyzing the correlation between socio-economic factors and health problems, newspapers focus on health news of the day, such as long patient waitlists and rising health care costs. These attention-grabbing health care problems, say the researchers, are often the result of governments’ inability to address the correlation between socio-economic factors and health.

It’s not the least bit surprising that our rightwing media has concentrated on waitlists and rising healthcare costs in their reporting since these have been the cudgels used by conservatives to attack and undermine our public healthcare system for more than a decade. It’s also not surprising that this coverage has nearly evaporated over the past 18 months. After all, continued coverage would only serve to point out how PMS has abandoned his fifth priority; healthcare.

I can’t say I’m in a rush to embrace this. How about you?

An Australian couple who won a trip to Western Canada plan to remortgage their home to pay for their baby’s premature birth in Calgary.

The Gallaghers says Alberta’s health-care system worked well for them, but they are now on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills and will have to remortgage their home in Australia.

This is the world that the opponents of Canada’s publicly funded healthcare system want us to live in. A world in which you could be forced to remortgage your home just to have a baby.

Free market healthcare.

Calgary’s only private birthing centre will likely close by the end of the year unless the province or the health region starts funding it directly, says the Arbour Birth Centre’s director.

“The overhead costs for running the birth centre are just rising much faster than the income for the birth centre. It’s running at a deficit,” said director and midwife Diane Rach.

According to the article, the cost of having a baby delivered in a private facility such as this runs about $500 and the cost of midwife care about $3,000. So according to the religious doctrine of private healthcare fundamentalists, shouldn’t this private healthcare facility just up its prices for birthin’ babies?

From The Tyee.

Premier Gordon Campbell launched B.C.’s Health Care Conversation by suggesting that public involvement in health care is no longer sustainable at current levels of funding — and that we should consider a larger role for private insurers and private providers. But according to B.C.’s finance ministry, public health expenditures increased from 6.1 per cent in 1984 to 6.9 per cent in 2005. This is hardly evidence of a public spending crisis.

If any thing, it is private, not public spending that is out of control. Under the current government, private spending in B.C. has risen sharply, from $871.40 per person in 2000 to an estimated $1312 in 2005, an increase of more than 50 per cent. Public spending, on the other hand, increased from $2433 per person in 2000 to an estimated $3,157 in 2005, an increase of less than 30 per cent (current dollars).

Private healthcare costs are rising nearly twice as fast as public healthcare costs. So why would anyone want more of the former?

Isn’t it about time we put an end to judicialcorporate activism.

I like to drink iced tea and I go through about a case of 24 cans a week. So yesterday I went out and bought ten cases since it was on sale. I put one case in the kitchen and 9 in the garage. At this rate my garage will be filled from wall to wall and floor to ceiling with iced tea in less than a year. Or so the Fraser Drunkstitute would have you believe.

Let’s take a walk though their press release:

Provincial government spending on health care will consume more than half of total revenue from all sources by the year 2020 and all revenue by 2050 in six out of 10 provinces if current trends continue, according to a study released today by The Fraser Institute.

And by 2100 it will consume, 200% of revenues. Health care spending, as a result of a few federal-provincial deals to “save” health care, has increased in recent years. The Fraser takes this as its starting point then projects in linear fashion what would happen if such a trend continued.

The unsustainable spending meme has had numerous stakes driven through its heart yet it continues to thrive in the minds of those who want to destroy our healthcare system in order to enrich corporate Canada; whose gross incompetence when it comes to protecting public interests should be enough to scare every rational person away from wanting them to hold our health in their hands.

A common complaint by conservatives whenever the topic of more funding for our healthcare system crops up is that the money will just end up going toward pay raises for healthcare providers. Yeah, not so much.

How health care dollars are spent has changed significantly over the last three decades. On average, the share of total health expenditures paid to hospitals and physicians declined, while spending on prescription drugs has greatly increased. Still, expenditures for hospitals and physicians take 43% of the amount that is directed to health care.

In 1975, a much larger share went to hospitals (45%) than in 2005 (30%). Payments to physicians in 1975 (15%) accounted for the second largest share of expenditures; this declined to the third largest area of spending (13%) by 2005. In contrast, drug therapies, particularly those prescribed by physicians, accounted for 9% of total health expenditure in 1975. This had nearly doubled by 2005, and at almost 18% had become the second largest share of total health expenditure.

It’s clear the bulk of new funding over the past 30 years has been eaten up by drug costs.

