I am not talking about two-tier health-care, I am talking about two-tier political treatment. PM Martin is supposed to the great defender of public health-care, willing to stare down Premier Klein on the matter, but it privatization occurs in Quebec, IN HIS OWN RIDING!, he does nothing about it.
Check out the details in Don Martin's column in today's National Post.
...What’s going on in Montreal is far beyond any tepid push to see more private services billed to the provincial health plan, as proposed by Alberta’s notorious Bill 11. It’s not even a case of doctors leaving medicare to set up shop as private entrepreneurs. It’s nothing less than a compromising of the Canada Health Act by doctors shuffling between public and private systems, charging patients for medically necessary add-ons as they deliver publicly insured treatment.
...Alberta lost millions of dollars in federal transfers in the mid-1990s for just allowing eye surgeons to charge a small “facility fee.” In British Columbia, they’re still losing transfer dollars for allowing extra billing for some upgraded treatments. But in Quebec, the Gazette found a patient, whose surgery was covered by public health insurance, being charged $1,000 for nursing care, $300 for instrument sterilization, $200 for disposable supplies, another $200 for medication, $100 for a dressings and $200 in unspecified administrative charges.
Remember, this is the city that elected Paul Martin as an MP. And, lest we forget, it was that same MP who warned that evil-doers Ralph Klein and Stephen Harper would conspire to undermine medicare if the federal Conservatives won the last election. What’s clearly happened here is another outbreak of asymmetrical federalism — robust private health delivery tolerated in Quebec which would trigger punishing fines against any province boldly going where only Montreal has gone before.
Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh’s reaction Monday was to gulp and decline to talk specifics because he is allegedly “carrying on a dialogue with other provinces suspected of violating the Canada Health Act.” That’s news to Alberta, where officials have opted to stuff a sock into any talk of violating the Act. “We’re going to do more and talk less,” confided a Klein confidant. “Ralph has told regional health authorities to stop coming to him for permission to experiment. That speech has triggered unbelievable activity in experimentation.” For Paul Martin, privatization of health will become another pounding hangover from the darkest days of an election he was losing.
By raising the Alberta bogeyman of privatization in mid-campaign, Martin thought he’d found a winner. “I will look Ralph Klein in the eye and I will say no,” he said, pounding a gleeful fist on the podium while his aides beamed. “Unlike Stephen Harper, I will defend medicare.” If he
looked south from his riding, the prime minister would see medicare morphing into a system of profit-seeking entrepreneurial activity. By turning a blind eye, he’s saying “yes.”
More importantly, why do Canadians put up with this? I am being serious. Why is it that if a right-of-centre party suggests something they are evil but if the centre-left party lies to you saying they won't do something and then do it anyway people keep voting them in?
