OTTAWA – Most Canadians don’t think the quality of health care in their province is likely to improve, a new survey suggests, despite new federal health accords with several provinces designed to quell the health-care crisis unfolding across Canada. The poll by Leger comes nearly a year after the federal government offered a $196-billion health accord to the provinces to increase health funding and address a growing shortage of health-care workers. Doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals have warned for years about a dangerous lack of health workers, leading to understaffed emergency rooms and a lack of primary care that […]
A year after a pandemic that saw belligerent and violent science-deniers push experts out of the medical field and we’re still recovering. This should have been expected, but we obviously thought better of our less community-minded citizens. In another forum I’d wonder why they weren’t tased far, far more.
What I know from living under the most mercenary healthcare system I can find - America - and under our own, is what we don’t want to become. And the same people riling the science-deniers into a frenzy of pique over the most miniscule of discomfort are going to now suggest that our healthcare is irreparably damaged and that their mercenary friends assure them the only way forward is backward into an American system. I urge those leaders to relocate their family members under that system for a while before they pitch it further.
In the recent past we removed monthly premiums based on income, instead of tuning it better, which in the past heavily offset operating costs. We defunded capital for land, facilities and equipment. We privatised as much as humanly possible, and beyond, in some shell game of expense hiding after destroying consolidation gains. We’ve got a system that is less fair, less fluid, rife with cost duplication, forces units to compete for artificially-scarce talent and goods, and publicizes the costs while privatizing profits. Running crucial public services as closed-book private for-profit enterprises is so American I’m sure the CEOs are imports.
Reinstate what was working, grow funding for staff and equipment through fair taxation and keep the funds where required through single-payer sourcing, mandated open-book policies and non-profit management styles. Fund medical training through 100% cost deferment while a student is studying at an open-books, non-profit university, with a sweetheart cost- and interest-deferment while they reside and work in Canada. Fund this brutally on the backs of the mercenary colleges for another de-enshittification effort.
While I continue to be paid well for my work, I think we need more taxation to programmes preventing things we’re already complaining about. Tax and Spend is anathemic to self-centered conservatives but it’s the engine of happy, stable societies. And it’s key in us rebuilding our healthcare. We cannot support a healthcare system that competes with itself and forces that costs onto everyone and disproportionately onto groups that require more care to get back into a tax-paying status.