The Marda Loop Medical Clinic owner, Dr. Sally Talbot-Jones, came under fire this week after the CBC reported she started a membership model at her clinic, one that charges $4,800 per year for two parents and two children, and $2,200 per year for an individual adult membership.
Ironically, Talbot-Jones appears a fully blown NDP supporter, given she has a history of pro-NDP and anti-UCP tweets. She’s tweeted support of the NDP and opposition to the UCP multiple times since 2020.
The Greatest Canadian
please please please please…
#TommyDouglas, founding leader of @NDP, is under review as historic figure due to “controversial beliefs and behaviour,” according to Historic Sites and Monuments Board. https://t.co/TjGWBg0r8G @RealKiefer #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/LhK6P4DFTO
— Holly Doan (@hollyanndoan) July 18, 2023
This is too delicious for words.
Safe and Effective®
The Telegraph- How the long-term sickness epidemic wrecked Britain’s public finances
Lockdown wreaked havoc across the economy, devastating children’s education, hammering the public finances and piling pressure on a health service already struggling with the ageing population. But among its more pernicious and long-term consequences appears to be a steep and sustained rise in the numbers of people of working age who have left the jobs market because of ill health.
Nothing to worry about. After all winter is coming.
Trust the Evidence- Looking forward to the next winter crisis
On 5 October, we pointed out the recurrent and seemingly intractable recurrence of the NHS winter crisis. Year in and year out, we have the same screaming headlines around Christmas time.
Waiting, Waiting, Waiting…
Its a feature not a bug.
Trust the Evidence- Intractable waiting lists
We are told that in the NHS in England, more than 7 million people are waiting for a hospital specialist or surgeon or whatever. Over 3 million patients wait over 18 weeks and 370 thousand over a year for treatment.
By any measure, these figures show we have an emergency on our hands – yes, a real one, not model-driven or PCR derived. Presumably, these are folk who have long-standing problems and need help. We do not know the makeup of their pathologies, but all are at risk in the forthcoming NHS winter crisis – we have become modellers and see the future.
Canadian “exceptionalism”
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Canada’s stubborn obsession with single payer health care is taking a massive toll on the budgets of governments and the health of Canadians, but that won’t stop Medicare’s supporters from continuing to insist that government payments to a few select private clinics constitutes “privatization”.
You’re seeing a lot of controversy about the introduction of “private health care” into the Canadian system. But you can all relax, because it’s not actually private health care. It’s still public health care, but just the worst possible version of it.
In Canada, it’s illegal to buy insurance for anything covered under the public system. Nobody else does this. In The Netherlands, New Zealand, Japan, the U.K. you can pony up a few thousand dollars each year in private insurance and — if you need stitches — you can either go to the public hospital or use your insurance to get it done privately at an entirely different health care system over here.
That’s private health care.
Dollars and gender
In the market for a sex change? Ontario has decided that it has other priorities for health care spending, so some of the previously tax funded services associated with sex changes will no longer be covered by the province. Naturally for the Red Star, they don’t make it clear as to what services are still covered. Presumably, we’ve still got a ways to go before taxpayers are not compelled to fund cosmetic surgery at all.
Toronto based Connect-Clinic, which shut down in December of 2022 after OHIP fees for virtual-only medical services were lowered, launched a new online venture Wednesday under the banner Foria Clinic.
The online clinic will provide virtual services such as gender-affirming hormone therapy and surgical referrals to patients throughout Ontario.
Nice Liver You’ve Got There…
… be a shame if something were to happen to you.
CBC- Avery’s Law makes organ, tissue donation automatic in New Brunswick
Update: Apparently you don’t even have to be technically dead yet either.
The Best Healthcare System in the World
Globe and Mail- How Canada’s emergency rooms are faring as major staffing shortages persist
Meanwhile in completely unrelated and unreported news…
Universal Death Care
It’s $150 a pop at a vet clinic: Quebec spent nearly $6 million on doctor-assisted suicide in 2022
Maybe climate change?
The post-pandemic spike in excess deaths is simply becoming too large even for the leftist corporate media to ignore, but it seems that most favored approach is to throw up one’s hands and declare that it’s all just a baffling mystery.
Statistics Canada last week published what are called “provisional” mortality counts for New Brunswick, which estimated 9,288 people died in the province through 2022.
If confirmed, the number will be a record for the province, obliterating the previous high set in 2021 by a stunning 1,179 deaths.
