Healthcare In Canada –Unnecessary Disaster

I certainly don't want to admit defeat to the corporations, but the strategy for public health care must be mindful of the lengths to which they will go to promote their interests.

Always assume there are politicians in each major party sympathetic to their agenda.

Some of these corporations, especially the big insurers, are economically larger than every province in Canada save perhaps Ontario and Alberta. In the U.S. states have problems going up against these insurers and the financial weight and power they can amass.

Ontario, remember the leaked Harris/Eves "we have to manufacture a crisis" meeting. There was a deliberate campaign to starve the public system, and this campaign will continue. Years ago, the demographic changes that are precipitating today's crises were easily predicted and just as easily ignored, one can only assume by design.

The idea is Canada is a minority of public health care enthusiasts, a minority of private health care enthusiasts, and a majority of easily influenced pragmatists. These are the people with whom the argument "let's not dwell on the past and who did what, and let's not waste our time on emotional arguments. The fact is, the system is broken now, and there is no alternative" resonates. You hear them on the 6:00 "news" interviews: "Sure I prefer the public system, but I've got to do what's best for my family".

Any risk/failure/liability in the health care system, until it is completely privatised, will be blamed on the pro-public-health groups and their preventing the transition from being "fast enough". Just like Enron and the Bush administration tried to suggest the California degreg fiasco was because they didn't deregulate far or fast enough.

I agree that it doesn't look good, but those same corporations were bigger (relatively speaking) back when saskatchewan started on the road to public insurance. Now we actually have a vast majority of canadians who prefer our system, but every media and corporation keeps trying to tell us that we are divided. However, it does depend on Canadians, will we sink lower and lower, or will something turn us around? We live in a country with none of the democratic tools of the states, which means when we sink low, we'll sink very low. Most people aren't stupid, most cities haven't got enough specialists or GP's, privatizing it simply means even less access. If we do get private health care I think we should form an organization to use canada's class action lawsuit laws and keep suing every doctor til their premiums are sky high and people can't afford to see them.

Corporations are accountable in Canada, government in Canada is not accountable - it matters not a whit how long you wait for health care or how much you suffer, you cannot do a damn thing about it.

Timely, efficient, cost effective, competent private health care in Canada is long overdue. Our entrenched governors in this country have milked the public health care goat in order to score cheap political points long enough, Canadians deserve better than the '25th best health care system in the world'.

Who are corporations accountable to? Sorry you are off the mark on this one. What Canadians deserve is a fully funded healthcare system that puts people's health first. What we are getting is big pharma b.s. telling us what we need, and what we can have, because they deem it in our best interest. They'll tell you that you need prescriptions drugs to cure just about everything from a boil on your arse to a teary mood swing, then the drug you took caused a side effect which another drug will cure, and on and on. They'll also tell you that a natural cure could be harmful. Wake up people, the only ones who are going to benefit from this private deal is the private people involved! When your child is really sick and you don't have the insurance, maybe you can do a telethon and hope some celebrity sings for you, so some corporation can feel good about funding your kid's treatment. Is that what we want? What happens to the kid's whose parents, don't know a celebrity?

All of these situations have been created not by accident. If you don't have a fire, you don't need the firetruck, no crisis... no big saving solution! Greed is driving this sickness!

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If I stand for my country today...will my country be here to stand for me tomorrow?

Once again it begins inside with a few of the greedy, or the ones with high-cost-technology stars in their eyes and grants for new wings for their hospitals will create the problem and then spread it into the lobby offices and then into the HOC like Bush spreads freedom. If this government and the provinces were serious about public health care we would be number one in the world. There is no financial reason why we shouldn't be.

You really start to recognize how these corporate bacteria work. It's a festering thorn that just keeps poking and poking and poking relentless in their zeal for mission accomplished!

If I was goint to be a one platform politician it would definitely be for the corporate death penalty to hell with pot.

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"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." Friedrich Nietzsche

I do agree with the above post in one respect: a Canadian citizen should *never* be LEGALLY PREVENTED from acquiring timely access to otherwise available doctor-ordered care because 1) the insurer refuses to pay; or 2) the provider is unable to provide. Public or otherwise.

This suggests a possible reform to the public system designed to ensure supply, which is the real issue here (in addition to promoting public health). Keep the single-payer system, but allow private service providers to offer competitive services, with price controls--they must meet or improve on the internal price charged under the public system. This should not be hard, right?--the private lobby is always crowing about how they would be more efficient and thus cheaper. Private providers would be able to operate in an environment driven by true doctor-patient demand, and liquid financing would be available via private credit markets, while the expense would still be insured by the public system, which would also be a lender-of-last-resort.