Which is why we need a National Pharmacare Program in this country.

Following up on Paladiea’s post on how our healthcare system is being pillaged by corporate robber baron’s in order to further entitle the rich, is this bit of info on the progress Ontario is making to fix the problem for all Ontarians.

Patients are getting cataract surgery 61 days faster than before and hip replacements 63 days sooner. Waits for knee replacements have shrunk by 52 days and people are receiving MRIs 28 days sooner.

So how is Ontario doing this? More privatization? Nope. Magic? Nope. By funding the system. What a novel concept, eh.

This is the reality of free market healthcare.

Emergency medical care in the United States is on the verge of collapse, with the nation’s declining number of emergency rooms dangerously overcrowded and often unable to provide the expertise needed to treat seriously ill people in a safe and efficient manner.

That’s the grim conclusion of three reports released yesterday by the Institute of Medicine, the product of an extensive two-year look at emergency care.

Long waits for treatment are epidemic, the reports said, with ambulances sometimes idling for hours to unload patients. Once in the ER, patients sometimes wait up to two days to be admitted to a hospital bed.

And the reason for this problem is nothing more than a lack of profitability.

From 1993 to 2003, the U.S. population grew by 12 percent but emergency room visits grew by 27 percent, from 90 million to 114 million. In that same period, however, 425 emergency departments closed, along with about 700 hospitals and nearly 200,000 beds.

ERs are notorious money losers. About 14 percent of ER patients are uninsured. About 16 percent are covered by Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for the poor, and 21 percent by Medicare, the program for the elderly. More than half of hospitals report losing money on emergency care of both groups of government-insured patients.

All of this has led to extreme bottlenecks in ERs, manifested by delays in every step of treatment, according to the reports.

This is the inherent flaw in free market healthcare. Profit margins, not social responsibility are what guide it and if Canada begins to allow more free market healthcare within the system it will be the less profitable rural areas that suffer the most.

Now Magazine has a good article on the Cons’ stealth efforts to undermine public healthcare despite their pledge to protect and strengthen it.

So today I finally got around to booking my first dental appointment since my move to London. It was somewhat overdue as my last checkup was in July of last year. I called a dentist that was recommended to me and was told I could have an appointment six weeks from now. Six weeks? That’s right, six weeks.

I took the appointment but after I got off the phone I grabbed the phonebook and started calling a few dentists at random. Nearly all of them had a waiting time of 5-7 weeks with a few exceptions being 4 weeks for a checkup.

How can this be? How can there be an average 5-7 week waiting list for a dental checkup when our dentalcare system works under the magic of the free market that according to conservatives provides services on demand?

So much for big pharma’s plaintive pleas that they have to charge outrageous prices for their drugs because of the high cost of research.

Governments, not the pharmaceutical industry, pay to create most new drugs, according to a report that calls for more spending to fight diseases in developing countries.

“Governments and the public provide 84.2 per cent of the world’s basic research budget for health, industry contributes 12 per cent and private non-profit sources such as the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations 3.8 per cent,” said the report’s author, Dr. Donald Light, a professor of comparative health-care systems at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Of course, it’s not likely you’ll see conservatives calling for an end to this type of corporate welfare. After all, big pharma probably funds half the rightwing think tanks in North America so they wouldn’t want to bite the hand that feeds them.

Friday’s Star has a story about a Barrie general practitioner who was taking on new clients but rejecting patients over the age of 55. Predictably some conservatives are painting this as a failure of our public healthcare system. In reality however, this is a perfect example of how privatized healthcare fails Canadians.

For a more detailed look at this case you need to go back a week to an article in the Barrie Advance and the case of Gail Foy who was also turned down by this Barrie doctor because she was over the age of 55. Foy contacted the College of Physicians and Surgeons to lodge a complaint and this was part of their response to her.

Her question regarding a possible violation of the Ontario Human Rights Code met with the response, “it’s up to the doctor to set his own guidelines for patient choice. Remember, this is a business. They are running a business. They have to make money like everyone else. I was told if I wanted to complain, I needed to put it in writing. Otherwise, contact the Human Rights Commission.”

This is the essence of private medicine in a nutshell. Public medicine has only one objective. It’s to provide healthcare to all Canadians. Private medicine on the other hand is a business and the primary objective of any business is to make money.

