Licia Corbella- “Canada has one healthcare administrator for every 1,415 citizens. Germany: one healthcare administrator for every 15,545.”
The amount of money spent on public health care is essentially the same in each country. Yet international studies show that Germany has more physicians, more specialists, and many more acute care and psychiatric beds. It far surpasses Canada in its inventory of diagnostic equipment (CT, MRI, and PET scanners) and just one per cent of its population waits more than four weeks to see a specialist, compared to 17 per cent in Canada.
Its well past time to start culling the herd.
Blackie just held a press conference for his loyal, drooling media. He explained how wonderful he is for providing more babysitting money. Gave the usual vague drivel on whether he will provide more money for health care. Last question was asking the moron on how evil Ontario is for not signing up for the babysitting money yet.
Bureaucrats looking after bureaucrats. Empire building at it’s finest.
Sask probably has one administrated per 100 people. All socialists as well
The Saskatchewan Health Authority loves its socialism. It prefers the “National” variety over the “communist” variety.
If the administrators would all be fired there would be more than enough funds to make an excellent health care system (even if still publicly run, much better if services could be provided privately). It is not just their salaries that cost us, in fact their salaries are the cheap part, it is their general incompetence and ability to waste money that really costs.
So fire them or at least remove their authority/ability to spend money or influence how it is spent.
One look at any of the Sunshine lists in Any Provincial Health care gulag is enough to make ya vomit. AHS Head gets some 625,000 Annually with some 40 talking heads all above 250k…doing what you ask..??
Fucking Canadians over on a daily basis….as 10’s of thousands wait for surgery due to a goddamned Cold..!!
Cull you say..!!
Damned Straight
The situation is endemic in all government bureaucracies. It is a secret/hidden cancer that many of the producers in society aren’t even aware of.
A former colleague of mine got a long term contract with a government organization that I hadnt even known existed. It’s obscure, but everyone is dependent on it to function. Provincial level.
Because he’s a contractor, his wages are hidden from the organization’s payroll figures.
His boss in this place had been hired because she ticked all the boxes of gender, ethnic exotica, immigration status, age, etc. So she had no idea how to do her “job”. She wasn’t so clueless, however, that she didn’t realize she needed a staff to “support” her do her job. So she hired my acquaintance.
Now this guy is smart and experienced, but much of the work demands he gets from this place is “find out how to do such and such”. My friend typically wouldn’t have a clue about random “such and such” stuff, so he just does a google search, and prints out the results. Typically.
He told me he’s never made 300+ grand a year doing something so trivial anyone with two index fingers to type couldn’t do just as easily. His boss adores him, and he’s universally recognized there as a genius.
The riches have been dropping from the abundant trees in government land for decades now. You just have to be part of the borg.
The Kanadian health care system is designed to make health managers and union brass extremely wealthy.
Kanada was created to preserve a form of government.
So naturally all the bureaucracy is judged successful based on head count and budget.
Service?
Their solution for that is create another level of bureaucracy (ie: the LIN’s) then another to administer those.
Bingo!
When the usual idiots start howling about how public/private health care will kill us all ask them why it hasn’t killed everybody in the 30 or so countries that use it.
30 or so countries? Pfft. Everyone knows that there are only 2 countries on the whole planet.
When someone says “we should fix health care”, the response is always “so you want the American system?”
“When the usual idiots start howling about how public/private health care will kill us all ask them why it hasn’t killed everybody in the 30 or so countries that use it.”
Absolutely. Every one of the European countries that ranks ahead of Canada for health care efficiency uses a mixture of public and private care…EVERY ONE. Yet somehow the Liberals can never see (let alone acknowledge) this. My personal feeling is that they have been using this as a wedge issue against the Conservatives for so long (as Kathryn points out below, the tired old “so, you want the American system?”) that they can’t figure out how to do a 180 on it. The Conservatives, long terrified of even raising the issue, would no doubt pull a total reversal of their own and start accusing the Liberals of promoting an “American style system” just to be able to beat the Liberals over the head with their own tactic. Either way, nothing will ever change until (and unless) we elect some politicians with the integrity and courage to make it happen. Won’t be any of the current crop.
It took us two years to discuss this. We’ve all known about it for decades.
It’s why the politicians pick on doctors and nurses unions, they can’t think how to tackle the real problem.
