Health care

[Argus]

I've been bitching about health care for years, hoping politicians would take the problems seriously. So far this election that has not happened. And that's double so with the Liberals, who are offering to fix everything about health care - everything, all at one go! No details on how, though. No spending commitments. Not even any costing. These are the kinds of promises you know are completely worthless, and just being thrown out to win votes. Even the picture in here looks like some punk desperately throwing out promises he has no intention of keeping.

The claim: "A re-elected Liberal government will make sure every Canadian has access to a family doctor, to mental health services, to affordable prescription drugs and to national pharmacare."

— The federal Liberals tout their promise to boost health care funding by $6 billion over the coming four years.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-health-care-fact-check-1.5295449

Edited September 24, 2019 by Argus

[Army Guy]

there is no costing because they have no intention of keeping those promises.....with the liberals it is never about the truth, it all about the con.....and we have fallen for it hook line and sinker....man we are stupid....Anyone but Justin...

[scribblet]

The Greens plan is estimated to cost 37 billion...   how on earth are they going to pay for that and keep funding for the crappy health care system we have now. 

[Army Guy]

The budget will balance itself.....and we will pass this debt onto Justins kids....liberals voters don't care about the budget, they care about how much money is coming to them....

[Dougie93]

23 minutes ago, Army Guy said:

The budget will balance itself.....and we will pass this debt onto Justins kids....liberals voters don't care about the budget, they care about how much money is coming to them....

Again, policy stimulus free money party, voters are not going to care about debt until it costs something, moral hazard is in effect, but it's the central banks which are inciting it.

In fairness to the Liberals, this is not limited to Canada, America is doing it, Europe is doing it, everybody has drunk the kool-aid

Governments have  become addicted to the stimulus which was supposed to be an emergency measure in 2008, that has now become the new normal.

Edited September 25, 2019 by Dougie93

[Nefarious Banana]

3 hours ago, scribblet said:

The Greens plan is estimated to cost 37 billion...   how on earth are they going to pay for that and keep funding for the crappy health care system we have now. 

How are they going to pay . . . . care to guess ?  In addition, lovely Elizabeth will tax the shit out of any existing big companies which will scare future investment away. Dummy ways my friend, dummy ways . . . 

[cannuck]

Greens and NDP have no expectation of actually winning a majority, so what they say is pretty much irrelevant.   As power brokers in a minority, might be a different story, but I still doubt their election platform will be adopted as policy, never mind legislation - even by a minority co-alition.

[Army Guy]

Thank god, we already have one wing nut making bullshit policies already 

[cannuck]

On 9/25/2019 at 3:34 PM, scribblet said:

The Greens plan is estimated to cost 37 billion...   how on earth are they going to pay for that and keep funding for the crappy health care system we have now. 

You haven't been listening to the left, have you?   Simply tax the rich...who will gladly just stay here, keep their money here and endlessly reward failure to the very bottom of their bank accounts.

[Argus]

The reality of our pissy health care system, is a guy waiting six years for an operation to relieve a terrible condition which almost confines him to his house. And how much time was spent on it in the last election? None. About the same amount spent in the last provincial election.

When Bill Bagyan was woken earlier this month, lying in a hotel room he'd paid for himself after making yet another drive to Ottawa from his home in Kingston, and was told told in sorrowful tones by a hospital staffer that he was once again being bumped from surgery, the first thing he thought of was climbing the stairs to the roof and jumping off.

It has been six years since doctors first accurately diagnosed what was making it so painfully difficult for Bagyan to urinate. What they'd thought was an enlarged prostate was in fact a buildup of scar tissue blocking his urethra. 

For the first few years, his urologist repeatedly tried to clear it out, inserting catheters and scopes and even a scope with miniature scissors into his penis, working up to his bladder. Each time, the scar tissue would just thicken.

"He was making it worse," says Bagyan, in the deliberate, fatigued cadence of someone for whom pain and discomfort never abates.

