CKNW Editorial
for January 7, 2000

There is no instant solution to the healthcare crisis but that doesn't mean that a crisis need not be met with crisis management.

There are loads of problems - only yesterday I received an email from a former Long Term Care administrator who, I'm sure rightly, identifies fat in the Long term Program. And I as a former Health Minister of all people admit that there's no quick fix.

But there is something that can be done and it requires a huge amount of courage. I know that this government doesn't have this sort of courage and I wonder where Gordon Campbell stands.

The part of the problem that's visible and is on the evening news in stark terms is the Emergency Room ... ERs across Canada are saying the same thing. There's no room. We simply don't have the beds. But it's not enough to simply identify that as the problem for the very good reason that it isn't the problem - it is the symptom. It's a very painful symptom, I grant you, but none the less a symptom for that.

The problem is a chain reaction. There are no acute care beds for emergency patients because they are all occupied. They are all occupied because a hell of a lot of them contain long term care patients who need less than acute care. Those patients are there because there are insufficient long term care facilities in the province, especially those that deliver care but not at the acute care level.

Now let me switch focus for a moment but I'll join up with Long Term Care again in a moment. The ever increasing demands of the health care system can no longer be entirely met out of the public purse. I have no doubt that the HEU is right to say that the system needs modernizing ... but all the modernizing in the world isn't going to make the system work on present revenues. We must have a huge injection of private capital.

It's at this point that the left collapses in a united swoon. Mair wants us to have an American style system ... with big health corporations ripping off the public. Well, Mair doesn't want that at all. This answer the left parrots whenever the suggestion of private capital is raised is preventing us from having a rational discussion and ironically may lead to the very thing they fear because by the time we get around to dealing with the issue, an American style system may be the only alternative.

We must face some very hard facts. The cost of health delivery is increasing dramatically and by the time the baby boomers get to my age, it will be completely out of control. We will be the equivalent of a third world country. New and expensive techniques, people living longer and a big wave of Baby Boomers will combine to create a horrific mess.

Now is the time we must look very seriously not at whether we seek private money but how we do it so as not to compromise universal care.

Now back to Long Term Care. If the government had the guts it could, within two years, go a long way towards partially solving the problem. What it must do is this - put an absolute freeze on capital spending in all departments. Sorry folks, there will be no new roads for two years ... no new ferries ... no new SkyTrains. No new Schools either - the sacrifices must be made right across the board. This is a wartime like emergency and must be treated as such. All of this because for two years, with the help of private capital, we're going to build long term care facilities. Not just a few hundred units but enough so that within two years we're not only ready for the problems of 2002 but for 2015 and later.

This is tough medicine but there is only one other alternative, namely that we have the roads, ferries and Sky Trains - and, yes the schools - but we accept appalling scenes on an hourly basis in the acute care part of our health system.

There is no money tree ... there are no targets to shoot at. Everybody is taxed to the hilt. We must have a government that has the guts to grasp this nettle and a public prepared to make serious sacrifices in the short term so that we not only have a healthcare system that survives but one that can handle the enormous new burdens it must very soon bear.