The Much-Touted System That Failed

Canadians will support a system because it is a system.

It doesn't matter if the idea is untenable, the execution is unworkable, the volume is overwhelming, the bureaucracy is both incompetent and cruel, the resources missing and the reality stark. It IS a system.

The idea of dismissing it or revamping it is - as the reactionary Canadian verbiage goes - "American", that being wicked, heathenish and unthinkable.

Reality doesn't care about your emotionally retarded feelings.

Again, don't take MY word for it:

While Canadians are increasingly warm to the idea of private options -

(Sidebar: these ideas.)

-  to alleviate a worsening crisis of health-care wait times, it won’t do much unless Canada can also break its onerous controls on health-care supply.

At the same time as politicians of all stripes condemn the country’s worsening doctor shortage, it is government policy to keep that shortage in place.

Canada maintains top-down limits on the number of students entering medical school each year. Provinces are also notoriously obstinate about approving foreign credentials in order to avoid overwhelming health-care budgets.

Until that system can be liberalized, any government contracts with for-profit providers will just be drawing from the same artificially small pool of clinics and physicians.

Canada stands alone among developed nations in maintaining an outright ban on private health insurance for anything covered by the Canada Health Act.

This is why Canadians can purchase insurance to cover emergency dental surgery, but if they get cancer they’re restricted either to getting in line – or paying cash in a U.S. hospital. ...

Each year, provincial health departments calculate how many doctors they’ll be able to afford, and then sets med school admissions on that figure. In 2018, for instance, the Government of Quebec cut medical school admissions after they determined that “too many” medical students were graduating.

Basically no other profession works this way. Provinces don’t really care how many lawyers or auto mechanics their schools are producing each year, since it’s not the government’s job to find them work.

But an oncologist can only realistically expect to find employment through the government, which then prompts the government to only train as many on hand as they can afford.

A detailed “quota allocation” published by the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine shows how the system works. For the 2020 scholastic year, the school was only allowed to train eight cardiologists, four endocrinologists and a single clinical pharmacist. The school also had to scale back its number of graduating family doctors, with one fewer allocation in the realm of “family medicine” than the year before.

It’s in part due to these quotas that in 2011 the Fraser Institute accurately forecast that Canada’s doctor shortage was poised to get exponentially worse.

“Even if government imposed restrictions on the number of doctors being trained in Canada are immediately removed, it won’t have an impact for much of the next decade given the time it takes to train a new doctor,” they wrote at the time. 

**

Justin holds the purse strings.

If the provinces had any intestinal fortitude, they would cut Ottawa off and simply do their own thing:

The federal proposal will see new money flow as soon as the next budget. It will include a top-up to the planned across-the-board increase to the Canada Health Transfer (CHT) and substantial funding for bilateral agreements with provinces and territories to deal with their specific needs.

Sources say the proposed CHT increases, and the bilateral health deals, will each run for a period of 10 years.

 

There is NO money.

That can't be said enough.

Not to worry.

There is always MAID to cut costs:

New research suggests medically assisted dying could result in substantial savings across Canada's health-care system.

Doctor-assisted death could reduce annual health-care spending across the country by between $34.7 million and $136.8 million, according to a report published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on Monday.

The savings exceedingly outweigh the estimated $1.5 to $14.8 million in direct costs associated with implementing medically assisted dying.

 

Ahem:

 **

What did she say? 😳 pic.twitter.com/fCMhIoYlMH

— Kat Kanada (@KatrinaPanova) February 3, 2023

**

Over 1500 of Canada’s publicly funded psychiatrists, pediatricians, medical professors, and general practitioners have joined an organization to fight the government’s expansion of medical assistance in dying (MAID). In March 2023, patients suffering from conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder, personality disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD, or any other mental affliction will gain access to the lethal injection.

Some critics argue medical professionals are being pressured to promote MAID because suicide is cheaper than having to provide care under Canada’s publicly funded medical system. A group of 1,502 Canadian doctors, including medical professors and specialists, calling themselves Physicians Together with Vulnerable Canadians (PTVC), have publicly expressed their concerns about the situation on their website:

“Medicine… has been transformed into a technical occupation that allows physicians to deliberately end the lives of their suffering patients. Forced participation in arranging and facilitating euthanasia and assisted suicide is now required by certain regulatory colleges…patients can no longer unconditionally trust their medical professional to advocate for their life when they are at their weakest and most vulnerable. Suddenly, a lethal injection becomes part of a repertoire of interventions offered to end their pain and suffering.”

** 

Read - until Canadians get used to the idea:

The option of medically assisted death for people with mental illness will be delayed by a year, under legislation introduced into the House of Commons on Thursday.

**

The last time we asked the Supreme Court to intervene, we had unfettered access to baby-killing.

Let's cut the unelected judicial activists out of this:

In 2021, more than one in three Canadians who died by assisted death cited their perception of being a burden on others as a motivating factor. Many others also reported “isolation or loneliness.” In recent months, the media has reported troubling stories of Canadians with disabilities who wish to live but whose adverse socioeconomic conditions have driven them to view assisted death as their only “solution.”

Many have expressed concern with what assisted death has become in Canada. It seems to be evolving into something other than a “stringently limited, carefully monitored system of exceptions,” as contemplated by the Supreme Court in 2015 in Carter. That was the court case which led Parliament to introduce the “first version” of assisted death in 2016 for adults whose medical condition is incurable and suffering is intolerable, but only if their natural death is “reasonably foreseeable.”

 

 Thank God we don't live in the "for profit" States, eh?