Thoughts on BC Politics and More

Linda Slater waited two years to walk with her grandchildren to the playground down the street from her Calgary home. She's finally able to do it. She just had to pay $33,000.  "I can walk without pain," she said. In June, the 83-year-old emptied her retirement savings to have her left knee replaced at a private, for-profit surgical clinic in Toronto ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Canada spends more on health care than just about any other country in the world, and with abysmal results. Yet when it comes to fixing the problem, most politicians and policy-makers are immune to common sense.  As business leader Gwyn Morgan writes, allowing private options alongside government-funded health care has been proven to help patients in both systems – around the world and here in Canada, too. Yet the courts continued to uphold restrictions on private care while the Mark Carney government simply promises to throw still more money at the problem – showing itself to be as deluded and dogmatic as those who went before ... CLICK HERE for the full story 

Ongoing emergency room delays at Abbotsford Regional Hospital have prompted the city’s police department to turn to a private health company to handle basic medical needs for jail prisoners. The move is meant to free up police officers who are required to wait with prisoners in the hospital’s emergency department—sometimes for as long as eight hours. But one expert notes that the use of private medical services by public bodies, if it becomes widespread, could further aggravate the issues facing Canada’s health system ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Can we really debate private health care in Canada if we don’t understand how it works? A new report by the C.D. Howe Institute explains how to understand private health care in context, reveals why the contours of private health care in Canada vary so much across the country, and examines why they are changing. Private aspects of healthcare already exist in different forms and to varying degrees across Canadian provinces, largely depending on their respective legislation and regulations. For example, while most healthcare professionals bill through the public insurance system, there are many instances of those who bill privately; but the conditions under which they can do so differ across provinces ... CLICK HERE for the full story