Posted by
lge on Monday, September 28, 2009 9:09:09 PM
Kim Murphy, of the
L.A. Times, has written an article, "In Canada, a move toward a private healthcare option" (September 27, 2009). In my opinion, the money quote is this:
[T]he B.C. Health Coalition . . . is involved in the lawsuit to
determine whether the Canadian Constitution guarantees citizens the
right to choose their own care.
That's what we are deciding as well -- are we free to choose our doctor, and if he doesn't meet out expectations, to pack up and go elsewhere? Or are we to be bound and chained to a system wherein the government tells us, "This is your doctor, like it or lump it" ? Some people are natural-born slaves and sheep, but I like having the freedom to choose.
More passages from the article:
. . . A universal, government-funded health system [in Canada] is only beginning to flirt with private-sector medicine.
. . . Hoping to capitalize on patients who might otherwise go to the U.S. for speedier care, a network of technically illegal private clinics and surgical centers has sprung up in British Columbia, echoing a trend in Quebec. In October, the courts will be asked to decide whether the budding system should be sanctioned.
Speakeasy medical centers! Bootleg doctoring -- what a concept! It's sort of like the old U.S.S.R., where people were forbidden to go into private enterprise for themselves, because of the bizarre, artificial ideology that underlay Communist rule. Supporters of government monopolization of medical care likewise have a bizarre, twisted ideology, consisting of hostility to things like private enterprise, doctors making "profits" (fees), insurance companies making profits, and rich people getting better care than poor people.
More than 70 private health providers in British Columbia now schedule simple surgeries and tests such as MRIs with waits as short as a week or two, compared with the months it takes for a public surgical suite to become available for nonessential operations.
The private system works! There's a "clinical test" carried on in real life.
"What we have in Canada is access to a government, state-mandated wait list," said Brian Day, a former Canadian Medical Assistant director who runs a private surgical center in Vancouver. "You cannot force a citizen in a free and democratic society to simply wait for healthcare, and outlaw their ability to extricate themselves from a wait list."
In other words, there's a difference between getting actual medical treatment, and getting "in the system." There's also a difference (in our own country) between having insurance of some kind, and getting care.
The question remains, Are we a free people, or do we want to subject ourselves to a regime of "Mother, may I?" wherein we go, hat in hand, to the federal government and beg some medical care?
Yet the move into privatized care threatens to make the delays -- already long from the perennial shortage of doctors and rationing of facilities -- even longer, public healthcare advocates say. There will be fewer skilled healthcare workers in government hospitals as doctors and nurses are lured into better-paying private jobs, they say.
"What it means is that people who have no money, who are chronically ill, disabled, who require medical attention frequently, are going to suffer dramatically," said Leslie Dickout of the B.C. Health Coalition, which is involved in the lawsuit to
determine whether the Canadian Constitution guarantees citizens the
right to choose their own care.
They're using any excuse they can think of to stifle freedom in the medical field. In all such schemes, people have to be tied like serfs to the system. That's the same reasoning our own spoiled-brat liberals use for stifling private schools, charter schools, etc -- such institutions "cherry-pick" the best students, leaving the rest to stew in a government-sponsored slough of despond. Liberals are always ready to force
other people to sacrifice for their socialistic notions of "social justice."
"There's so much money to be made by the insurance industry," she said. "If this [legal] case succeeds, what we would have is a system of U.S.-style healthcare -- along with a public system that is decimated."
That's their bête noire -- they have a
mortal dread that some company, somewhere, is going to make a profit.