CKNW Editorial
for June 27, 2001

There is something very curious in this land of ours. If I want to get a lawyer, I hire one and pay the agreed upon fee. If I want a notary ... same thing. If I want my car fixed, I can shop around and find the deal that best suits me. If I want my teeth fixed I go to a dentist and upon my agreeing to pay his fee, the work will be done. But if I want to see a doctor and get an operation done, I must do it according to government diktat. Now I'm quite at liberty as a free Canadian, to take my bad knee to Bellingham or Seattle and have it fixed ... but I'm not at liberty to take it to a Canadian surgeon unless I get into a year long lineup first. Now, of course, I'm exempt from that lineup if I play for the Vancouver Canucks but that's another story.

What I'm driving at here is that we Canadians, with Medicare, have abandoned a pretty basic right - to seek professional advice and help in our own country where and when we want it and pay for it ... though we're quite at liberty to take our problems and our money 10 miles south and exercise that liberty.

It is said, of course, that the only way publicly financed health care can work is if we all surrender our right to choose ... that Canadian society has agreed to eliminate this basic right in order to have universal health care paid for out of the public purse.

Two points - we don't deny this basic right in all cases, eye surgery being one very good example. How is it that I forgo my liberty when it comes to fixing my knee but don't if it's my eyes that need fixing?

It is argued, of course, that we must all give up out liberty to make private arrangements for health care or the public system will fail. I have some philosophical problems with that argument but let's deal with the practical implications. The next health budget in BC will be in the range of 10 billion dollars, ten times what it was 20 years ago. And what do we have to show for it?

Emergency rooms in turmoil and unable to handle the traffic. A nurses strike that will result in an increase of almost ¼ in nurses wages - I'm not denying the justice of this, only stating the financial burden. We have a doctors dispute in general and a serious dispute over rural health services. We will see a substantial increase in other health workers wages. We have
woefully inadequate long term care facilities so that a totally unacceptable number of acute care beds are occupied by long term care patients. We have surgical wait lists - except for hockey players and other preferred citizens - that are hopelessly long and which present a real danger to health and indeed life. We have virtually no preventive heath initiatives – indeed preventive health practitioners are discriminated against by the system. We have mental health patients wandering the streets homeless. Our mental health services to young people are appalling and the government can't even decide what ministry to put them in. Our equipment is lacking or so obsolete that we can't even give it away to third world countries.

This is the publicly financed health system our politicians get se dewy-eyed about and for which we gave up our civil liberty to buy medical services if we wish.

No one, least of all I - would wish to have a system like the United States where some 50 million citizens are uninsured. (Actually it is not the unemployed poor and elderly badly hit under that so-called system for they are entitled to Medicare and Medicaid - it is the working poor and lower middle class who have some means or some savings that are wiped out with a medical disaster.) But I think all British Columbians ... all Canadians are entitled to look to the authorities in Ottawa and Victoria and say "look here! This publicly funded, exclusionary health system you boast about is nowhere near what it's cracked up to be. In fact it's bankrupt and as the baby boomers age, will become catastrophic. We say that we must find a fair and equitable way to get private capital injected into the system ... you say no, we are committed to medicare". We respond "then tell us how you are going to clean up the system and make it work ... make it be responsive to the needs of Canadians."

It's time that we all took the blinders off and looked at the system for what it is and worked towards solution, however philosophically repugnant they may be to some politicians and their supporters.