And it keeps on failing:
Emergency departments will almost certainly continue to face difficulties this fall — but COVID patients will not be the reason why, said an emergency physician speaking on an Ontario Medical Association panel on Wednesday.
“A straight-up prediction is that there’s a 99 per cent chance that the emergency departments in Ontario will be worse. I want to say 100 per cent, but I want to give myself a little bit of hope,” said Dr. Andrew Petrosoniak, an emergency physician and trauma team leader at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.
Emergency departments are still able to provide care for people in life-threatening situations. But Petrosoniak, who was a member of a panel speaking on living with COVID as Ontario heads into the fall, said he is concerned about patients who are not initially very sick.
“They will get missed,” he said. “It might happen in a waiting room because patients are waiting so long. It might happen in a hallway because they’re sitting for hours to get to a place where they can actually get adequate care. It might be because there are staffing issues or just systemic inefficiencies. I don’t know where it will happen. I suspect it’s playing out right now.”
Everyone knows that.
The socialised medicine model is one that cannot be sustained; it is inefficient and wasteful; doctors and nurses are leaving or are fired (RE: jabs); people were kept waiting for life-saving treatments due to the global house arrest.
The bottom is not falling out. It already HAS fallen out. One is merely waiting for the crash landing.
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But private healthcare is wicked, heathenish and American!:
Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones’ plan to stabilize the health-care system includes increasing surgeries performed at private clinics but covered by OHIP, covering the exam and registration fees for internationally trained nurses, and sending patients waiting for a long-term care bed to a home not of their choosing.
The plan comes as nursing staff shortages have seen emergency departments across the province close throughout the summer for hours or days at a time.
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Like abortion, it's not healthcare but you will be paying for it, in one way and another:
Barely a week now goes by without some new case emerging of a sick Canadian being offered assisted death in lieu of treatment. Most recently, it was a Canadian combat veteran who was casually offered the option of dying after he approached Veteran Affairs Canada for help with his PTSD.
It’s a nightmare scenario that was envisioned by no shortage of ethicists and health figures when assisted death was first written into Canadian law. But with few exceptions, these warnings were ignored by the various court rulings that ultimately forced Canada into adopting the world’s most permissive regime of legal euthanasia.
It was the 2015 Supreme Court decision Carter v. Canada that first struck down Criminal Code bans on doctor-assisted suicide and compelled the House of Commons to encode legal euthanasia into law.
Notably, Carter v. Canada directly contradicted another Supreme Court decision from just 22 years before — that was even written by some of the same justices. In 1993’s Rodriguez v. British Columbia, the Supreme Court had dismissed a Charter appeal against the assisted suicide ban, arguing that such a measure would violate the Charter’s “underlying hypothesis” of the sanctity of human life. “Given the concerns about abuse and the great difficulty in creating appropriate safeguards, the blanket prohibition on assisted suicide is not arbitrary or unfair,” read the 1993 ruling.
But by 2015, the Supreme Court had decided that denying citizens the option to end their own lives violated Charter guarantees against the “security of the person.” As for the prospect of abuse, this was dismissed almost entirely.
Assisted suicide was already legal in Belgium in 2015, and had similarly yielded a number of controversial cases in which state-sanctioned death was extended to citizens without terminal illnesses.
This included a severely depressed 34-year-old woman who suffered from suicidal ideation, and two twin brothers who opted for assisted suicide when they began to go blind.
Belgian bioethicist Etienne Montero was even flown in to say as much before the court. “Strict safeguards” were an illusion, he told the court. “Once euthanasia is allowed, it becomes very difficult to maintain a strict interpretation of the statutory conditions.”
But the Canadian justices dismissed the Belgian experience as “the product of a very different medico-legal culture” and said it offered no lessons for Canada.
Rather, the justices were optimistic “that a permissive regime with properly designed and administered safeguards was capable of protecting vulnerable people from abuse and error.”
“We should not lightly assume that the regulatory regime will function defectively,” they wrote.
The Liberal-dominated House of Commons was far less cavalier when it came time to encode assisted death into an Act of Parliament.
The resulting legislation, Bill C-14, extended medical assistance in dying (MAID) only to “competent adults whose deaths are reasonably foreseeable.”
This was done to defend the “interests of vulnerable persons in need of protection,” according to the bill, which received support from 15 members of the Conservative caucus.
During parliamentary debates over the bill, a non-partisan cross-section of MPs spoke to their fears of greenlighting an assisted suicide regime that could unwittingly extend to the disabled or the mentally ill.
The NDP’s Joe Comartin warned of “mercy killings” becoming a regular component of an underfunded Canadian health-care system. “The risk we have is sending a message to the country that life is expendable, that we are prepared to say that we do not care enough for people to take care of them,” he said.
A Conservative, Joy Smith, raised the experience of Dutch bioethicist Theo Boer, an initial supporter of euthanasia in the Netherlands who ultimately became a fierce critic when he saw it being applied well beyond rare cases of terminal illness or unbearable pain. “Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not likely to ever go back in again,” said Boer in 2014.
Around this time, even as polls showed more than 75 per cent of Canadians to be in support of MAID, an internal poll by the Canadian Medical Association found that 63 per cent of physicians would refuse to offer assisted death to a patient.
One of them, John C. Wootton, wrote in a letter to the Canadian Medical Association Journal that MAID’s core issue was that it was a 100 per cent successful procedure, with no way of telling whether it was a mistake. “Because few other medical acts can be accomplished with such impunity, we are likely to become more and more comfortable with it, and more and more permissive as times goes by,” he wrote.
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