Scratch a progressive in Canada’s socialized medical system, and you’ll find a eugenicist;

Dr. Andre Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC), told the Globe and Mail yesterday, “Palin’s decision to keep her baby, knowing he would be born with the condition, may inadvertently influence other women who may lack the necessary emotional and financial support to do the same.”
“The worry is that this will have an implication for abortion issues in Canada,” he said.
Under the facade of “freedom to choose”, Lalonde said that “popular messages” about women like Palin, who choose not to kill their unborn children, “could have detrimental effects on women and their families.”

The apples, they fall not so far from the tree.

“Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday she might be willing to garnish the wages of workers who refuse to buy health insurance to achieve coverage for all Americans.”

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Update – The Would-Be Commandress In Chief has the sniffles again!

“Gotcha. The essence of contemporary British national identity is defined by waiting two years for a hip replacement.”

More – slow-mo euthanasia. Why not? It works for us.

So long as queue jumping is afforded the hypocrites who legislate health care, why deny the ones who deliver it?

When his five-year-old daughter’s bone scan revealed a tumour that might be cancerous, the man who is now president of the Canadian Medical Association decided to jump the queue.
His wife, also a doctor, had taken their daughter into the emergency room of a Vancouver hospital after the little girl experienced a sudden pain in her leg, Dr. Brian Day recalled. The initial bone scan indicated a tumour, but couldn’t reveal whether or not it was cancerous.
“The hospital said: ‘We’ll do a CT scan, bring her back next week,’ ” Dr. Day said. “To me, it’s completely unacceptable, sending a mother home for six days not knowing whether her daughter has a malignant or a benign bone tumour. I made the phone call … I made them do it that day.”

Via Andrew Keyes;

I recall seeing a CBC interview with Jack Layton a couple of years ago, and he was asked “If you discovered your wife had a life-threatening condition and you had to chose between waiting for treatment in Canada and risking her death, or traveling to the US for immediate treatment, what would you do?” Layton answered that he would wait in the queue in Canada.
Some would say his answer reflected his conviction to his principles, others would say it reflected his complete lack of any ability to act rationally. I wonder what his wife thought.

We know what Jean Chretien and Belinda Stronach would do.

There’s a reason Shirley Douglas made her living reading other people’s scripts; “That puts us back to one of the most dreaded words in the English language — the means test.” One thing I do like about Shirley – when she’s done telling mouselanders how to vote, she wastes no time getting back to Toronto.

(from a previous visit to SK)

Flashback – Heh. “He’s dead by the way”

Melanie Phillips gets letters;

“Unfortunately, 30 months ago I was diagnosed with bowel cancer and had my bowel removed. On arriving at the hospital the day prior to the operation, I went to the toilet. No soap or hand-wash. Spoke to nurse. Yes we know we will get some tomorrow when the cleaner is back!!!!! The patient in the next bed informed me he had said the same the day before. Basic hygiene. After the operation, excrement from a spill from a colostomy bag was left on the floor for 2 days until the next bed patient’s daughter brought in disinfectant to clean up.”
[…]
“Many days I watched the nursing auxiliaries bring his food in and place it temptingly on his table at the foot of his bed, often out of reach. After what seemed a relatively short time they returned and noticing the full dishes commented that he must not be hungry! He couldn’t reach the food. When I complained they left it there but no-one came to feed him so I and his friends fed him. On very few occasions did any of the nursing staff attempt to feed him (they may have when I was at work. I visited him every evening for 3-4 hours). Had it not been for myself and his large group of friends visiting and feeding him I believe he would have received little or no food at all. As a result he didn’t last very long.”
[…]
“I am a nurse of some forty years experience, most of which has been spent in community nursing and working with elderly people. Nurses are no longer encouraged to nurse (care) for their patients. Instead they are directed to learn abstract concepts and highly technical procedures from the beginning of their training. Long gone are the days of bed bath, bed pan and temperature rounds. These rounds generated the time for nurses to share confidences with patients and to observe ways in which their patients’ comfort and progress could be monitored and improved.”

Leader Post;

Frustrated while awaiting surgery on his damaged knee, Saskatchewan Roughriders receiver Matt Dominguez told a national TSN telecast about his unhappiness and inadvertently waded into a debate about universal health care. All this in a province approaching an election, in the birthplace of medicare, where surgical waiting times are always a hot-button topic.
“I went from being on the best team in the league, leading the league in receiving, to being on a list for surgery,” Dominguez said Monday after calling the Leader-Post to clarify his on-air comments.
“I’ve lived here for three years and I’m involved in the community, but not a week goes by that I don’t hear somebody complain about the health care system. Because I’m an American, I can’t talk about the health care system? You never hear people saying that the waiting lists are awesome. I never said I’m better than anyone or that I should be put ahead of anybody else. I’m not. I’m just saying that if I have to wait eight months (for surgery), that’s too long.”

There’s a reason that the Saskatchewan Roughriders have never won a Grey Cup with the NDP in office.
But what Tommy Douglas taketh away, Lorne Calvert can giveth!
Help Matt Jump The Wait Times Queue!
Telephone: (306) 787-9433
Facsimile: (306) 787-0885
premier@gov.sk.ca

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.