For a province in the middle of an election campaign, this report is receiving surprisingly little media attention;

The survey measures median waiting times to document the extent to which queues for visits to specialists and for diagnostic and surgical procedures are used to control health-care expenditures.
“It’s becoming clearer that Canada’s current health-care system cannot meet the needs of Canadians in a timely and efficient manner, unless you consider access to a waiting list timely and efficient,” Esmail added.
The 2007 survey found the total median waiting time for patients between referral from a general practitioner and treatment, averaged across all 12 specialties and 10 provinces surveyed, increased to 18.3 weeks from 17.8 weeks observed in 2006. This was primarily due to an increase in the first waiting period, between seeing the general practitioner and attending a consultation with a specialist.
[…]
The waiting time between specialist consultation and treatment — the second stage of waiting — increased to 9.1 weeks from 9.0 weeks in 2006. The shortest specialist-to-treatment waits were found in Ontario (7.3 weeks), Alberta (8.9 weeks) and Quebec (9.4 weeks), while the longest waits were in Saskatchewan (16.5 weeks), Nova Scotia (13.6 weeks) and Manitoba (12.0 weeks).

Of course, we know the drill by now. Despite our own personal experience and that of family, despite the individual cases that come to media attention, despite alarm bells being rung by doctors, despite, despite, despite – each year the Fraser Institute tells us what we already know, and Sask Health responds by telling us not to believe our own lying eyes.
And there’s the dirty little secret behind the NDP’s promise of a universal cradle-to-grave drug program – you need to see a doctor to get a prescription.
(More at the National Post)

In response to last week’s item from a physican’s wife (The Calvert Manifesto), Saskatchewan blogger Arcolaura offered a few comments that I thought deserving of their own post;

When the Sun Country Health District had a public meeting for input into their strategic plan, they showed us the provincial health goals, including “improved access to quality health care services” or something very close to that. I had to say, never mind “improved” and “quality.” There were a couple hundred of us at that meeting (they had booked a room for 30), and most of us were looking for “restored” access to “basic” health care services.
That was some months ago. Just this week, they finally restored enough services here to stop locking the hospital doors at 11 p.m. every night.

It sounds as though little has changed. In an earlier NPD government incarnation, a different bureaucrat travelled the 120 miles from Regina to explain to Arcola residents that the hospital was likely to suffer reduced services due to the town doctor’s advancing years and pending retirement.
The “town doctor” (for want of a better term for the South African trained practitioners who were rotating through at the time) was in his 30’s.
Previous: Tommy Douglas: Back Door User Fees

Two-tier, third world;

It didn’t take long for someone to jump on the Michael Moore bandwagon. Choice Medical Services is a Winnipeg based company that is offering health tourism trips to Cuba for those in need of eye, knee and shoulder surgeries as well as drug rehabilitation.
[…]
Provincial Health Minister Theresa Oswald was right on the ball when questioned about the health tourism trips, she was quoted as saying “It’s never been our government’s position to want to infringe on people’s right to do that,” That’s right Theresa, because you have no control over it. That has however not stopped your government from infringing on the people’s right to seek alternatives within Manitoba by refusing a license to the Maple’s Surgery Clinic or by buying the Pan Am Clinic at a price that was very hard to refuse!

Related: Cuban health care for Cubans.
Reader Alert This morning on John Gormley Live talks to a family that has fallen through the cracks. 3 years on a “waiting list” for heart surgery?
Segment is scheduled for 11:00 – 11:30 am Sask time, (1:00 – 1:30 Eastern ). You can listen live at the link.

(As the Calgary quad incident begins to receive international attention, I thought today would be a good time to revisit my 2005 piece on zero-tier health care for newer readers to SDA.)