Culling the herd? Why that is exactly what the last two years have been about and what the next few years will be about.
Yes indeed, let’s cull the herd of those nasty, infectious and ungrateful citizens. We are the administrators that brought you the very expensive machines that go PING!!! that we can’t afford to staff because we need more administrators and their fancy furniture.
Yes, Monty Python nailed it decades ago. It is a shame that such obvious logic is so hard to come by in gov’t and gov’t bureaucracy.
A Globe & Mail columnist has also recently pointed out how poorly Canada’s Soviet-style health care system performs compared to other wealthy countries (yes, the Globe & Mail published it, but the article is not written by their regular health care columnist who has never once mentioned this awkward truth):
“Unfortunately, whenever discussion of substantial health care reform is raised in this country, Canadians are spooked into believing that changes to the system would de facto result in an American-style health care system where patients would go bankrupt to afford chemo treatments. Our proximity to the U.S. makes that concern appear more acute, even though the U.S. is an outlier among developed nations when it comes to its health care model, and the introduction of private health care alternatives would render Canada more like Germany or France, where patients generally wait less time for surgeries and have more access to hospital beds and specialist care.”
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-when-do-we-admit-canadas-health-care-system-just-isnt-working/
Currently, there are 980 comments shown under this article in the Globe. All of the “most respected” comments support the idea of changing the Canadian health care model to a European-style model where the private sector is allowed to compete with the public sector in the provision of all health care services. This is the “most respected” comment. It is from “Libertarian 1”:
“Excellent Article. We need to reform our system with the understanding that we “are not the best” and in fact are one of the worst most inefficient systems in the world. Canadians need to understand that we have work to do in reforming a bad system. And that parallel private systems operate alongside publicly funded single payer systems in Europe with people not bankrupting themselves to pay for care. The European models have much greater capacity than ours does and it costs less with better outcomes and shorter waitlists.”
And this is the second “most respected” comment, from “john I gee”:
“Canada’s health care system, with it’s bloated, unanswerable bureaucracies whose unwillingness to learn, is a perfect example of failure.
But if only the feds would transfer 100s more billions to them….they could create more bureaucracies of inefficiencies and succeed even more with their failed systems.
Two tiered systems can’t come soon enough.”
Interesting, especially considering the Grope & Flail’s (or Mop & Pail’s, take your pick) target demographic.
DB: You are right. That one article by one columnist (Robyn Urback, a token, sometime “conservative” columnist at the G & M) does not reflect the paper’s consistent policy position that Canada’s health care system does not need fundamental reform. It simply needs more taxpayer money. The following is from a G & M editorial ( Jan. 17/22). It starts with the false bogeyman of some Canadians wanting to switch to a U.S. – style health care model:
“There’s a line of thought developing in Canada that says that all the economic pain and physical distancing COVID-19 has put us through, all the lockdowns and restrictions of the past two years, could have been avoided if we’d only had America’s health care system.”
And these are the changes the Globe proposes, which amount to spending a lot more taxpayer money:
“Now, thanks to the pandemic, it’s more clear than ever that Canada’s health care system needs improvement.
That probably involves spending more money on things such as additional hospital beds – Canada has fewer per capita than most developed countries. We probably need more doctors. We certainly need more nurses.
We also need to rethink how the system is run, to encourage innovation and efficiencies. That doesn’t mean privatization, or extra billing, or moving services outside of medicare. But it may mean figuring out how to get market incentives into our public, universal insurance system.”
“It may mean” ? “figuring out to get market incentives into our … system”? Ya, right. Figuring out the impossible. Of course! We need a new bureaucracy to be created to study and write reports on “how to get market incentives into our…system” because that, regrettably, is the Canadian way.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-no-the-pandemic-does-not-prove-that-our-health-care-system-should-be/
Thx for the quotes, OMJ. I won’t give them a click.
Well, they got one right & one partially right: Our health care system does need improvement and we have far fewer ICU beds per capita than other populations. After that their analysis falls apart.
Yeppers, create another level of bureaucracy to figger out why all the existing levels of bureaucracy aren’t working. Brilliant. And self-perpetuating.
It’s not a healthcare system, it’s a Russian communist style rationed system of access to a government run bureaucracy. The left can’t function without an harem or gaggle of Assistants and aides.
When every patient is seen as an expense…
For every producer in Canada there are now at least two non-producers, or takers as some call them. The country will not last much longer.
YES, I would welcome an American style medical system.
The American style health care system is only scary to people who don’t work. The taxes I pay for the health care portion easily eclipse what I would pay for private medical insurance in the states. (Yes I checked).
Having said that, the insurance/health care system in the states is far from perfect.
Looking forward to the cleanup in the healthcare aisle in canada. (Ha…just kidding, we’re past the point of fixing it.)
“The American style health care system is only scary to people who don’t work. The taxes I pay for the health care portion easily eclipse what I would pay for private medical insurance in the states. (Yes I checked). ”
Don’t you just love hearing the Liberal and NDP supporters smugly proclaim that our Canadian health care system is “free”?
It would be interesting to know who are those administrators.
Are they graduates of socialist studies, women’s studies, racist studies and other such nonsense?
What a waste of billions of $ for nothing.
Germany? Our health care system is an embarrassment even by post-Soviet standards.
My firm lost at least two top-notch employees from the former Soviet Union because of Medicare (at least=just the ones I know about). Both fell ill and all the Canadian doctors did for them is run the same three tests and send the bill to the province. To see a doctor who was serious about getting them better, they had to go home.
As I recall, one of them had planned to send for his parents after getting his permanent residence visa.
Back home, once their son had seen a local doctor and had recovered enough to make it worth having a serious discussion with him, the parents sat him down and told him point-blank that they were not going to Canada, if Canadian medical care was so awful. He was coming home. And that’s what he did.
Interesting.
Jordan Pererson, you will recall, had to go to Russia to be saved.
Jordan Pererson, you will recall, had to go to Russia to be saved.
Moreover, according to Peterson’s story, he got himself hooked on dangerous psychotropics that were prescribed, (and I’ll assume repeatedly), by a Canadian physician in Canada. Apparently after his wife was the victim of a flawed and erroneous diagnosis of the most extreme kind by another Canadian physician.
A story so damnatory a private institution would suffer appropriately severe repercussions. There is never accountability in government bureaucracy. In fact, it exists to eliminate the possibility of accountability.
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawas-sunshine-list-of-100000-earners-grew-by-214-in-2020
Duncan Stewart, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute CEO and VP research The Ottawa Hospital, $540,771.10 (plus $10,170.51 in taxable benefits)
Cameron Love, The Ottawa Hospital president and CEO, $474,912.90 (plus $15,316.94 in taxable benefits)
Bernard Leduc, Montfort Hospital CEO, $434,515.31, (plus $3,561.36 in taxable benefits)
Andrew Falconer, Queensway Carleton Hospital president and CEO, $373,452.09 (plus $1,846.89 in taxable benefits)
Alex Munter, CHEO president and CEO, $329,999.80 (plus $1,345.20 in taxable benefits)
This is from last March.
Think one of them is going to hire less minions?
Think one of them lost a dime of salary from Wuhan restrictions.
Think any live in a tenement?
They are universally wealthy because the state’s #1 health care goal is the enrichment of state bureaucrats.
The funny/not funny thing about the above salaries is this. If I remove one of those employees from his office for a period of four weeks and no-one replaces them the organization will still continue to function. Now if I take a caretaker/cleaning staff out of the equation for four weeks and do not replace them, what happens, the floors don’t get cleaned, the garbage and refuse doesn’t get picked up, and the executive desks don’t get dusted every night. Just think about that for a while.
We have a relative in Alberta who is in the plus 100,000 wage group. She is now “working” from home. Spends a lot of her time napping and going to movies. How would we ever get along without someone like that?
I worked in academic bureaucracy — briefly. I began to think that the particular institution that employed me was an elaborate Chinese mainland money laundering operation, just like BC government casinos. Anyway, I used to look at my mid-100 grand salaried “colleagues” and think to myself that, but for their paycheque from the academic funny farm, they’d be crowding the already overcrowded sidewalks of granville and robson living in a cardboard box. Seriously.
ps — I should also state that these people were just your run of the mill do-nothing functionaries; they were NOT senior or executive level bureaucrats. Which means there were hundreds of them everywhere.
As mentioned a while back Milton Friedman did a famous study on the economics of hospitals. He discovered that output (productivity) bore an inverse relationship to inputs (money spent).
