I think Iggy is allergic to sneezing and he would get a lot of that pretax fever in Ab. He also has a strong aversion to rotten eggs, and the H2S from those sour gas areas, welling up amongst the population of derricks and derrick hands would make his belly ache.
Politicians campaign as armies where they know they can win, rather where they know they are going to lose.
They hung Trudeau in effigy in AB when he put on his great transfer tax called the national energy program.
I hate to say the Conservatives are the only solution to our national problems. They can do little as certain levels to curb the massive inefficiencies of government. Michael Wilson tried, but he faced the fact that the civil service is such a large voting block and lobby, and a vicious one, that all he could do was shadow box trying to clean it up and he could do nothing at all about the top heavy provincial governments. 40% of civil servants are red lined, meaning they have no real job, and just come to work to fill in time. This is appalling, but they government can do nothing to either give them productive work, or move them into private sector. The unions won't allow it. One can hardly expect the civil service to vote for a program that will put them out of work, or work for lower salaries. In the medicare area, all hospital workers and the doctors too are effectively government employees, or civil servants. One imagines that doctors suck down most of the medicare budget with their fees as they make what seems to be pretty large money. In fact doctors only receive 10% of the budget. The rest is administration. Medicare is 90% inefficient. And it does not pay for drugs, which are one of the biggest costs of medical care. It pays for government civil servants who do not provide any medical service, and that is most of what it pays for. A doctor who wants to do his own blood tests is his own lab cannot get enough money for this service to justify the expense. He gets $15 for a blood test and it takes him about 20 minutes to do. You can't get a car fixed for those rates. No way plumbing or electrical work. In 1960's a doctor got paid $60 for delivering a baby and about the same for an operation where the prostate was removed. He could not afford to pay an anaethesiologist for the operation.
You could not pay 4 car mechanics to oversee a delivery for that kind of remuneration. You can imagine four greasy guys in coveralls walking in to an operating theatre, On person handles the gas, called Lefty, another, Larry puts on a catcher's mitt for the kid, one acts as a nurse. Curly lights up a cigarette and reads a magazine. Moe gives directions and plays with the forceps in an unseemly way. At the end of the process they hand the patient a bill for 8 hours in the garage times four delivery mechanics. It would cost you more to get a baby born in an auto shop than a hospital if they charged regular rates. So are we getting a bargain? No, as the cost you get billed as a tax payer in real world medicare adds in another 20 employees who weren't there.
When doctors ran their own hospitals in Canada during the 1960's, a private clinic could always provide a private ward, and the cost of a room in a private hospital was about $150 a day back then. A public hospital that ran under government auspices cost $450 a day for a public ward, where 4 persons shared a room. Three times the cost for less service. And back then there was a long waiting list to get a room. This has not changed. The government shut down all private clinics and refused doctors of world fame to run their own hospitals in Canada, despite the enormous cost saving. We descended into Flesh Eating disease and C. Difficile, which are symptoms of the incompetence and dirt which pervades everything government does.
People forget the famous doctor shortage of the 60's and 70's. Most of them left for the US to practice in Nevada, etc. We were short doctors in Ontario for 20 years. And if it were nurses who were getting all the money, why were we short nurses in the 1970's. They were getting short pay, although it was a living wage. Incentives to even be a nurse were not there. So where was all the money going. To cousins of politicians who ran the billing department of medicare.
Tommy Douglas' dream of universal health care was a crock. Nobody I recall could not get to see doctor in those days. Blue Cross and Green Cross existed and there was emergency medical care for the poor. Most people had family doctors. Not so today.
EC<:-} |
