Re: ‘Health care battle was lost long ago,’ Nov. 27 Gazette:
There are several contentious points in Eric Joly’s letter that he can perhaps clear up. He claims that Canadian doctors simply accepted the will of the people when they came on board what he seems to consider the Medicare bandwagon when, actually, Medicare was probably the best thing for them as well. Doctors in the U.S. live with a constant barrage of red tape and form filling not to mention stress from when the welfare and treatment of patients is taken out of their hands by HMOs.
Now that is closer to ‘the enslavement of ... the medical profession’ than exists at present in the Canadian system. It is a well known and easily substantiated fact that in the U.S. it is often a question of your well-being and life or your home and/or business — as though the two were unconnected. It is also likely that were the Canadian health care system privatized, insurance would be even higher here than it is in the U.S. — as is, for instance, air transportation. But more egregiously, Mr. Joly fails to show how it would be possible for individuals to pay for adequate care when the public system claims to be in financial crisis. As it is, many people can’t afford the $20,000 and often more it takes to control MS symptoms. There are new drugs for cancer accessible only to a privileged minority. Where is that money coming from for privatization, or is it a mystical factor in the equation? As to the system itself, the deficiencies and inefficiencies would not automatically disappear even if it were affordable privatized, which we can be certain it wouldn’t be because 44 million Americans can’t afford any health care right now.
Mr. Joly claims health care is not a right. What then does he consider a right? That hospitals and doctor training be paid to provide health care to those who can afford it by the taxes of those who cannot afford it? Interestingly, he constructs this argument as being in the interests of the ill who actually would be far worse off, as is the case in the U.S., in his Utopia for the well-off.
This is a classic conservative argument where the position of oppressor and oppressed are reversed and in which the most regressive views are couched in obscurantist rhetoric as being in the interests of those whom it is calculated actually to marginalize further.
Doris Wrench Eisler, St. Albert
