Thursday, June 25, 2009

Ontario's Liberal health care hypocrites

above: St. Catharines Standard, Jun.19, 2009 (click photos to enlarge!)
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Astounding how, when a Liberal health care scandal appears provincially, that federal Liberals whip up smokescreens to divert attention away from their shared failing Liberal health care ideology.

Has anyone noticed if Liberal MP's Wayne Easter or Carolyn Bennett ever called for any investigation - public or criminal - into Dalton McGuinty's secretive health care monopoly, which killed some 500 patients from c. difficile infection?!

Easter and Bennett are oh-so-smugly outraged - but only when they can wring some political points out of their disingenuous behaviour.

Hypocrite federal Liberals say nothing about fellow Liberal McGuinty's health monopoly fiascoes.

The federal Liberals (when they brag about their good ole budget surpluses under the Chretien/Martin regime) say nothing of how they achieved those surpluses:

- by reconfiguring EI standards and pocketing the resultant funds (which Iggy now pretends his Liberals had nothing to do with (!!) ... well, how would Iggy know? He wasn't living in Canada!)

- by withholding transfer payments to the provinces, essentially downloading health care on to provinces.

Maybe Bennett and Easter could talk in detailed length about those little Liberal policy turds of theirs.

The St. Catharines Standard reported (Jun.23, 2009) that Iggy was in Welland on Jun.22, 2009:
"Welland psychiatrist Dr. Thoppil Abraham was one of several people in attendance who asked Ignatieff about the federal Liberals' commitment to public health. He asked Ignatieff if he would support a national health program, and the continued support of public health care."

[What soft lobs! We already have a (failing) national (and provincial!) health care program, whose tenets are broken every day, everywhere in Canada - and that is from a Liberal MP, Keith Martin, talking of health care under Liberal rule! 'Continued support' of duplicitous state-run single-payer health monopolism (which is apparently also known by the politically-correct euphemism of "public health") is our common political problem, not solution.]

The St. Catharines Standard continued:
"Ignatieff expressed his commitment to the continuation of public health care in Canada. "We have to have a publicly funded single-payer health system in Canada, period. We must never have a system where your access to health care is dependent on your wallet, ever."

O, praise be thine, Iggy! What Liberal crappe spewes forthe from thy Vulcanoid mind!!

I guess Iggy, having not lived in Canada for several decades, is unaware of Quebec's Supreme Court Chaoulli decision? Is Iggy that ignorant; or is Iggy pandering rhetorically to his audience, lulling them with his sweet, unrealistic lullabies of even more failed Liberal health care duplicity?

Remember when St. Catharines Liberal MPP Jim Bradley and then-health minister Liberal MPP George Smitherman, the tag team of Batman and Robin, flew into a holier than thou outrage over the Life-Line screening tests that were proposed to be brought into Ontario? Remember the 'chequebook medicine' rhetoric spewed by the conveniently-outraged Liberals then?
Now we have this article in Niagara This Week, (Jun.24, 2009):
Yes, you read that right, down at the bottom: $250.00, payable by cheque or cash.

Where's the outrage from a livid Liberal Jim Bradley, in whose Liberal-under funded "public" (and supposedly "single -payer") health system this is occurring?!
Where's MPP Jim Bradley's smug outrage, when preventative breast cancer screenings are being held for cash, right in Niagara, right in Jim's backyard?

Where's Ignatieff, the Vulcan who just several days earlier was spreading his Liberal fertilizer in Niagara, babbling something about 'wallets' and 'never, ever' ?!

Where's Wayne Easter? Where's Carolyn Bennett? Why aren't they badgering for Jim Bradley to do his Batman health-care act in this instance, the way he and Smitherman did regarding Life Line?
Thermography scans are not covered by OHIP, so patients who use this diagnostic tool must pay for it. (Deductions, with certain conditions, of course, can be made off their taxes) But, arguing that this diagnostic tool can be used as a preventive and early warning tool - thereby saving lives and future health-monopoly-covered expenses - why isn't Jim Bradley's government covering this medical expense right now?

The answer is that these Liberal hypocrites have calculated they can't get any political mileage out of it.

Bradley needs to pretend his health monopoly is fine - this as his Liberals cut health care. (As in the St. Catharines Standard story "NHS mulling closing 1 of 3 maternity departments", Jun.20, 2009, where, interestingly, the words "Jim Bradley" or "Liberal" are conveniently NOT even mentioned! No comment or response in the Standard's story from the local health care monopolist and under-funder, Jim Bradley!! You can't buy that kind of press!)

Liberal Ignatieff blusters about health care, but he's full of it as well, sadly out of touch with what the Chaoulli decision was all about. No one in Welland (at least as reported by the Standard) asked Iggy about that little inconvenient twist, or about the pending McCreith/Holmes constitutional health care challenge against the Ontario Liberal government. No one pointed out to Iggy that Iggy's idol Obama wisely chose NOT to pursue Canada's failed single-payer health care model as a template for the States!
Where's Iggy's and Liberal Jim Bradley's smug outrage to Pamela Fayerman's article: "B.C. Health Minister supports private care", (National Post, Jun.25, 2009) ?

"Kevin Falcon, British Columbia's new Health Minister, believes patients should be able to use their own money to buy expedited health care in the private sector.

"I don't have any philosophical objection to it," he said candidly. "What we have to do is improve the public delivery of services."

His statement, in his first major interview since being named Health Minister on June 10, brings to the fore the issue of a two-tier Canadian health-care system.

It has been a topic for debate for years, as patients face lengthy hospital wait times and governments try to cope with surging health-care costs.

"I do not have any objection to people using their own money just as they do for dental care or sending their kids to private school," Mr. Falcon said.

"I think choice is a good thing and reducing it is not a good thing."

But Mr. Falcon said he has never gone to a private clinic and doesn't expect ever to do so in the future.

"I'd insist on being treated like anyone else. People might hear that and say, 'Yeah, right,' but I would because I wouldn't be looking for special favours and I hope none would be offered," he said.

Reminded that a former Liberal member of the provincial legislature, Barry Penner, used a private surgery centre in 2004 when he needed a back operation during a hospital employees union strike, Mr. Falcon said: "I have no problem with what he did, particularly because it was during the strike."

Mr. Penner said at the time that he would have preferred to save the money by having surgery in a public hospital, "but that was not an option."

Mr. Penner was among 7,000 British Columbians who had surgery cancelled or delayed during the strike.

The government ended up contracting out many of the procedures to private clinics as a way to catch up.

Asked how the public should reconcile his views with a current court case in which private clinics are suing the government for not allowing doctors to accept private payment from patients in private clinics, Mr. Falcon said he has not been briefed on the details.

"It's before the courts, so I have to be careful," he said.

Private clinics are seeking a declaration that legislation preventing patients from paying for expedited care in private clinics is unconstitutional and an infringement of their rights.

The clinics plan to argue that the results of the 2005 Chaoulli Supreme Court of Canada case should be applicable in B. C.

In that case, the highest court struck down Quebec's ban on private insurance for medically necessary services.

The private clinics in the B. C. case are expected to argue that citizens should be allowed to buy private health insurance to use in private clinics if their operative care is not delivered in a timely matter in the public system."


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Doesn't Michael Ignatieff believe in patient choice? Has Liberal leader Ignatieff publicly condemned the provincial government of British Columbia - a LIBERAL government!! - for its heretical anti-single-payer stand, so anti-thetical to what Iggy was glibly spouting several days ago, on Jun.22, 2009, in Welland Ont.?

Come on, Iggy!! Spout some real world response to what the Liberal government in B.C. is saying!! Where's bag of hot air Iggy on this issue, the very issue he was blabbing about here in Niagara several days ago? Talk about Liberal health care duplicity!

Come on, Liberals Jim Bradley...Dalton McGuinty...David Caplan: spout some of your ideologically-blinded propaganda, condemning what the Liberal B.C. health minister has said!!

Jim Bradley and Caplan and McGuinty are ALL ABOUT enforcing a despotic single-payer monopoly in Ontario!

Ontario's arrogant Liberals are ALL ABOUT philosophy and dangerous anti-patient-choice ideology! Smitherman was the epitome of this disgracefully politically-retarded attitude!
Bradley's just as guilty!

B.C.'s Liberal health minister Falcon says he believes patients should be able to use their own money to buy expedited health care in the private sector - but Ontario's authoritarian Liberals refuse to acknowledge this kind of thinking. They think there is no problem with their health monopoly that a couple more draconian laws and a couple more million dollars of eHealth scandals won't fix!

These Liberal monopolists just don't get it - they just don't get that they are glorifying a flawed, unrealistic, socialist philosophy. They just don't get that their much-vaunted monopoly is a failed political construct.

Liberal monopolists such as Jim Bradley do not think, as does Falcon, that 'choice is a good thing'. Bradley believes that less choice is a good thing.

Bradley for years blabbed about all the supposed evils of Mike Harris - yet Bradley is mysteriously silent about his fellow Liberal cousins in British Columbia. I guess Bradley will try to figure out a way to smear B.C.'s Liberals the way he did Harris. Or maybe Bradley will remain silent, and maybe the local press won't bother to ask for Jim Bradley's comment on the events unfolding in B.C.: we wouldn't want Bradley to look like a political hypocrite!

Ontario's McGuinty monopolists (and Ontario Liberal MP Ignatieff as well) are inexplicably, obstinately stuck on propagating their failed single-payer ideology. It's criminal that so many Ontarians have been forced to suffer just so McGuinty's secretive, arrogant Liberals could indulge themselves with their monopolist fantasies.

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