CKNW Editorial
for November 6, 2000

When is the election going to start? So far we’ve learned that Jean Chretien’s object is to paint the Alliance as the force of doom who have some sort of corrupted view of the country because it doesn’t believe that it’s contrary to the order of things to throw the Liberals out. We have Stockwell Day getting the crowds in Ontario only to deliver flat, uninspired speeches.

Joe Clark, so hopelessly out of date, highlights his speeches by calling Mr Day’s Party the Reform/Alliance. Mercifully, after November 27 he’ll be back in private life. And there is Alexa McDonough who is doing a bang-up job trying to breath life back into a corpse.

The health issue is as phony as a three dollar bill. Mr Day is, according to all his tormentors, in favour of a two-tiered system that will make the rich well at the poor’s expense. That this kind of aura should surround a campaign shows how immature our debate on this subject has become.

The health care system in this country is in trouble – just ask Sharon Singh if you don’t believe it. We already have two tiers. If you need surgery – not just laser, surgery period – to your eyes you have the option of paying about $1600 per eye and getting it done in three weeks or stay with the public system and wait 6-8 months. There is a tier that operates on and rehabilitates injured workers that you can’t get on. Hockey players and football players don’t get into your line-ups and if you think they’re a special case ask yourself why, then, the company you work for can’t get special coverage for you. If you have money, there’s a clinic in Bellingham just waiting for you. If you’re not well off, you may get to that Bellingham clinic anyway as the BC system gets too overloaded to look after you.

I suppose the hardest bit to take in this debate is the federal government’s pious claim to be the defender of medicare. Were it not for the downloading onto the provincial governments and the offloading of health costs much of our current difficulties wouldn’t be with us. And to watch the likes of Hedy Fry lecturing the province of BC that they must file a report card with the feds showing how they use the funds that the feds stole from them in the first place is more than a bit galling. It’s part, of course, of what Peter C Newman in a recent article calls the Liberal insolence, where they continually put down provincial governments.

The system is not in chaos but damned near. And it’s not a question of just throwing more money at it – in BC we already spend 40% of our budget on healthcare. The debate ought not to be about two tiered systems although that makes such a nice slogan for the likes of Chretien whose government did so much to make some private intervention in the system inevitable. It ought to be about how we re-structure the system.

I nearly fainted the other day when I heard Mike Harcourt on Bill Good’s show remind us that the whole idea of medicare was to prevent people from having catastrophes because of enormous costs of life threatening illness or injury. It was not designed for many of the surgeries we now call elective. Which brings me to the basic point which I must say I’ve been hammering at for two decades. We cannot begin to publicly finance a system until we have laid down some rules as to what is and what isn’t covered. What we have now is a system where politicians rouse the rabble every time a service is done privately yet haven’t the jam to set priorities.

In order to get a decent, publicly financed health system we must define the health care then look at models all over the world to see how it’s best financed. We must, at the same time cut back on the rhetoric and make some decisions. Simply chanting the time worn mantra about the five principles of medicare while whispering Tommy Douglas’s name in hushed tones will just leave us where we are – chucking money into a system where line-ups get longer and there are more and more Sharon Singhs.