Thursday, September 10, 2009

"Code Gridlock" in Niagara's monopoly health system - yet no explanation from secretive Liberal MPP Jim Bradley

below: St. Catharines Standard, Sept.10, 2009:click to enlarge!

Be ready for "a really long wait" at the St. Catharines General Hospital, the Standard's Grant Lafleche reports.

What else is new in McGuinty's Liberal-health-monopoly-land?
Elective surgeries being cancelled - and yet, the local Liberal monopolist, MPP Jim Jerk Off Bradley, IS NOT EVEN MENTIONED in the story!??

Many St. Catharines residents have been waiting a long time for the St. Catharines Standard to actually include responses from the local Liberal health monopolist, MPP Jim Bradley, in these health care stories.

What exactly was Jim Bradley's response to this "code gridlock" protocol in his own city's hospital?

Was Jim Bradley even asked by "reporter" Lafleche for a response or comment? {...what Liberal ass-kissing... Bradley wasn't even asked - he was protected from scutiny!!}

In this St. Catharines Standard article, not one mention was made of any Ontario Liberal, or of the Liberal government's monopolist role in this latest NHS fiasco!
It's as if McGuinty's monopolist Liberals don't have anything to do with any of this! {...great job by "reporter" Grant: time to give him some awards!}

We all know what Good Ole Jimmy's m.o. was when he blustered his way during the Harris years, when Liberal Jean Chretien and Paul Martin were happily cutting federal transfer payments to the provinces.
Good Ole Jimmy had a heyday blaming the Ontario Conservatives for his Liberal federal colleagues' cuts!

Now, Good Ole Jimmy's dropped off the radar and gone missing in his cosy, media-enabled Cone of Silence, as his health monopoly crumbles.
Patients have to wait while Jimmy serves at the altar of Tommy Douglas.

Seeing no mention of health-care-monopolist Jim Bradley in health-care-related stories seems to be a predictable pattern by now at the St. Catharines Standard.

One would think that Lafleche or some Standard editor would remember the Standard's own editorial just last Saturday, Sept.5, 2009, regarding the lack of health-care debate in Canada - but, where's the health-care debate here, right in Niagara??

Bradley is allowed to get away with silence while his Ontario Liberals cut, overcrowd and under-fund their health monopoly!
No one seems to hold Jim Bradley or Kim Craitor to account!! How can you buy that kind of status-quo supporting, fifth-columnist loyalty from Niagara's Liberal-lovin' press?

There was a brief bit of open-minded hope in the St. Catharines Standard's editorial, "Private health-care debate needed among Canadians", (Sept.5, 2009, written by Brian MacLeod):

"Many Canadians are appalled by the toxic health-care debate in the United States - but at least they're having a no-holds-barred discussion.
We dare not do such a thing in Canada.
What's going on in the U. S. is the mirror image of what we need here, minus the apocalyptic arguments.
They are debating the expansion of public health care. But we're afraid to debate having more private health care.
Americans are polarized on the issue - to the point President Barack Obama's proposals have been described as "evil" and CNN insists on using a graphic that proclaims "death panel fears."
We don't get so preposterous during debates in Canada, but when the rhetoric about queue-jumping and two-tier health care gets trotted out, politicians run for the hills.
Instead, private clinics open with government contracts. They're not allowed to charge premiums, so this is deemed to be public health care. They make money by specializing, which creates efficiencies that make doing the same procedure thousands of times more cost effective.
They do MRIs and CT scans, they perform some surgeries and they operate as private clinics. The demand is there, and so is the model to make them work, but they upset public health-care purists who say they steal resources from the public system.
It's not like we don't have private health care. The Canadian Institute for Health Information says that in 2005 (the last year of data provided), health-care spending across Canada reached more than $140 billion -- with $43.2 billion of that spent on private care.
Former Alberta premier Ralph Klein took an aggressive stance in favour of private health care a decade ago, and in 2007, Ontario PC leader John Tory talked of more private partnerships. Neither got anywhere. Opponents didn't even want the debate to happen.
And now, with most governments running deficits, money for health care to meet the needs of a growing seniors population will be scarce.
Private-sector investment seems like a viable option.
If only we could talk about it."

*
What MacLeod didn't mention in the above article, and glossed over, was that John Tory's 2007 plan simply contemplated publicly-paid private delivery (...which is not the large issue: the real issue is the freedom of not having the state ban  privately-paid, privately delivered health-care choices in Ontario. THAT is what the lib-left monopoly-enforcers do not want to see in Ontario.)

Also, MacLeod just forgets to mention how viscerally the federal Liberals had chastised Liberal MP Pierre Pettigrew, when he had proposed mild, tepid ideas similar to John Tory's, three years earlier, in 2004; the federal Liberal hypocrites went ballistic to Pettigrew's most innocuous hints of reform, which were barely any kind of reform at all!!!)

