Vancouver Province
for March 28, 2002

We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time on this one folks because, you see, the doctors are right yet they must be dealt with by the government in forceful fashion.

They’re right because the government made them right. When they referred the doctors’ dispute to arbitration they didn’t just pick an arbitrator from the jelly bean jar but selected a man who had been chief justice of both superior courts, a man held in universal high esteem. They trumpeted the wisdom of their choice from the treetops – as well they might.

Alas, Mr. Allan McEachern disappointed them by finding for the doctors big time. Using an unavailable excuse, namely that the good judge failed to take into account the governments ability to pay, the Campbellites denounced the findings, legislated their own version of what was proper and took away the doctors right to sue. Why was the defence of affordability not available? Because the governments always have the ability to pay, however awkward their finances might be. What the government was really saying was that they had a big deficit to deal with and they were going to start with the docs– quite a different thing.

To go back on your word and then take away the aggrieved party’s right to sue while, at the same time, bad mouthing your own arbitrator is naughty. Very naughty indeed. It demonstrates far too early evidence of unlimited arrogance at the top.

The second part of this saga is that the doctors must be dealt with. They like to portray themselves as the very essence of small business practicing free enterprise. They’re no such thing. They don’t compete on price, they have much of their working area paid for at public expense and they have no accounts receivable. Show me a small business person in the real world who can say that.

But, they say, we are in the great world wide market and we’ll all leave and go where we’re loved if you don’t pay our demands.

Well, we’re not in that market at all. There are indeed medical positions available in the United Sates where the money is double, US$30,000 is thrown into your retirement package and all your kids get a free education at Harvard. But we don’t compete in this market because we can’t afford to.

The time has come to put doctors on salary. While some doctors would like that – many threaten to pull up stakes and move, in a flock, to Houston. Well, we’ve heard that song before.

In 1945 when Aneuran Bevan brought in the National Health Service in the UK the doctors threatened to emigrate, en masse. There are lots of doctors in the UK and always have been. When the NDP brought Medicare into Saskatchewan the province was to be, in no time flat, devoid of doctors. It wasn’t.

Will we lose the super brains? Will the best of our trained professionals move south? Perhaps. But they’re doing that anyway. The key point is this – a publicly financed medical scheme can’t possible promise its customers treatment by a doctor who heads his class.

We cannot afford to pay Rolls-Royce prices – we can’t expect to get Rolls-Royce doctors.

It’s just that simple.