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After my mother died, my brother quipped sarcastically that no one should be admitted to Regina General unless they first survived two hours on a vibrating gurney.
Saskatchewan spends $4 billion a year on health – 44% of the total provincial budget – on a population of under one million, and those dollars are increasingly directed to more centralized systems of delivery. While debate about “wait times” tends to revolve around diagnostics and scheduling of surgery (especially “elective” surgery such as knee and hip replacement), few consider the “wait time” facing the farmer in Val Marie with a crushed pelvis or severed artery.
For when it is decreed that your local hospital is no longer “economically viable” (a curious complaint to put forward under not-for-profit ideology), bureaucrats gather a few hundred miles away, debate the best way to release the bad news, and with a big red pen, draw a line through your town. They will apologize, quite properly, while they advise you, quite improperly, to be grateful that health care is still “free.” You’ll just need to start out a little earlier in the morning to get to it.
Welcome to zero-tier health care.
While the sacred cow of “universality” grazes on in the world of the reality-challenged, vast regions of the country are being transformed into zones of health care prohibition.
With every new cut, more and more rural Canadians are faced with travelling long distances over crumbling roads to seek emergency care – the “vibrating gurney” of the rural ambulance. The only thing “universal” about the system is the rate of taxation and the powerlessness of the very people who pay the bills – the taxpaying patients. The patient taxpayers.
After waiting 10 days on oxygen in an intensive care ward, where it was more likely that a knowledgable visitor would tend to a distressed patient or dysfunctioning equipment than any of the five nurses charged with holding down chairs, we began to wonder when the lung specialist planned to show up to discuss our mother’s condition.
He had to be reminded, as it turned out. Standing over the duct-taped linoleum, he shared the diagnosis and advised it was terminal. With no hope of treatment, we arranged for her return by ambulance the 120 miles to our local rural hospital, where she was finally treated for pain and was tended to by a nurse she knew as a friend. Thank heaven for small mercies – for it had been slated for closure earlier that year.
The “not for profit” lie is so bold, so obvious, so outrageous, that it’s difficult to understand how it’s survived this long.
The truth is precisely the opposite. Everyone in the Canadian health-care system, from top to bottom – from doctor, to nurse, to bureaucrat, to cleaner, to kitchen staff – has a guaranteed profit, guaranteed payment, often in wages that eclipse those in the private sector, regardless of quality or timeliness of patient care.
And even this isn’t enough for some – they demand guaranteed patients, through the eradication of what private sector competition there is.
The only participant who lacks a guaranteed return under this “not-for-loss” monopoly is the one paying the bill, the patient whose assets are involuntarily seized through taxation to keep the hulking, insatiable bovine alive and belching. The most powerful check and balance of all – the ability of the customer to refuse payment to protest inadequate service – has been removed from the equation.
Discussing the abysmal quality of care my mother received with a friend who works in the bureaucracy, I suggested that the imbalance might be partially restored through a holdback system, in which a percentage of wages or fees would be released only upon patient or family signoff – in the way that holdbacks are used in the construction industry to ensure the job is well and truly complete.
She disagreed with the idea, for, as she correctedly argued, “Some people might withhold payment unfairly.”
To which I replied; “Welcome to the world the rest of us live in.”

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More – a doctor turns number cruncher. “The main reason socialists love public health care is because they know they can get rich off of it. “

Because high risk pregnancies come with so little warning;

Well, you can’t expect a G7 economy of only 30 million people to be able to offer the same level of neonatal ICU coverage as a town of 50,000 in remote rural Montana. And let’s face it, there’s nothing an expectant mom likes more than 300 miles in a bumpy twin prop over the Rockies.

More on the Calgary quartet at BBC.
More reaction: Don Surber strikes a similar theme.

Clearwater River Dene First Nation and the neighboring community of La Loche are among the most economically challenged in the province, with all the accompanying social ills – crime, substance abuse, welfare dependence. But save your sympathies. Apparently, they like it that way;

Christopher Hopkins, the president and CEO of Oilsands Quest Inc., gets a steely look in his eyes when you ask him about the reason he’s moving the bunkhouses from one of the two camps his company had constructed at the Axe Lake oilsands project in the northwestern corner of Saskatchewan.
He’s moving the camp infrastructure, which can house up to 100 workers in hotel-level comfort, to the Alberta side of the border, where Oilsands Quest also has oilsand leases on land contiguous to its Saskatchewan property.
The move west to Alberta is more than symbolic to Hopkins, whose company was in the news this past June when road access to his camps was cut off on Saskatchewan provincial Highway 955 when members of the Clearwater River Dene First Nation, under the direction of Chief Roy Cheecham, refused access for vehicles or people headed to the Oilsands Quest camp.
The blockade left a lasting impression on Hopkins, who says he has no desire or plans in the future to meet with Cheecham again.
“I have told the chief. I have told anyone who will listen. We will never be caught in a blockade like that again,” Hopkins said. “And I mean it.”

That’s not the only barrier to development. Cheecham has allies in Regina.

Hopkins won’t say anything bad about the Government of Saskatchewan, but notes he had to submit 18 copies of his application to various government offices in Regina for the right to lay down more than 900 kilometres of new seismic lines, plus do additional drilling into the bitumen formation.

Many in the industry speculate that Saskatchewan’s oil sands deposits may rival those of Alberta.

Now you know why they speculate.
Related: Ending the desecration of Father Sky and Mother Earth through the miracle of outdoor plumbing….

So what number do you dial to call a fatty wagon over to your house? 1011? 1TON?
Just curious.

Jack Layton appears to have wandered from Saint Tommy’s flock. He’s been caught using private health care. Taliban Jack a waiting list dodging hypocrite? Who knew!

Laura Herman (Arcologist) emails;

I’m not afraid of user fees, but I figure they should be applied first on the specialty services, not the basics. Now after all the reductions in hospital services here, we are being asked as rural/small-town taxpayers and as individuals to come up with funding for an incentive package for nurses, so that we can get our in-patient services and night-time emergency services back. Before I organize a garage sale for the cause, I’m doing some thinking about a slippery slope.

And before you jump in about declining rural populations, this is not one of those cases. In addition to a stable mixed cattle/grain agricultural base, the town is located in the booming southeast oil patch, with all the accident risks – and tax revenues – that accompany that industry.
From the comments;

When 75-80% of your workforce is coming from two year technical school and college programs and you eliminate this sector and you are expecting a taxpayer funded university system that is chronically short of money to pick up the slack the outcome is an unmitigated disaster.

650 Newstalk;

Yesterday’s legislative session shed some light on the latest development in the province’s nursing shortage. It appears the Weyburn General Hospital will be unable to deliver babies this summer because of staffing shortages.
Specifically, six full-time nursing positions are open on the ward that houses maternity services. According to a report, there are also just two doctors performing deliveries at a hospital where 50 babies are born every year.
So as of June first, mothers heading into labour in the Weyburn area will have to be directed elsewhere.

Weyburn is located in the province’s booming southeastern oil patch, with a population of around 9,500.

It’s also famous as the home town of the “father of universal health care”.

(Related: The “fight of the century” to fund universal health care in Illinois goes down in a 107-0 vote of the Democratic House.)

Via email;

I am working on a documentary against socialized medicine in the US and Canada. We are now at the stage of looking for Canadians stuck on waitlists so we can find a select few to get free medical care in the US. If you know any suffering Canadians (especially in Vancouver) please feel free to pass on our details or to promote us to them.

More information and an application form here.
This is all I know about the project – so be sure to apply a little “due diligence” should you choose to participate.
Main page.

Here’ s a valuable money-saving tip from the British NHS that our hospitals may have missed:

Cleaners at an NHS hospital with a poor record on superbugs have been told to turn over dirty sheets instead of using fresh ones between patients to save money.

In many trends Britain is “ahead” of us, but we can probably assume our Medicare systems will catch up in due course.

William Watson notes Canadians’ opinions are beginning to change on Medicare:

There’s a political party in this country, Mario Dumont’s Action democratique du Quebec, that is currently running — in a real election, in Canada’s most statist province — on a reformist platform in health care. It’s not a very detailed platform and Mr. Dumont might run away from it if he ever gets near power, but, for the time being at least, the program says:
– The Supreme Court’s Chaouilli decision was right: People should be allowed to spend their own money on their own health.

A short course In brain surgery.

The more things stay the same, the more things stay the same;

On the same day the provincial government announced it had taken in an extra $1.2 billion in the last budget year, the latest population numbers from Statistics Canada showed a decrease of nearly 2,000 people in the first quarter of this year.
That dropped Saskatchewan’s population to 988,980, putting it under 990,000 for the first time since July 1982.

If past behavior is any indication, we can brace for an influx of immigration as Lorne Calvert addresses the decline by advertising civil service positions out of province.

My friends, watch out for the left-wing propagandist with an idea;

CBC Television has agreed to pull the movie Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story from all future scheduled broadcasts in response to criticisms it was historically inaccurate.
When the two-part miniseries ran in March, it received some good reviews but also criticisms from historians who said its portrayal of James Gardiner, premier of Saskatchewan in the late-1920s and mid-1930s, was inaccurate.
One example cited was the suggestion Gardiner drank alcohol, when in fact he was a teetotaller. In one scene, Gardiner berates miners in the 1931 Estevan coal strike in a broadcast to the province. However, historians say the speech never happened and Gardiner wasn’t premier during the strike.
On Monday, members of the Gardiner family received an e-mail from CBC Television’s executive vice-president Richard Stursberg.
“In response, we are pulling Prairie Giant from all scheduled broadcasts and we have halted both home and educational sales,” Stursberg said in the e-mail.

