Yesterday and oftentimes since the Liberals’ minister of North Korean-style healthcare, Ujjal Dosanjh, has been in charge, I’ve lamented Dosanjh’s incredibly deceitful and irresponsible leadership of the healthcare debate in this country. As I’ve said repeatedly, he should be the one who finally leads this country into an honest debate, but chooses instead to do the exact opposite.
The National Post’s editorial today would seem to indicate that they agree, going so far as calling Dosanjh our “so-called Health Minister”.
Unlike politicians, this country’s doctors are evidently not prepared to collectively stick their heads in the sand. Instead, the CMA’s annual meeting in August will include a session titled “Charting the Future—Public/Private Interface in Health Care,” in which the association will debate resolutions expected to propose privatization initiatives.
This is not some sort of conspiracy to undermine government health care policy; rather, it is an attempt by doctors to take responsibility for steering the system’s evolution rather than allow it to collapse entirely amid political paralysis. In an encouraging interview with CanWest News Service this past weekend, CMA president Albert Schumacher called for a “societal debate” that engaged the public “without the inflammatory, incendiary words” that politicians tend to fall back on as soon as the words “private” and “health care” are uttered in the same sentence.
Unfortunately, federal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh seems to have no interest in that sort of debate. Instead, he has already begun to demonize the CMA for daring to take the Supreme Court’s ruling seriously.
Dosanjh refuses to allow an honest debate about healthcare in this country. He constantly insinuates that changing it will cause its demise—and cause all Canadians to sell their homes and go bankrupt as we adopt “An American-Style healthcare System” in which health services will only be available to “rich” Canadians with a Visa credit card. He refuses to allow Canadians to know the truth—that 27 countries have universal-access healthcare systems that all allow and encourage private enterprise, all operate more cheaply, many have no line-ups, and all have as good or far better health outcomes.
Rather than trying, as he should, to find as many ways and reasons as possible to involve private enterprise in all manner of services, he repeatedly denounces private-sector involvement in healthcare as if capitalism is a bad thing. He sounds exactly like a communist to me.
The National Post points to some of the same remarks Dosanjh made yesterday as I did:
Actually, Mr. Dosanjh seems to be doing less “wondering” than fear-mongering, implying that Dr. Schumacher—who has predicted that 95% of medicare services will continue to be delivered universally—is aiming for the destruction of the public system. “There are people who still remember the dark days of private health care, where people had to sells their farms and their homes to care for their loved ones,” Mr. Dosanjh said, urging doctors to avoid a “rush to judgment” on the court’s decision.
Our Health Minister’s attitude is a disgrace. Nearly a year into his tenure overseeing medicare, he has delivered nothing but hot air …
In a sane world, Canadians would be marching in the streets and demanding an election over this issue alone.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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