A timely bit of info if there ever was:
The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country’s health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.
Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country – who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting – recognize that changes must be made.
“We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize,” Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
“We know that there must be change,” she said. “We’re all running flat out, we’re all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands.”
The pitch for change at the conference is to start with a presentation from Dr. Robert Ouellet, the current president of the CMA, who has said there’s a critical need to make Canada’s health-care system patient-centred. He will present details from his fact-finding trip to Europe in January, where he met with health groups in England, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands and France.
His thoughts on the issue are already clear. Ouellet has been saying since his return that “a health-care revolution has passed us by,” that it’s possible to make wait lists disappear while maintaining universal coverage and “that competition should be welcomed, not feared.”
In other words, Ouellet believes there could be a role for private health-care delivery within the public system.
Anyone want Obamacare, now?
Look, liberals, government can play a role in helping manage funds to ensure that people without coverage aren’t left out in the cold – though, even there, the actual dispensing of the money would be best left to private charitable organizations. What government can’t do is run the system – even in the military, staffed with brave and dedicated men and women, things get screwed up…if the military can’t get the bureaucracy right, what makes you think anyone else will? All these boards and all the piles of bureaucratic flapdoodle proposed in Obamacare would, indeed, crush those private insurers your side is demonizing, but they would make the system bureaucrat-centered, rather than patient-centered. Canada is just learning this, the hard way.
We don’t need to – we can get quality, inexpensive health care to all Americans (don’t you mean “affordable”? No, “affordable” is liberal-speak for “costs like the Dickens but not directly” – inexpensive means precisely that). We can’t get it with Obama and his Democrats, but we can get it…it’ll just have to wait until at least 2011.
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