Now, may we please have our money back?
Update. I now have contents of the letter of apology;

Dear Mr. Gardiner and Ms. Gardiner,
On behalf of everyone at CBC Television, I regret the mischaracterization of James Garfield Gardiner in the mini-series `Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story’ that we aired earlier this season.
The criticisms that you and others expressed about the credibility of this portrayal concerned us greatly even as we came to its defence. To help us address the criticisms, we engaged an outside third-party historian with no ties to CBC, your family or the Douglas family to assess the way in which Mr. Gardiner was depicted. I regret to say that his conclusion was that the character created for the film does not reflect the accepted historical record-and that, as you well know, the characterization in the mini-series is significantly different from Mr. Gardiner’s true personality and behaviour.
In response, we are pulling `Prairie Giant’ from all scheduled broadcasts and we have halted both home and educational sales. Our hope is that we can find a solution that will address concerns regarding the characterization of Mr. Gardiner before resuming distribution.
All of us at CBC Television greatly regret the distress that this has caused, and thank you for drawing this to our attention.
Sincerely,
Richard Stursberg
Executive Vice-President
CBC Television

Background

In Calvert’s Saskatchewan, it’s not good enough to drive bureaucratic nails in the coffin of a tiny rural community – not if you can collect a fine as well.
Because God knows, they need every penny of those revenues to pour into the rural infrastructure.

The CBC is coy about the controversy surrounding Prairie Giant – The Tommy Douglas Story. (Speaking of The Greatest Eugenicist, can anyone tell me if it mentioned these writings?)

The movie, which ran in two parts on CBC in March, got some good reviews but it also came under fire for alleged historical inaccuracies.

“Alleged inaccuracies” include a hard-drinkin’ Premier Gardiner giving a speech to striking coal miners in a year he wasn’t premier – or so “historians say”. The report goes out of its way to downplay the school division rejection.

Some school board trustees in Prince Albert think schools in the region shouldn’t show the recent made-for-TV movie about former premier and medicare founder Tommy Douglas.
Members of the Saskatchewan Rivers school board recently held a brief debate in response to a letter from Saskatchewan Party leader Brad Wall objecting to the way former Liberal premier Jimmy Gardiner was portrayed in the two-part movie Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story.
Some trustees were opposed to having the movie shown in schools, while at least one other raised concerns about censorship, director of education Bill Cooke said Thursday.
However, no action was taken and the letter was simply received and filed, Cooke said.
“Let’s face it, this is a letter from a politician,” he said. “We’re supposed to be above that.”

Compare the CBC report with this less “invested” one;

A majority of trustees in the Saskatchewan Rivers School Division are advising against schools showing the movie Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, saying it is based on fiction and not fact.
The CBC drama was broadcast in March as a two-part, four-hour miniseries chronicling the life of the former Saskatchewan premier who changed the face of health care in Canada.
But Saskatchewan Party Leader Brad Wall recently wrote a letter to the school division, saying he objected to its portrayal of former Saskatchewan premier James Gardiner.
“The film does not accurately portray a very significant period of time in our province’s rich history,” said Wall. “The historical inaccuracies of the film have been cited by no less authorities than former premier Allan Blakeney, who stated that Gardiner was inappropriately depicted as a ‘simple-minded demon.’”
Saskatchewan Rivers trustee Barry Hollick said he supported the letter from Wall and suggested the rest of the board do the same.
“I view this film as political propaganda and I’d hope we wouldn’t use it in our schools,” said Hollick.
Trustee Rodney Thompson said he didn’t think the board should interfere with freedom of speech.

More here on how Gardiner was portrayed;

A blacker figure could scarcely be imagined. Mean, arrogant and selfish, the CBC’s Gardiner was the very antithesis of the saintly Tommy. In dramatic terms, the lifelong Liberal’s rendering provided a great nemesis for Douglas, an implacable foe for the CCF leader to prevail over.
It was wonderful television, but abysmal history.
David Smith, the Saskatchewan political scientist who co-authored the only Gardiner biography ever written, calls his subject’s treatment at the hands of the CBC “scandalous.”
“It’s not right to portray him like that. You might disagree with how he went about it, but Saskatchewan was very important to him.”
On almost every score, scriptwriter Bruce Smith got Gardiner wrong. Significant historical events were either twisted beyond recognition or worse, drawn out of thin air.

“My friends, watch out for the little fellow with an idea.” *

More at Cjunk.

Developments in this story from two weeks ago, via Mutt-Man;

Two weeks ago, we reported on the plight of Rev. Harry Lehotsky of Winnipeg who was suffering from abdominal pain and was told he had to wait five months for a barium x-ray and seven months for an appointment with a gastroenterologist (See ‘Health Care: Paying to be on a waiting list’).
According to the article in today’s Winnipeg Free Press (link available for a limited time), “…the minister was insistent they [the tests] be moved up”. The diagnosis? “…the ulcer doctors had been treating isn’t an ulcer at all. It’s pancreatic cancer. It has spread to his liver, spleen and lymph nodes. And it’s inoperable.” Doctors have given Rev. Lehotsky six weeks to nine months to live.

More about Rev. Lehotsky Dust My Broom