Private health care will crush some under a load of debt
By Lethbridge Herald on April 15, 2023.
Editor:
I suspect not too many of your readers will have run across the following bit of news out of the States. The members of Trinity Moravian Church in Winston Salem, North Carolina purchased nearly $3.3 million of local residents’ medical debt for just $15,048.
Then, they held a debt jubilee ceremony and burned up the debt, cancelling it all. This is the second year the congregation has done this. Last year they purchased and cancelled some $1.5 million worth of their neighbours’ medical bills.
Now, putting to one side the theology behind what is an obviously laudable act of Christian charity, and disregarding the completely insane economic system which allows third parties to buy up debts at a ratio of some 200 to 1, let us turn for a moment to the premier and her public musings about who should pay for health care in this province.
Danielle Smith is on record as recently as June 2021 asserting: “we can no longer afford universal social programs that are 100 per cent paid by taxpayers,” and that includes public health care.
“Once people get used to the concept of paying out of pocket for more things themselves then we can change the conversation on health care,”. . . “But we could take it one step further. If we establish the principle of Health Spending Accounts, then we can also establish co-payments.”
Which, with the inexorable logic of the true believer, leads us to a private healthcare system with it’s attendant winners and losers.
The winners with their private wards, and personal attendants and little foil wrapped chocolates on their pillows – the losers buried under a crushing debt load. If they get health care at all.
Ms. Smith has been ducking and dodging and spinning, blowing smoke like a hot wind in fire season ever since those remarks surfaced. Doing everything up to denying she ever said it. Well: “By their acts shall ye know them.”
The Moravian Brethren acted and good on them. I’m just a little leery of waiting to see how Danielle Smith acts. I’ve heard how she speaks and that way lies the private hospital and the reliance on the charity of strangers.
Ken Sears
Lethbridge
13-12
More Danielle Smith clown show:
https://www.thestar.com/news/analysis/2023/04/15/will-conservatives-blame-you-for-having-a-heart-attack-the-magical-thinking-of-danielle-smith-and-some-in-her-ucp.html
Yes , no one except the godly NDP are allowed to change their positions. Look how Phillips hangs on to the SCS. This is one she should change.
Oh look mum, the left wing rag the red star has something to say about Alberta and there are apparently Albertans that quote it. Bird Cage.
Sound the alarm, scream from the roof tops, protect your union friends and NDP. IT WILL BE AN OPTION Lots of flatulence and misinformation on this one. Canada currently has over 100 private clinics, you want to close them? Your doctors clinic is a private operation, close them as well? Now that we have many Doctors coming to the City you need to shift the focus to the old “USA style health care mantra” as patients without doctors is flogging the proverbial dead horse. There isn’t a single politician in any party in Alberta that will scrap the health care system and have you pay for your doctor. Trial balloons and more meaningless gas!!! Let’s all line up for another round of 90 billion dollar debt. No thanks. Everyone is not equal. We have the equal system now and are operating in some cases at the lowest common denominator. Who wants a job in the medical field, the police field, teaching field when you can be a tic tok king or queen. So no one including Notley and Phillips are allowed to take a different approach or change their position? They all do it all the time.
Four year as of the NDP, 90 billion in debt, didn’t “fix”the health care system. They fixed it all right.
Yes, Ken get with the program. Your perspective is about 20 years old.
Agreed! This, which includes much of Premier Smith’s private-for-profit health care history:
“The victim of her own repeated blunders, Danielle Smith decrees a limit on reporters’ questions”
http://www.albertapolitics.ca
private health care is about lining pockets. it has ruined many people in the usa, including those that believed they had private insurance to cover their health needs.
at present, there is a lot to suggest that our public health system is lining pockets, and, that there is a lot of waste, inefficiencies, graft, and other concerns. however, these each can be remedied, so long as our decisions makers are forced to follow the findings of numerous audits and commissions that have always just been shoved aside…likely so as to keep the graft circuit flowing, and, likely, to maintain the erroneous basis for private-for-profit health in canada.
This is getting scary… second time I have to agree with biff.
Why change something that doesn’t work. Just keep throwing money at it “union style”
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/tackling-the-surgery-backlog-in-the-canadian-provinces?utm_source=Facebook-and-Twitter&utm_campaign=Tackling-Surgery-Backlog-in-Cdn-Provinces&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=Learn_More&utm_term=700&fbclid=IwAR3GxHTo6UmX4BlE2wALyUzv9xQ-imsFTRxNdNOFe3WUuVlFVQ6x8d7R5Xk
And three negative votes show people don’t like facts and truth, and prefer to wallow in a system that caters to themselves, to hec with the patients but we talk a good game.
well, you use the fraser institute, and they will spin everything so as to justify big corp, private for profit everything. our system worked very well until inefficiencies and graft were routinely permitted/overlooked.
our best way forward is to dust off and examine the numerous audits and commission findings – and put them to action.
please be mindful that the usa system shows us time and again how private health benefits the few and impoverishes the many. that is exactly why the beautiful Tommy Douglas helped to deliver to each of us the legacy that has proved time and again to be the gift of a lifetime: universal health care.
As usual facts mean nothing. Attack the messenger.
not sure what you refer to. moreover i have presented two points of fact: the usa reality, and that sundry audits and commissions have pointed out what needs to be corrected in our system.
haha! and simply agreeing on something from biff gets you a neg vote.
wishing you well, truly
In true Reform Party Fashion it’s about looking after their rich friends to try to buy votes and who gives a damn about anyone else. While the seniors in my circle of friends point out. They may pay for it out of our public funds, for now, but in the next oil industry crash they will dump it into the laps of Albertans, just like Klein did will all his privatization and orphan well cleanup disaster, yet these mindless seniors aren’t smart enough to understand it. Voting for the word conservatives is all they know.
Like in the U.S.A. this will put a lot of seniors and their families in financial ruin, if we are dumb enough to let it happen.
Over the years I have had two retired doctor friends who both worked under a two-tiered health care system in the U.K. like these Reformers want to create. They both stated that it would never work in Alberta. First off we don’t have nearly enough doctors and nurses to make it work. We can’t keep them because of the way they are treated by these Reformers. Secondly our populations aren’t concentrated , like they are in Europe, where it does work. Thirdly doctors and nurses will never stay in rural Alberta if they can make more money working in these private for profit clinics and hospitals in the cities that this system would create. Why would they.? We are having enough trouble trying to fill the positions in rural Alberta without some fools making it a lot harder and this stupidity will definitely cost some rural Albertans their lives. But when has a reformer ever cared about people’s lives.
excellent points, fed up.