"If only we could talk about it", the above editorial points out!!
But Liberal monopolists such as Jim Bradley do not want to talk about it!!
And neither, really, does the local press! Grant Lafleche sure didn't bother!

It's quite obvious that one of the main spouters of apocalyptic health care rhetoric was Good Ole Jim Bradley!
Jimmy's been smugly obstructing reform debate for years!
Even Obama realizes that single-payer, as practised in Ontario, is not what the U.S. needs, or wants!! When will Good Ole Single-Payer-Jim realize that as well? When the Shona Holmes case against his Liberal government comes through?!

Let's see (...for old times' sake!) what the St. Catharines Standard had once written, in an extremely rare criticism of Good Ole Jim Bradley on this very subject - on Jim Bradley's predictable obstructionist health-care fear-mongering - way back, eight years ago, in "Grits could be haunted by health care" (St. Catharines Standard editorial, Apr.21, 2001):

"There are few things more predictable and disheartening in politics than the reactions to pronouncements that our health system is in need of reform.
The idea that reform is needed is a no-brainer. As currently constructed, Canada's health system serves as a black hole for public funds. Making matters worse is that despite the endless injection of money, the general belief is that health-care service is deteriorating across the country.
And so the Harris government's speech from the throne this week stated: "In the absence of fundamental reform, increasing funding is no answer to the national crisis facing the health-care system."
The government called for a "broad" dialogue between the provinces and Ottawa on medical reform and argued there should be no sacred cows.
"Responsible choices and tough decisions are needed not merely to sustain, but quite literally to save, Canada's health-care system."
While the message expressed is rapidly becoming the pillar of mainstream thinking on the subject, it was the reputation of the messenger this week that allowed for suggestions of ulterior motives to be raised and political hay to be made.
St. Catharines Liberal MPP Jim Bradley, in lock-step with his leader Dalton McGuinty, immediately dismissed the province's sincerity in trying to bring some fiscal sanity and improvements to Ontario's health-care system.
"There's no question in my mind that they're looking for a way to impose a two-tiered health-care system with a good deal of privatization in it as an excuse to save money," intoned Bradley.
McGuinty warned the government intends to open the door to U.S.- style health care.
Ah yes, the Holy Trinity of catch-phrases designed to stifle any attempt at real reform - two-tier, privatization and U.S.- style.
The provincial Liberals need only look to their federal cousins to appreciate the impact of fear-mongering on health care. The feds so successfully accused Stockwell Day in last fall's election of having a secret agenda to privatize our health system it had all Canadian Alliance members looking collectively like a deer caught in the headlights whenever the issue was raised.
The Alliance fell into line on the question of upholding the government monopoly on service delivery, and any hope for serious reform talk disappeared.
Ironically, it's the Liberal party, either federal or provincial, that is most likely to pave the way for a two-tier delivery system in health care.
Call it the Nixon-goes-to-China syndrome. Who but an ardent, long-time communist-hater like U.S. president Richard Nixon could have had the political support to re-establish ties with China in the early 1970s?
Closer to home, which party could be better positioned to preach the virtues of ever-wider free trade than those virulent anti-free traders of the 1980s, the federal Liberals?
Of course, when the health-care delivery system is inevitably reformed to include players other than government, the Liberals won't be using the phrase two-tier. And they'll speak of successful models in Europe.
The phrase U.S.-style will never be mentioned. Political spin doctors will be working overtime to come up with more user-friendly terms.
How disheartening. How predictable."

*

So little has changed in Ontario's toxic health-reform non-debate, that this above 2001 editorial from the St.Catharines Standard is still as relevant as if it had been written just yesterday!!
It's as if the eight long years between these two previous editorials never happened.
How much time we have lost kissing Tommy Douglas's socialist ass!

Jim Bradley's been a bombastic health-care-reform obstructionist for years. Monopoly-pusher Bradley was "stifling reform" for decades.
All we've seen in his Liberal single-payer monopoly has been failure.
Jim Bradley, the smug Liberal reactionary, ignorantly refuses to acknowledge his Liberal party's monopolist failures.
This clown just pushes for more socialism, and more state-control: more of the same old failed monopolist single-payer status-quo.

Both MPP Bradley and MP Michael Ignatieff refuse to publicly comment on Liberal MP Keith Martin's health care reform ideas...
see:
*(http://rightinniagara.blogspot.com/2009/04/ontarios-rotten-liberal-health-care.html)
*(
http://rightinniagara.blogspot.com/2009/08/will-iggy-become-single-payer-heretic.html)
*(
http://rightinniagara.blogspot.com/2007/08/liberal-healthcare-duplicity-ontario.html)

And now windbag Iggy is following Bradley's tired old head-in-the-sand reactionary playbook.
*

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