He needed surgery. But only a few surgeons in Canada had the training necessary to operate.

So patient Bill Bagyan entered the twilight world of the Canadian waiting list – a place of voicemails and messages and sitting on hold for an hour at a time.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-bill-bagyan-health-care-neil-macdonald-1.5355707

[scribblet]

Our health system is sad, years on a wait list is not health care.   I've been on a wait list just to see a specialist since April, this year, the appt. is for June 2020.    If I win the lottery I'm off to t he States.  This is one of the reasons we should have choices, as in the choice to buy insurance and or pay for it in our own country. 

[cannuck]

Government should continue to provide the sick care insurance as it does now. What it should NOT continue is to monopolize service delivery.  Yes, they should - as does most of the rest of the developed world - still operate service delivery but NOT have a monopoly.  Our government sick care insurance should pay out public or private delivery of insured services at equal rate.  What could THEN follow is the ability for those who choose to buy supplemental sick care insurance to have better access to faster/better services.  Those with real money do just that now, self insured and simply go to the best provider available internationally.

[Michael Hardner]

On 10/6/2019 at 10:10 AM, cannuck said:

 Simply tax the rich...who will gladly just stay here, keep their money here and endlessly reward failure to the very bottom of their bank accounts.

The money that can leave has done so hasn't it ?  But this is about health care.

I think I agree with your premise above that service delivery needs a little disruption and challenge.  I'm not convinced that patients are being well served for what we're paying.  Unfortunately, though, good management would only be part of the picture - driving down wages would be the other part.  Companies could, I'm sure, bring qualified doctors from other countries working under TFW visas for example.  How does that sound ?

[cannuck]

6 hours ago, Michael Hardner said:

The money that can leave has done so hasn't it ?  But this is about health care.

I think I agree with your premise above that service delivery needs a little disruption and challenge.  I'm not convinced that patients are being well served for what we're paying.  Unfortunately, though, good management would only be part of the picture - driving down wages would be the other part.  Companies could, I'm sure, bring qualified doctors from other countries working under TFW visas for example.  How does that sound ?

I have been generally very unimpressed by the quality of sick care providers who are newly arrived...and conversely VERY impressed by many of second generation.   I believe in that lies the key: we need to educate more and better providers.  I can not say we are not well served overall, as we pay half as much for sick care compared with our US neighbours and get far better overall results.  What we do NOT have - due to too much government service delivery - are the phenomenal centers of excellence.   Now, before citing that these are for-profit results, keep in mind that one of the best of the best (Mao) is a non-profit company...so we KNOW it can be done.  The whole culture of sick care delivery needs overhaul, in many places, but those G7 countries that do better than we do (i.e. everyone but USA) have it a lot closer to the right path.

[Michael Hardner]

3 minutes ago, cannuck said:

I have been generally very unimpressed by the quality of sick care providers who are newly arrived...and conversely VERY impressed by many of second generation.   I believe in that lies the key: we need to educate more and better providers.  I can not say we are not well served overall, as we pay half as much for sick care compared with our US neighbours and get far better overall results.  What we do NOT have - due to too much government service delivery - are the phenomenal centers of excellence.   Now, before citing that these are for-profit results, keep in mind that one of the best of the best (Mao) is a non-profit company...so we KNOW it can be done.  The whole culture of sick care delivery needs overhaul, in many places, but those G7 countries that do better than we do (i.e. everyone but USA) have it a lot closer to the right path.

I think it would help if Canadians stopped comparing to the US system and started considering things like fees, instead of seeing criticism and trade-offs as blasphemy.  

[wonderfully_aly]

On 9/24/2019 at 4:34 PM, Argus said:

I've been bitching about health care for years, hoping politicians would take the problems seriously. So far this election that has not happened. And that's double so with the Liberals, who are offering to fix everything about health care - everything, all at one go! No details on how, though. No spending commitments. Not even any costing. These are the kinds of promises you know are completely worthless, and just being thrown out to win votes. Even the picture in here looks like some punk desperately throwing out promises he has no intention of keeping.

