Saturday, November 24, 2007

Smitherman's skewed, shortage-plagued Liberal health system

This letter by R. Bobak "Local councils shouldn't haggle with doctors", (St. Catharines Standard, Dec.29, 2006):

"Re: Doctor claims offer reneged, The Standard, Dec. 20.

That a family doctor should even have to grovel before some local politicians for "cash incentives" to set up shop shows how skewed and dysfunctional Tommy Douglas' fabled socialist health-care monopoly has become.

Why should any municipality have the right to pilfer doctors from some other municipality by subsidizing them with taxpayers' cash (in itself, a zero-sum game), when it is illegal for a private individual in Ontario to pay a doctor?

Any professional in a free marketplace should be able to operate in an area of their choice, where they believe there is a demand for their services and where they could earn their living.
But in our authoritarian liberal health-care system, skewed by salary caps and central planning, compounded within a non-competitive monopoly, health professionals are being relegated to some kind of salaried civil-servant status.

It's not a local council's mandate to haggle with doctors because of the systemic failure of Health Minister George Smitherman's dogmatic Liberal policies.

Though an Ottawa newspaper earlier this year recommended that Smitherman be fired, for any positive, meaningful health-care reform to occur, the entire Dalton McGuinty crew would need to be exorcised from office."

No comments: