Healthcare: Michael Moore warns Canadians against creating two Canadas
Michael Moore warns Canadians to stand on guard against creating two Canadas
Tue Nov 17, 12:29 PM
By The Canadian Press
TORONTO - Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore says Canadians have to stand on guard against creating two Canadas - one for the rich and one for the poor.
He says Canadians seem to be on a misguided quest to become more like Americans when it comes to health care. As a result, he tells a conference in Toronto, Canadians are straying from one of their core principles of looking out for one another.
Moore also took direct aim at the health-care bill before the U.S. Congress, saying it will enrich medical and drug companies.
He says Americans are spectacularly uninformed about Canada's health-care system, which he praised.
Moore says Canadians do not die or lose their homes because they cannot afford medical treatment, a situation millions of Americans face now and will continue to face
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/091117/health/health_michael_moore_he...
If Moore never did another thing after his rescue efforts in New Orleans, he would be a hero and a treasure. But let's not swallow something that is not good for us.
Many people think Canada's health care system is healthy and an example to the world. I think it is a bloated, expensive system that causes and sustains health ignorance, morbidity and mortality and is rigidly institutionalized.
When the budget of the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care in Ontario for one year is equal to the entire personal fortune of Bill Gates yet hospitals are still launching appeals for money, you have wonder what is going on. In some places, about half of us do not have physicians and MDs are driving cabs. In Ontario, only about 1/3 of the MOHLTC budget goes to actual patient care. Patient appointments are now often limited to 15 minutes.
How, then, can we say our health care system helps us look out for ourselves or each other?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J19cwiPWONY
While it is better than the Yanqui care system, this is NOT the health care system that Tommy Douglas envisioned. Canada, take a good look in the mirror - and grab a carrot.
Health Care in Ontario
Health care in Ontario - it's scandalous!
Yep. And you have only to convince the Great Misled that continuing to buy into voting for lower taxes, the neo-con mantra, will surely give us the system that Moore abhors. There is a connection, sure as shucks, between tax levels and social services. Any old fart out there can tell you how many thousands are spent on each individual to keep them ticking while raising the profits of big pharma. Pharmaceuticals are the fastest rising cost element in health care. Perhaps there should be limits to our spending to save lives - at any cost?
(Musings by an old fart who works out three times a week to help put off the inevitable.) : )
The biggest threat to public services is always the corporate sector trying to figure out how to make the service their own personal cash cow. They never sleep in that pursuit and we have let them get their grubbing hands on our health care through the drug scam and damnpanic (sic pandemic) excesses.
We pump billions of public dollars into private pharmaceutical corporations and spend billions more trying to arrest anyone who wants to use any product that isn't covered by one of their patents. We need to stop the war on drugs and move to a war on drug prices. Rising drug prices are crippling our system. We need to bring real competition into the provision of drugs by reducing the time before generics are allowed and we need to tighten up our regulation of the relationship of doctors to pharmaceutical salespeople. The former policy of no advertising has now been reduced to the absurdity of ads for Viagra and Cialis that supposedly are not caught by our laws because they only say talk to your doctor about this condition and don't forget to mention where you heard about the product. Those billions of dollars in advertising are paid for in higher drug costs across the board.
I think we should have a look at which drugs are considered essential. Last time I checked, atypical antipsychotics were in the lead (in terms of Big Pharma revenue) and this is largely due to the fact that they are aggressively marketed off-label. They are not appropriate drugs for mood disorders but are used anyway as adjunct therapy for them. Next up, statins and friends. This whole group of drugs could fairly be described as lifestyle mitigators. It's become "reasonable" to eat poorly and not to exercise and then treat the resulting chaos with drugs. This is absurd. How did we get into this mindset that baseline should be taking a prescription drug? Big Pharma's partially to blame, surely, but what about the consumers? What's going through their heads?
Visions of sugar plums.
Response to G. Pie: Excellent points.