The single-insurer public system would still actually pay the bill, as now, but it would amount to coverage of medical expense claims filed at tax time (plus carrying costs such as interest on borrowing). When you file your tax return, all these claims plus carrying cost get submitted, and your tax owing/rebate is reduced by that amount less any dedictible amounts. If you are not creditworthy your tax refund may bear a lien (liens) from private creditors who financed medical expenses, and CCRA would distribute the refund directly to the lien holders.

Entitlement to public health care thus would be defined through the tax system. Governments would not be able to promise "more" or "less" money for health care, throttling access via supply-side controls. They would instead be restricted to initiatives to reduce demand and value of claims. Illegitimate use of medical claims could be treated under laws governing tax evasion with equally serious consequence, and with investigation/resolution consolidated under the CCRA auditing system.

No more P3s please. They are not cost efficient, which is why they won't submit any cost benefit analysis studies. In fact they cost more and deliver less. Private corporations are accountable to their shareholders and that is all! Right now there is legislation waiting in the wings to be passed which will take away the rights of private citizens to sue corporations for any reason! They call it frivolous lawsuits and they define what is frivolous. <p>The real crisis in health care in this and every other country around the world is that the doctors are not trying to prevent illness! They are treating the illness once it manifests itself! If the healthcare system in Canada payed for mega vitamin therapy for all Canadians there would be less and less illness to treat, doctors would be reduced to setting broken bones and other injury types of treatment. Instead of cancer patients getting intravenous drips full of poisons (the theory is that we have more good cells than bad cells and therefore if they are all being killed at the same rate you will eventually end up with only good cells left) and calling those who survive this torture <b>cured</b> if they live five years after, we should be giving them mega vitamin therapy. Vitamin C given in an intravenous drip at a rate of <b>100+ grams</b> per day would do more to cure cancer than all the other standard treatments (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation) combined have ever done. Combine the vitamin C with the other vitamins and minerals and other dietary supplements and most modern illnesses would vanish. Some would remain, like the damage done by vaccines (they have put mercury in the vaccines and the vaccines are often contaminated with all sorts of other pestilences), or the damage done by food additives ( both direct (colors, preservatives, etc) and indirect (herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, mutant DNA from genetically modified plants and animals, etc) and food processing techniques (ie. hydrogenated molecules, removal of essential fatty acids etc). <p>The justice system never tires of telling us that ignorance of the law is no excuse. When we finally wrest the right to govern ourselves from the usurpers who now have it, they should all be placed on trial for criminal negligence, man slaughter and a host of other crimes that they have willfully, in the name of their <b>Profit</b>, committed. It is the capitalist religion that harbors the majority of the worlds terrorists, IMHO.

I'll be clearer: as long as the federal government is legally required to reimburse all valid medical claims (plus cost-to-carry), and as long as government is legally required to be the lender-of-last-resort in financing medical expenses, who cares if the actual service provider is public or private? Caveat: private providers must not refuse service to a customer who can pay the nominal CCRA expense claim amount for that service, and must operate on a first-come-first-served basis.

My idea is to take care of the accounting at tax time--ie: NO actuarial tyranny or politics-driven waste, either from the private sector OR the public sector. No denial-of-care based on edicts from bean counters, period. The finance-and-tax-claim approach means medical services are demand-driven while still being publicly financed. Absuses and frauds are covered under existing tax law, as is the mode of recovery of false claims. Medical expenses go on your tax return as earned income (the value of the service provided is a taxable benefit), with the claim forming an offsetting deductable, making it a "zero" overall. Though the "zero" seems silly, the point of doing it is to pass all this through the tax system and the demand-side, rather than having the supply-side control that causes so many problems (*AND* will continue to do so if we simply privatize like the U.S.).

It also means a private insurer only stands to gain if they can figure out a way to purchase services (say, on behalf of a group) at a discount from the expense-claim amount (eg: by investing in options or other forward instruments). This essentially caps profits, encourages the private insurer to take on customers likely to make claims, and prohibits price gouging, since no consumer in their right mind will pay more for a service via a private provider than the amount they would pay via the publicly-available expense claim--they can always elect to use the public system.

Use of a tandem private system simply means the private insurer gets to file the expense (and report income from the benefit provided), rather than the original claimant. They're free to make money on whatever finanical arbitrage they can muster in the middle, so the bean counters still get a fun game to play, but can't hurt anybody while playing it.