So why would this doctor turn down older patients? For one simple reason. Business is about mass production/servicing. The more a business produces or the more clients it services in a day, the more money it makes. Younger patients, being typically much healthier, consume less of the doctor’s time per visit. A routine check up for a 65 year old for example, is far more time consuming since there are more tests involved than their are for a 30 year old. This means that a doctor can service more younger patients in a day than older patients which means they can bill the government a higher number of fees. More patients = more fees = more money; the formula upon which business operates.

So in order to “make money like everyone else”, private sector doctors are increasingly becoming more selective about who they will take on as clients. This makes the service they render less about providing healthcare to Canadians and more about pushing the biggest number of clients through their door in the least amount of time. This has the effect of causing profit driven, privatized healthcare to follow the same formula the banking sector uses when determining the qualifications for a loan; the more you need it, the less likely you are to qualify for it.

As for Dr. Derek Nesdoly, the physician at the heart of this little controversy. It should come as no surprise that he’s a conservative, who most likely contrived to stir up this hornet’s nest in order to set off yet another round of bashing our public healthcare system by the mindless pundits on the right.

While the one face of Stephen Harper is busy chastising imaginary enemies for wanting to cut and run from the fight in Afghanistan…

“There will be some who want to cut and run, but cutting and running is not my way and it’s not the Canadian way,” he said, to a round of applause.

“We don’t make a commitment and then run away at the first sign of trouble. We don’t and we will not, as long as I’m leading this country.”

…the other face is busy cutting and running from the fight over national public healthcare.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper appears to be backing away from a confrontation with Alberta over its Third Way health proposals.

Good old Stephen Harper. He sure knows how to fight the battles Canadians care the least about.

I don’t know how anybody else thinks, but my way of thinking is that you leave your personal beliefs at home and just do the job you were hired to do or you pack up your tools and fuck off to the unemployment office.

A New Brunswick man has been told he has to butt out before his doctor will perform the surgery he needs to get back on his feet.

Robert Randall, 42, a fisherman from southeastern New Brunswick, said Thursday he has smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for more than 30 years. Randall said his doctor has told him he will not perform further surgery on his knee and leg unless he quits smoking for two months prior to an operation and four months following.

Welcome to the big chair, Stephen, now here’s a slap in the face from reality. First up, Le Revue Gauche points to a couple of articles on the reality Harper is going to face trying to implement his tax cuts, such as this one from the Toronto Star.

But there’s a problem with lowering the GST rate right away.

The first income tax reductions announced by the Liberals have already passed into law. The Canada Revenue Agency has sent out millions of tax forms, incorporating the changes for the 2005 tax year.

“Can Harper change the GST rate midway through 2006?” Poschmann asks. “It’s unlikely. He may propose looking at it in 2007 instead.”

The delay makes sense. With the Liberals’ income tax measures in place for the first year, the Conservatives may not have the revenue needed to pay for their GST promise.

However, there’s danger ahead. The provinces may want to grab some of that GST money for their own purposes.

The second dose of reality Harper’s new government is already facing is a showdown with Klein over healthcare.

During the election Stephen Harper made no bones about it he defended the Canada Health Act. Well now he will get his chance. Becuase his good friend from Calgary, Ralph Klein has drawn the line in the sand and has shoved Harper with a dare ya challenge. Klein intends to violate the Canada Health Act with the hope that the newly elected Conservative goverment will not do anything. Caught in a quandry Mr. Harper is. Does he defend provincial government autonomy to do as it pleases or does he defend the Canada Health Act. This will be a test of his Prime Ministership. Gee it doesn’t get any better than this, challenged by Klein within 72 hours of being elected. Now if it had been a Liberal government, well Klein would have never had dared. He has waited since 1999 for a sympathetic Conservative government in Ottawa.

And the final bit of reality Harper now must face comes from Tilting At Windmills who points out that the new Conservative government is rethinking its position on subsidies for the manufacturing sector that continues to get squeezed by the rising dollar and high commodity prices. Ian hits the nail on the head regarding the dilemma plaguing Harper.

It’s always amusing when hard economic and political reality bumps up against ideology.

It’ll be amusing too, watching the conservative supporters as they begin flip flopping their opinions in order to justify why subsidies are now good, the tax cuts they absolutely had to have must now wait and why saving healthcare from Klein’s attempts to destroy it needs to be done even if it goes against their drive to decentralize the federal government and hand more power to the provinces.

Welcome to the reality of being in charge, rubes. You’ll find that slinging feces and blind ideology don’t solve problems.