"I think we should have a look at which drugs are considered essential. "
Doctor education is now being dictated by the funders of "chairs" at universities - often pharmaceutical companies. A Medicins Sans Frontieres doctor might do very well in the field with just two hundred medications or less.
Hamilton SPECTATOR:
http://www.thespec.com/specialsections/section/BlindFaith
NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4696316
WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB112138815452186385.html?mod=todays_us_pa...
Two charts from the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care - one current and one from ten years ago.
While this is Ontario-centric - and I apologise to Babblers in other provinces for that - perhaps it will serve as a template to begin your own research and citizen journalism.
I don't see anything about patient care in this presentation - but a lot about building construction.
http://www.health.gov.on.ca/english/providers/program/ltc_redev/pdf/sess...
Have questions about the budget of the MOHLTC? Call and ask one of the people on this chart.
http://www.health.gov.on.ca/en/ministry/orgchart.pdf
from
http://www.pmprb-cepmb.gc.ca/
G. Pie wrote,
"Next up, statins and friends. This whole group of drugs could fairly be described as lifestyle mitigators. It's become "reasonable" to eat poorly and not to exercise and then treat the resulting chaos with drugs. This is absurd."
Ah, but if we keep taking drugs, we may not notice that we're being robbed, and be too weak to fight back.
Statins? Read this:
http://www.spacedoc.net/rest_of_my_story.html
Antipsychotics
"An Unholy Alliance? Psychiatry and the influence of the pharmaceutical industry" by Joanna Moncrieff
http://www.spinwatch.org/-articles-by-category-mainmenu-8/47-pharma-indu...
The years 1995 to 2003, encompassing the reign of the cons, also saw the greatest % incrrease in drug costs, year over year. Amazin'.
And one Robert Rae managed to achieve the only year of negative growth in drug costs.
In Ontario... no money for a FOOD ALLOWANCE for the poor, but LEGAL DRUGS are covered.
http://www.isthatlegal.ca/index.php?name=benefits.welfare_law_ontario
Minister Sandra Pupatello was a key figure in the Liberal government's attempt to stop the poor
from getting enough to eat through a LAWFUL dietary supplement program... while she got an annual job perk of $20k for her rent.
'“Chronic health problems are the sentence you get for the crime of being poor,” says Kathy Hardill, a member of Health Providers Against Poverty.
She says that children who grow up in poverty have a higher risk of heart disease than other people, even if their economic status gets better later in life.
Women are also at risk of bone diseases, such as osteoporosis, if they don't get a healthy diet, she says.
That's why Hardill and other health providers have been prescribing the special diet to people on social assistance who would not necessarily qualify under the government's stringent criteria.
On November 4, the Ontario government announced that it will no longer be allowing average Ontario Works and Ontario Disability recipients to claim the supplemental grant.
New application forms have been created that force those on social assistance to specify their disease or ailment to the government in order to receive additional money for food.
“Our organization is in no way...reconciled to this vicious and appalling cutback,” John Clark, an OCAP organizer told the demonstrators on Saturday.
“We didn't come out here to register a protest; we came out here to initiate a war against this government.”
The target of the protest was Pupatello's apartment, because according to OCAP, she receives a $20,000 housing allowance per year from the province.
Once a critic of the faltering provincial welfare system, Pupatello has surprised many activists by further diminishing funds available to the poor.
Ten years ago, Ontario suffered a stinging blow to social assistance when the Conservative government, led by then-Premier Mike Harris, cut welfare rates by 21.6 per cent.
Since coming to power, the Dalton McGuinty Liberals have increased that rate by three per cent.'
http://www.rabble.ca/news/cutbacks-anger-activists
http://kcap.tao.ca/dietsupplement.html
Ontario Coalition Against Poverty:
http://www.ocap.ca/
Things are bad in British Columbia too. Learn more here:
http://www.raisetherates.org/
Here’s hoping Danny Williams got Canadian-style heart surgery MacLean's