New Brunswick’s Department of Health is aware of the record 2022 death estimate but it has no theories about a cause — and isn’t prepared to draw any broad conclusions about what it means.
Tommy Douglas, Not Dead Enough
Anyone willing to look at actual data, or listen to real patient stories, has known for years Canadian health care is in perilous territory. Whether it’s ER wait times, hallway health care, surgical backlogs or the severe shortage of family doctors, the system isn’t working.
Unfortunately, any debate about how to fix it was stymied for years by leftist politicians who insisted critiquing Canadian health care was tantamount to treachery. They found it much more politically profitable to accuse Conservatives of wanting to import U.S.-style privatization, despite the fact literally no Conservative politicians were suggesting this.
Now, after years of squandered opportunities to fix our system, we’re instead exporting Canadians to the U.S. system. This week, British Columbia announced it’ll send nearly 5,000 patients over the next two years to the U.S. in order to receive cancer treatment. Aging radiation therapy machines and worker shortages have resulted in untenable wait times and significantly increased risk of poor outcomes, which is health care jargon for Canadians dying entirely preventable deaths.
Well, at least we have MAiD.
At the same time, we must consider how broad immigration targets that aim for record numbers of newcomers each year impact the problem. Similar questions swirl in relation to the housing crisis. We’ve failed to match immigration targets with the infrastructure to back them up, which hurts both Canadians and newcomers.
Oh, no. One mustn’t notice the million new elephants in the waiting room.
Medical Assistance In Killing
Solving Canada’s housing crisis one blue needle at a time.
Investigative malpractice
Jordan Peterson interviews Minnesota doctor Scott Jensen regarding his lengthy harassment at the hands of medical licensing officials. His crime? To push back against the CDC’s instruction, trotted out at the beginning of the pandemic, to “adjust” death certificates to inflate Covid numbers. If a deceased patient had symptoms of Covid, doctors were given the green light to list the cause of death as Covid instead of trying to determine if it was the primary cause of death, a contributing factor, or unrelated.
Medicinal Marxism
As Terence Corcoran notes, with a recent decision the Supreme Court of Canada has effectively barred any legal challenges to single payer healthcare.
The Supreme Court effectively approved the lower court’s conclusion that restrictions on private-health delivery do not contravene the Canadian Charter of Rights.
To make matters worse, the court’s justification openly parrots a famous slogan of Karl Marx:
If everyone had to choose a distributional principle, but did not know if they would turn out to be able to make private provision or not, it is plausible that many or most would opt for a system that protects distribution according to need, rather than ability to pay.
Mainstream Canadian conservatives, some of whom are privately critical of Medicare, are not going to move the debate in the right direction by silently awaiting a favorable court decision. That ship has sailed.
Universal Death-Care
Back in the day, governments sterilized the mentally ill.
Until they got sued for it.
So now, they’ll just kill them.
The Government of Canada is directing medical professionals to concede to a patient's suicidality as long as the request to die "is consistent with the person's values and beliefs, and is unambiguous, and enduring."
What happened to suicide prevention?#cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/5AkIhGRBXH
— Amanda Achtman (@AmandaAchtman) April 2, 2023
Who’s Next?
Nice of them to give you kids a heads up.
Juxtapose!
The Telegraph- Ukrainian healthcare is better than the NHS
If you have read and struggled to believe stories about Ukrainians living in the UK returning to their native country for medical treatment, let me tell you that I am one of them. Having given up on the NHS, I flew to Poland and crossed the border. Later that day, amid air raid sirens, I visited a hospital. By the evening, I had the relevant medicines to get me back on the mend.
Tommy Douglas, Not Dead Enough
YOU WILL NOT GET HEALTH CARE UNTIL WE SAY YOU GET HEALTH CARE: Protesting at a hospital? Intimidating patients? The NDP has gone full Westboro Baptist Church. Funny — they called for the arrest of anti-vax protesters for doing far less.
Do It Already
Global- Majority of Canadians support private options for health care, poll shows
The Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News between Jan. 19 and Jan. 23, 2023 found 59 per cent of the 1,001 adults surveyed expressed support for the private delivery of publicly-funded health services. Sixty per cent of respondents were also in favour of private health care for those who can afford it.
Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, says in the 30 years he has studied public opinion in Canada, he has never seen such a shift in support toward privatization.