The Canadian Medical Association and Maclean’s magazine held a town hall in Toronto on March 1, 2011, to discuss rebuilding Medicare. The remaining ones will be held in Edmonton, Vancouver, and lastly, Ottawa also home to the first SOS Medicare conference in 1979. It’s hard to believe that more than three decades have passed and we are still looking for ways to revive this failing social program. It may have started with good intentions but we all know that good intentions don’t always lead us down the best road.
Our citizens are forced to pay for a health care system where politicians and health care bureaucrats make decisions regarding our access to health care and the type and quality of care we receive. With a government monopoly on medically necessary services, the only option available to patients is to wait on lists or leave the country to seek care.
Some say we need to focus on prevention, but rising rates of obesity and diabetes indicate that there is little incentive for people to adopt healthier behaviors when they are insulated from the true costs of their medical care. Things are unlikely to change until individuals, not third-party payers like government, assume the role of customer and start paying directly for their own medical care.
Canadian health care is not free. Would you rather pay for it directly and have the freedom to choose the quality and quantity of your medical care or would you rather have the government pay for it on your behalf and make those decisions for you?
We’ve reached the end of the path to socialized medicine. It’s time to turn around.
Rather than having your access to health care being a political issue that bureaucrats and politicians fight over, it should be a private issue in which individuals own and control the dollars in their health care decisions. Canada should start experimenting with individual health savings accounts while deregulating the prices of medical services. Look at how the price of Lasik has dropped with competition and without price contrlos. This does not negate a legitimate role for insurance to compensate for large unexpected financial losses.
My mother has been cared for by first homecare, and when my father was unable to care for her, she was transferred to a personal care home (PCH) In the personal care home, she was offered activities such as carpet bowling, sing songs, and placed with residents that had similar cognitive abilities, in order for them to enjoy some mental stimulation and friendship.
Unfortunately, after a short time, my mother was unable to eat (this had happened in the past and usually lasted a few months), where she had to be tube fed for a period. Since the PCH was unable to offer this service such as giving medications through the tube and flushing, and determining when she required tube feeding, she was transferred to a community hospital to await placement in a chronic care facility.
Due to the fact that she required a special tube to feed her with (a PEG tube) she was not able to stay in the PCH and had to wait in a community hospital for one and one half years until a chronic care bed was found for her for permanent placement.
In the community hospital, where she was on a medical unit, she was placed in a bed and was sometimes placed in a chair for part of the day. She was not taken to the washroom ever, and was made to wear diapers. Her diapers were not changed on a regular basis and there were a number of incidents where I found a pool of urine beneath her chair as the urine leaked through the diaper, through the chair, and left a pool on the floor. She also developed some skin issues due to sitting in urine for so often and for so long.
In a hospital my mother did not have any mental or physical stimulation to keep her mind busy or physical stimulation, like assistance with walking. The only stimulation she received was from visits from family. After her stay in hospital, she was unable to walk, and she lost much of her ability to speak and ask for things she needed. After this stay she went from someone that was able to walk a little, and make it to the washroom when needed. She was able to communicate her needs to staff and family She is now in a chronic care facility where she is given the basics of life, tube feeding, diaper changes, and is moved by electric lift from her bed to her chair each day. She is not able to communicate her needs and is unable to walk, and relys on diapers.
I feel that it is a real shame that she has lost so much of her life due to our inefficient health care system, and that our elderly in my opinion are not treated as persons, however as a chart number, and only occupy a space that needs to be fed and watered daily.