Destroying Medicare:From Paul Martin To Gordon Campbell

Caught between the Bay Street dragons (of which he is one himself) and a determined electorate, Paul Martin fiddles, hides money surpluses from Canadians, sends up trial balloons suggesting privatizations, fails to punish breaches of the health care terms, and protests too much about his dedication to the present system.

Paul Martin has plenty of money to restore funding which he, as Finance Minister, cut -- by using surpluses in general revenue, or a small portion of the gigantic Employment Insurance store of funds, and/or by restoring and using the powers of the Bank of Canada. Instead, Martin is pretending to dither, which means he is staging planned delays in order to bring present health care operation under further attack.

Les Vertesi writes in his book Broken Promises that there is a huge wall between advocates of a (parallel??) private system (to "improve" health care, he says) and the universal health care purists who want no hint of a two-tier system. The reason for the huge wall, Vertesi says, is abject FEAR, prepared by brainwashing. Let's look at his argument, an argument put forward by an embarrassing anti-leftist and advocate for a two-tier system. But first.

But, first, lets admit Les Vertesi is the brother-in-law of B.C.'s far-Right premier, Gordon Campbell. Let's admit, too, that Gordon Campbell is doing everything he can to destroy Canada's universal Medicare system, that he is savaging hospital employees, and mainlining in multi-national, slash-and-burn private corporations wherever he can. Let's admit that his Minister of Health appointed Les Vertesi (without public announcement) as one of three B.C. government appointees to the new Health Council of Canada.

Some of the Health Council's tasks are to "compare waiting lists across the country, to monitor provincial efforts at reforming primary care, to track progress in expanding coverage for home care and catastrophic drug treatment, and to assess new technologies." ("Health care", John Ibbitson, Globe and Mail, Jan 26 04 A15).

In appointing Vertesi, Campbell has planted a Medicare destroyer on the Health Council of Canada. Not only is Vertesi's appointment embarrassing nepotism, it is a statement that Campbell has every intention of working at the highest levels to destroy the Canadian Medicare system.

That is a symbol of why there is a huge wall between the two sides. The wall is not there because Canadians have been brainwashed to live in fear of privatized medicine. The wall is there because too many of the advocates of private medicine, alas, are naked proponents of health care services dominated by wealth, exclusion, greed, elitism, and the desire to thrive on the exploitation of impoverished employees.

Les Vertesi is a strange mixture. He is a highly intelligent and widely experienced doctor. He has seen the Canadian Medicare system at work at almost every level. He sets out real and valuable criticisms, for instance, of the phony Emergency Room debate, pointing out that the failure to provide sufficient beds in hospitals crowds patients onto Emergency Room pallets and stretchers. There is no Emergency Room problem, he argues, but a hospital problem. He points out, convincingly and humanely, that Emergency Rooms are not foolishly plugged with irresponsible patients. He explains simply how and why patients-in-fear quite reasonably "go to Emergency".

He makes, moreover, a strong and valid argument that the numbers of hospitals should be increased and funded on a results-based program. He argues hospitals do not track costs in anything like an efficient manner and so cannot reliably report results. Finally, he insists on evaluating the worth of both doctors and nurses and explaining the follies that have placed them in short supply.

But he himself demonstrates the reason for the huge wall. He presents privatized medicine in a totally misleading way. And he does so because he is in love with the fundamentally false view of free enterprise capitalism that is propagandized by its greediest proponents. He frequently cites, for instance, good U.S. health methods, but he says nothing about the 45 million uninsured in that country, or about even the moderately insured who can be financially ruined by illness.

Nowhere does he refer to the methods some private lab and other technical operators in Canada sometimes use purposefully to drain health care funds in order to profit themselves and to weaken the system. Not a word on that. The private sphere, he argues, would provide "active competition" (p. 295) for the public system, and would reveal the cleansing nature and the practical constructiveness arrived at by "the power of consumer choice".

Doubtless the beauties of "consumer choice" explain why inadequate and meager service is provided to the uninsured in the U.S.A. Those people have, no doubt, freely chosen lousy healthcare, all 45 million of them. (During a visit to Seattle a few years ago, I saw the newspapers full of a story about university doctors defrauding the meager government program to assist the uninsured.) Because he absolutely refuses to look at privatized health care with any kind of critical eye, Vertesi's argument for it is mere, empty "puffing".

Pursuing the uselessly over-simplified mantra (p.207) that "human beings have [in health care] the right to make their own choices", he writes of capitalist economics as "normal economics". (p. 206) If that is not enough, he clinches the fact that he uses a warped and exceedingly dangerous ideological basis for his whole argument when he lays out for the reader the socialist view of society. It is, according to Vertesi, a view "in which an elite few determine what is in the best interests of society and -- through force or political power -- impose their will on those they deem less able or willing to take control." (p. 173)

That view is certainly what ill-educated, tunnel-visioned Rightests say is the view of socialists about socialist society. But the rest of the world calls those Rightests "nut cases", or as B.C. Nurses Union president Debra McPherson said, Vertesi's ideas are "almost wacko". (Don Harrsion, "Outspoken doctor wins key post," Vancouver Province, Fed 11, 04 A24c).

Vertesi's book tells us more than we want to know about the state of the Canadian health care battle. He depicts the state of health care in an interesting and sometimes powerfully informative way. But he is a symbol of the battle for the Canadian system -- and he doesn't seem to know it. Consider. The government of a major Canadian Province is sending to the National Health Council a Right Wing Ideologue (brother-in-law of the far-Right premier) who seriously and frequently discusses Canadian health care as directly related to Communism, Soviet methods, and Leninist ideas, and who campaigns for a two-tiered system in his book published last year.

He presents, moreover, a wholly false picture of privatized medicine, its effect on the population, and the "free enterprise" system which produces it.

Canadians need telling over and over that the Liberal governments in Canada -- federally and provincially -- are dangerous guardians of the Canadian health care system. The appointment of Les Vertesi to the National Health Council is simply a Gordon Campbell up-front statement of a position lurking very near the surface of much Liberal rhetoric about the need to support the present system. The Canadian Alliance hiding under the name "Conservative" , on the other hand, is quite simply an enemy of the Canadian health care system. Period. That leaves -- like it or not -- the NDP.

And, Oh yes! Of course. The people.