Sunday, December 16, 2007

Nurses don't milk the public health system?

Re: “Turning blind eye to private clinics”, Joan Lesmond, (Toronto Star, Dec. 9. 2005):

In light of Jack Layton’s recent health privatization flip-flop, is Joan Lesmond, the president of the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario, truly interested in healthcare, or health-scare?
Why would a prominent RN like Lesmond use such “biased, self-interested” terms about unnamed “physicians who milk the public system for private profit”? Doesn’t her own union quite handsomely “milk the public system” as well?
Why does she fearmonger with the old chestnut that for-profit clinics will siphon health-care providers from the public system?
The solution to her dilemma is simple – she should summarily ban her union members from working at any private clinic. The effect would be twofold: new clinics would gladly source their own staff, while Lesmond would buy some time to keep her cozy nurses’ monopoly from disintegrating.

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