We Canadians celebrate Tommy Douglas Day each and every day of the year. To realize the significance of Tommy Douglas Day, simply check the hospital emergency units, line-ups at doctor's
offices (for those fortunate enough to actually have a doctor)and the wait times for needed life-saving surgery. Check almost anything to do with our morally bankrupt medical care system.

As has been said so many times before ..... "Tommy Douglas - - not dead enough".

Is Tommy Douglas Day before or after National Eugenics Celebration Day ?

"...the wait times for needed life-saving surgery."

It seems a bit tasteless to bring that up during breast cancer awareness month. How do we get this act repealed?

""...the wait times for needed life-saving surgery."

It seems a bit tasteless to bring that up during breast cancer awareness month. How do we get this act repealed?

Posted by: K Stricker at October 21, 2008 12:14 PM "

No,Mr Stricker. What is tasteless is one of my best friends dying from breast cancer,in her prime,waiting for surgery.All most one year,ONE YEAR,to the day she was diagnosed,we buried her. Yeah. I may be a little close to the problem,but in my mind,that is murder by government.And all she needed was a masectomey(sp?),on one breast only.And to think we are only a four hour drive from one of the best medical systems in the world,the US.
As Bcer said....Douglas,not quite dead enough!
Maybe we should have tried to get her on the same plane as Belinda,who believes SO MUCH in Tommy's medical system,she went to the States for her breast surgery. Tasteless does not even come close to describing it!

Justthinkin: Oops, I see what I did there. What I meant to say was "It seems a bit tasteless to honour that during breast cancer awareness month."

Next election, I am voting Libertarian in Saskatoon Rosetown Biggar. I was just contemplating what painting the entire province Tory blue has done for us. Quebec gets more cabinet seats, Quebec gets more money, we get promises to ban exports of bitumen. There seems to be no upside to actually backing the ruling party.

Ahhhhhhh. Thanks K. You are right. How can you honour(not you personally),how can anyone honour what is not honourable? Is there any way to find out where the "Friends of Medicare" get their medical needs from?

Spreading the glory around commie style = legislated mandatory accolades!

Failed pinkos are funny.

I'm sure that IN THEORY, Tommy Douglas had a passable system in mind.
That being said, the system is so broken it'd be laughable if it werent killing people. It is killing people though, and because of that, the system should be torn down and replaced with something that actually WORKS. If we dont change the system, we dont do anything to help people who really are at the hardest points in their lives.

They forgot to mention that he invented the internet and saved the environment.....ooppss..wrong socialist. Not being terribly religious I get the Saints mixed up all the time.

Syncro

I'm not sure the socialists are to blame, now that the Cons have had 3 years to get around to addressing health care.

Look at how much they focused on it in the election.

Or maybe the Cons are idiologically pure as to recognize that government can't cure all social ills through bureaucracies - so therefore aren't doing anything.

Except indexing health spending to inflation, plus 5%.

but....that was what the socialists and societal engineers were doing before the Cons got in.

Yet we have a relatively poor health care system given per capita spending, a lack of physicians, and queues that shorten only marginally.

But the socialists said that private medicine would crush medicare. Yet the Cons are fighting any private provision of health care. Except for those who can jump in a private jet and get it.

But a conservative position would be to advocate for increased competition and transparency of a price signal to rationalize operations and eliminate waste within a massive bureacracy.

And yet the Cons kept health care below the radar for the election, and have repeatedly said that the status quo is and will remain the status quo.

Now I am really confused...

You wiseacres weren't around when medicare was introduced in Saskatchewan. I was a kid in southwestern Saskatchewan when experimental Health Region Number One was established. It was cheap ($5.00/person/year with a ceiling for family coverage, if I remember right, plus an increase of 1 cent in the provincial sales tax). Don't flame me if I have the numbers wrong - I was only 14 years old at the time.

Much of the administration was done voluntarily by local boards, country doctors and municipal reeves. People who had never before gone to doctors unless they were near death were actually able to get care, and doctors who were used to being paid a few dollars in instalments, if at all, actually started to receive decent incomes. Believe me, in rural Saskatchewan, in those days, Douglas was God.

The rest of the province had hospitalization but not medicare. That came 16 years later, in 1962.

Things didn't start to go to hell until the feds became involved, the provincial bureaucracies exploded, and local hospital boards were eliminated - often along with their hospitals, with consolidation .

The current disaster can be attributed to two things - bureaucratic constipation and the idiotic decision, almost 20 years ago, to practice a little "professional birth control" by drastically limiting admissions to medical schools.

If you're pissed with the situation, direct your stream towards the $250,000/yr CEOs (most of whom are political hacks) who infest the system Canada-wide and the legions of nose-picking paper shufflers taking up hospital space that should be occupied by nurses. Form pressure groups. Be active. Be political. Or, you can just whine in the blogesphere and impugn the name of a dead (enough) man who, like all the rest of us, had frailties but who devoted his life to public service.

well said Zog.

But at the bottom of it, bureacracies and government interfering with the population will inevitably lead to the same outcomes: citizens dying because of their (in)actions.

I wonder what the great one would think of sex change operations being funded by canadians. Maybe the act should go back to what was covered in the original plan.

Seldom do I see any account of the fact that the vast majority of Canadian citizens were opposed to socialized medicine in 1962. The doctors strike against it is never mentioned either. It was imposed on us from above.

Since then, my mother was used as an experimental guinnea pig for drug testing and my father was killed in hospital with an overdose of morphine when he went in for tests (that showed he was fine).

Personally I believe the whole scheme is nothing more than a setup for a money making kickback racket from the drug companies. The government offered up Canadian citizens as lab rats for the drug companies and they make money from it. Look at the tainted blood trail - Connought Labs - and the Liberals via Paul Martin as an example.