The claim: "A re-elected Liberal government will make sure every Canadian has access to a family doctor, to mental health services, to affordable prescription drugs and to national pharmacare."

— The federal Liberals tout their promise to boost health care funding by $6 billion over the coming four years.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-health-care-fact-check-1.5295449

I like their claim... It's not possible.  There's such a doctor shortage, and most people cannot afford mental health services as an appointment with a psychologist etc is $190 or more.  

[SpankyMcFarland]

Mental health services should have had their spending ring-fenced when the old asylums were closing and community care, along with the new antipsychotic drugs, were supposed to replace many of those beds. Across the West, this advance, which should have led to better care, was used to cut the mental health budget and leave seriously ill psychotic patients with nowhere to go. 

[Marocc]

32 minutes ago, SpankyMcFarland said:

Across the West, this advance, which should have led to better care, was used to cut the mental health budget and leave seriously ill psychotic patients with nowhere to go. 

A lot of countries have done excellent job with that....across the West. By that I don't mean US.

[SpankyMcFarland]

1 hour ago, Marocc said:

A lot of countries have done excellent job with that....across the West. By that I don't mean US.

Really? Somewhere in Scandinavia? I don’t know of an English-speaking country that’s carried through on the community care promise. I was going to limit my statement to that and then I got a bit carried away and labelled the entire West with my broad brush which may be unfair. I think the idea arose in Italy and AFAIK they haven’t done so well either, and I spent decades listening to complaints from psychiatrists about the shortage of beds in Canada. If there’s a national model out there we should follow, I’d love to hear about it. 

Edited January 4, 2020 by SpankyMcFarland

[eyeball]

On 9/24/2019 at 4:34 PM, Argus said:

These are the kinds of promises you know are completely worthless, and just being thrown out to win votes. Even the picture in here looks like some punk desperately throwing out promises he has no intention of keeping.

Does anyone have any clue as to why it's still perfectly legal for politicians to lie like this?

Why haven't conservative parties down anything meaningful to make it illegal when they had the chance to do so?

[bush_cheney2004]

21 minutes ago, eyeball said:

Why haven't conservative parties down anything meaningful to make it illegal when they had the chance to do so?

 

Same reason the left hasn't done so.

[Yzermandius19]

27 minutes ago, eyeball said:

Does anyone have any clue as to why it's still perfectly legal for politicians to lie like this?

Why haven't conservative parties down anything meaningful to make it illegal when they had the chance to do so?

Why should lying be illegal? You really think freedom of speech only means speech you agree with or aren't bothered by, don't you? Politicians have no right to free speech, if they don't use that speech in a way that eyeball agrees with, what could possibly go wrong with such a law?

Edited January 4, 2020 by Yzermandius19

[Marocc]

4 hours ago, eyeball said:

Does anyone have any clue as to why it's still perfectly legal for politicians to lie like this?

It would be impractical to make lying a crime, except in court. The common people rarely know whether the person has tried to do what he promised or not.

[Marocc]

6 hours ago, SpankyMcFarland said:

I don’t know of an English-speaking country that’s carried through on the community care promise.

What promise, exactly? UK has a pretty impressive psychiatric treatment system. Scandinavian countries and Baltic countries have also made great progress with deinstitutionalization in the last decades.

Shortage of beds is probably a problem everywhere. In psychiatric treatment it may be part of the deinstitutionalization precisely. The amount of beds are decreased since the amount of admissions decreases. There remains the decision of who gets the available bed. That's for the psychiatrist to make.

If there is a big problem with a shortage of beds in one hospital or one ward, it doesn't automatically mean it is the same in other hospitals and other wards.

[eyeball]

7 hours ago, Marocc said:

It would be impractical to make lying a crime, except in court. The common people rarely know whether the person has tried to do what he promised or not.

People like you make me puke.