My wife’s doctor was the best we had ever had. Then she started spending part of her time in administration. The best managers are not experts in the industry that they manage. They are experts at managing. They can ignore your industry technobabble because they don’t know or care, then they can ask the hard questions.
No….they aren’t “experts at managing”….they are expert bureaucrats. Big difference.
And it’s not just the health care system. ALL government departments at ALL levels (municipal, provincial and federal) are operating on models that are over 100 years old. The first duty of government bureaucracies is to GROW the bureaucracy. They are inefficient (and designed to be so) and the bureaucracy goes immediately into defence mode when it detects any kind of threat. That is why governments need to swing the ax so hard and fast that the bureaucracy immune system can’t respond in time. You start at the Deputy Minister level and by the end of the week you are down to the manager level….then you rebuild with half the worthless bureaucrats you had when you started
half, you don’t need half. From my experience, you only need 10% at most of the administrators/bureaucrats in the system. The hard part is to find the right 10%.
A first effort would be to understand that we don’t need 3/4 of the gov’ts depts we have, just clean them out and forget about it.
Second, would be to hire from private industry, then ensure they don’t have a useless degree, check what their parents do/did for a living and ensure that they understand they can’t hire anyone else, they are a public servant, and they will never get paid more than X /year no matter how much they complain and if they complain they are fired.
These 2 points alone would make a dramatic difference. Ahh, to dream…..
” The hard part is to find the right 10%. “
Wouldn’t waste the time trying to sift the wheat from the chaff. Fire the lot of ’em & start accepting job applications from people not previously employed by gov’t anywhere. Get rid of that entitlement mentality right off the get-go.
I am a little surprised that she was allowed to publish this.
Imagine if we had an ICU bed instead of a health care administrator for every 1415 citizens! Come to think of it, the cost per year must be about the same…
Nobody is more greedy and selfish than a socialist.
They have no problem robbing the system to fill their own pockets.
No part of their side of the health care ‘debate’ in Canada is driven by anything but their own self interest and greed.
The worse off the patients are the more they can howl for increased funding.
For them the shitty results are a feature, not a bug.
They have no problem robbing the system to fill their own pockets.
hey, lay off the government bureaucrats. They’re tax-payers too. I know because they always claim to be. Sometimes even by commenters to this blog.
Stan, yes. So few people understand that politicians and bureaucrats pursue self interest above everything else. It is an immutable human trait. There is a category called Public Choice Economics that deals with this critically important issue.
Get rid of the Unions.
There should be no such thing as public service unions.
Boy, ain’t that the truth?
Socialism is the political system of bureaucrats.
Imagine having to justify this “healthcare” system without socialism.
It’s funny how many Lib-friendly Canadians say they want no part of the US health care system, but then turn around and take advantage of US developed pharmaceuticals, surgical techniques, medical technology- all products of the US healthcare system- and, of course, Covid vaccines.
But, then, your basic Laurentian Liberal voter is neither very smart or very honest.
That insanity they share over their relationships with their American Cousins cannot be ignored.
Total derangement.
Aping the American Citizen in every way shape and form,these Canadian then shriek in hostility at any passerby who mistakes them for what they copy.
Out West we do not seem to share the illness,possibly because our cousins really are Americans and they provide some of the best tools and equipment we buy
Greatest Grossest Health Care Resource consuming charnel House in the world..
We are number one.
“Free Health Care” has ensured you will never receive,shall pay forever and have been stripped of all your ancient rights to ensure that you pay more to receive ever less.
Now that is a most impressive bureau.
And Canadians line up.
When my wife started in health care there was a provincial health Ministry and self administered hospitals. Since then there have been multiple levels of bureaucracy injected between those that dole out the funds and those who care for people. None of the additional money supports actual health care providers. This is a fact that the defenders of Canada’s system never acknowledge.
Yet international studies show that Germany has more physicians, more specialists, and many more acute care and psychiatric beds.
Not even the seemingly bottomless pit of the BoC’s debt monetization scam could provide enough funding for the number of psychiatric beds this country needs. The whole place is an unofficial psych ward, from sea to shining sea…
How many patients can you treat on desks? When nurses get tired of nursing they become managers. Because they know nothing about managing they hire staff to do their work and slowly build their little kingdoms. When the kingdom becomes large enough they become directors. Its a pandemic of silly staff doing silly jobs. Been there, saw it first hand, got the hell out.