How many "new drugs" have been used on us - at great expense - only to be withdrawn at a later date because the number of deaths caused could not be hidden any longer. The doctors and nurses who draw attention to these cases are treated like criminals by the College of Physicans and Surgeons.

Where is all the money going? Not to the betterment of our health. Canada spends an obscene amount of money on this scam.

Socialized medicine looks after our health in the same way the Human Rights Commission looks after our rights.

But, but, according to the CBC, he was voted "The Greatest Canadian Of All Time".

But, but, according to the CBC, he was voted "The Greatest Canadian Of All Time".

Some sicknesses socialized medicine cannot fix.
Maybe it's time for another of ol' Tommy's ideas: Eugenics.

Zog.....maybe you should read irene's comment@1:37. IN THEORY. In theory,according to Einstein,shit can time warp. Guess what,in theory,crap doesn't save peoples lives.But what's not a theory is socialized medicine,in Canada,Cuba,and North Korea,DOES NOT save lives.My cat can get faster and better service than I or you can.But then you and your types want more cats than people to survive.Stalin would be proud.

hardboiled, Zog, all your protestations seem offensive to me, as my mother gets to wait until JANUARY to get an MRI that was ordered last month.

Nobody thinks a public -component- to healthcare would be inappropriate. What is seriously wrong is that there is no private care allowed. I, personally, have the capability, the connections and the capital to get an MRI machine up to Hamilton Ontario, in use and making money, before January.

If I can do it, many many other people around here can do it. Why can't we get a half dozen MRI machines, CAT scanners and PET scanners up and running Zog? hardboiled?

Tommy f-ing Douglas, that's why. And his useful idiot son, Pierre Trudeau. If not for those two pricks and the likes of you, my mum would have her results already and be able to chose when she would like her hip surgery, instead of having to0 fight like Hell to get on the list before January 2010.

Some 18 percent of lifetime costs for medical care--over $40,000--is estimated to be incurred in the last year of life.

this seems like a simple fix.

Phantom: You want changes? You want the Canada Health Act ammended to allow private care? Get off your a$$ and do something instead of leaving the field to outfits like Friends of Medicare. Otherwise, quityurbitchin.

Justthinkin: Oh yeah, anybody who has a good word to say for Douglas has to be a Commie or at least a frothy-mouthed socialist. Anybody who remembers the good old days pre-1945 (and I'm willing to bet that neither you nor Phantom does) knows what a blessing that early medicare was when it was introduced. Actually, it wasn't a new idea even then. A lot of municipalities hired doctors and built hospitals in the 1920s but , most of their small public health ventures went tits up in the '30s.

BTW, you could both take a lesson or two in reading comprehension, tolerance and good old fashioned civility.

S'all OK...this page'll get archived and folks looking for "Tommy Douglas Day" will be transported by the miracle of links on the digital goat trail, right here to SDA.

It's a wonderful world.

oh that's so clever Kate. next time try not putting quotes around the search string:

Results 1 - 10 of about 342,000 for tommy douglas day. (0.07 seconds)
Search Results

1.
My Blahg » HAPPY TOMMY DOUGLAS DAY
20 Oct 2005 ... It should be a national, not just a provincial day to honour the Greatest Canadian. It’s Tommy Douglas day in Saskatchewan. ...
myblahg.com/?p=219 - 35k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
2. [PDF]
Tommy Douglas Day Act
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
1 This Act may be cited as The Tommy Douglas Day Act. October 20 to be Tommy Douglas Day. 2 October 20 of each year is declared to be “Tommy Douglas Day” in ...
www.qp.gov.sk.ca/documents/English/Statutes/Statutes/T15-002.pdf - Similar pages - Note this
3.
Tommy Douglas Day Act
T-15.002 TOMMY DOUGLAS DAY The Tommy Douglas Day Act being Chapter T-15.002 of The Statutes of Saskatchewan, 2005 (effective May 27, 2005). ...
www.canlii.org/sk/laws/sta/t-15.002/20070307/whole.html - 10k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
4.
Tommy Douglas Day | eyeranian.net
Random Opinions & Observations by; Pedram Moallemian.
www.eyeranian.net/archives/1128 - 80k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
5.
Tommy Douglas
It was June, and Tommy Douglas was spending the day in and around Weyburn. It was a lovely, sunny day, and it was election day. Douglas was waiting for the ...
www.weyburnreview.com/tommydouglas/tommydouglasintro.html - 8k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
6.
On This Day - Feb. 24, 1986 - CBC Archives
Stephen Lewis eulogizes Tommy Clement Douglas, the father of medicare who ... Tommy Douglas was the most influential politician never to be elected Prime ...
archives.cbc.ca/on_this_day/02/24/ - 45k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
7.
tommy douglas - Google Books Result
by Doris French Shackleton, Doris Shackleton - 1983 - Biography & Autobiography - 338 pages
Tom Douglas received $L10a day: $ 1 .00 was assigned to his wife and there were no additional allowances for her or the children. Annie Douglas sold sewing ...
books.google.ca/books?isbn=0887801218...
8. [PDF]
TOMMY DOUGLAS
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML

why does google come up with this 0.07 seconds crap still? propaganda no doubt . . .

Actually, Mr. WYSIWYG, I think the point that Kate was making was that on the date that we were mandated to HONOUR TOMMY DOUGLAS, there was absolutely no mention of it being a mandated day to honour Douglas in the media. No comments from Shirley, no mention of it any where in the press. Nothing. It was just another day. As it should be.

Tommy Douglas - not dead enough

My search was on Google News. But it's indeed revealing to note that the number one hit you came up with was Robert McClelland's toxic site. Talk about being damned by faint praise.