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Cardiac care, diabetes care, primary care and prevention, mental health, patient safety

The death throes of healthcare



It’s difficult to watch a terminally ill patient go through all the stages of dying without being left with a complete feeling of despondency and helplessness. There are five stages of dying as defined by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross.

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These are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance. Canada’s healthcare system is currently in the process of passing from the stage of denial into the anger stage. For the last decade most Canadians have denied that there was a problem with our healthcare system. “It’s free!” they exclaimed, “The only problem is that we’re not spending adequate amounts of money.” After pumping an additional $42 billion into the healthcare system there has been virtually no improvement in the level or quality of service and slowly Canadians are starting to enter the anger stage of healthcare’s demise. We’re seeing it in the number of lawsuits that are being launched by Canadian patients against the government which, still being in the denial stage, continues to maintain that private care isn’t necessary and there’s nothing wrong with the government healthcare monopoly. To recap the current state of healthcare in Canada, we should start with the fact that right now there are 5 million Canadians without a primary physician, or family doctor. That’s 15% of the population, or one in seven Canadians, who have to get their primary care from someone other than a family doctor. Since private healthcare is legally unavailable in Canada that only leaves veterinarians. Currently Canada ranks #24 out of 28 rated countries with membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). That ranking isn’t about the amount of money these countries spend on healthcare, Canada is in the top three; the ranking is about healthcare outcomes covering five basic areas of priority. These include cardiac care, diabetes care, primary care and prevention, mental health and patient safety. The Canadian Medical Association estimates that because very soon a large number of physicians will be retiring, Canada needs another 26,000 primary care doctors right now to fill the gap. There aren’t enough medical schools in Canada to train that number of doctors in a short time, so any way you look at it, our healthcare system will get a lot worse before any part of it gets better. As this dismal fact starts to dawn on many Canadians, the anger will grow and eventually affect all those clueless politicians who are still singing “don’t worry; be happy”. But then, one can’t really blame them, given the fact that no politician in Canada is without a family doctor. As Canadians pass through the anger stage and the political fallout settles, they will attain the bargaining stage of public healthcare’s death. “Well, so long as serious illnesses like heart disease and cancer are treated, the Canadian system’s still better than the U.S. system because it’s still free!” They will rationalize until the time arrives when even serious illnesses can no longer be treated as the healthcare bureaucracy implodes under its own enormous entropy. At that point healthcare will consume three quarters of all government funds, yet deliver care to less than half of patients. That’s when the fourth stage of dying, depression, will kick in. “What’s the use?” will be the popular refrain, as smoking, drinking and other risky behavior increases among the populace. Realizing that being ill in Canada under the government healthcare monopoly is a fate worse than being ill in the U.S. with no insurance at all, Canadian won’t care about having a family doctor and the emphasis will be on getting life over with. Finally Canadians, being the timid people they are, will just accept the fate of public healthcare, deeming it irrelevant. By then enough enterprising physicians will have opened private clinics in defiance of a law, which only two other countries on the planet, Cuba and North Korea, have imposed on their people and healthcare (for a fee) will once again be readily available to all Canadians. As always, government has proven its incompetence in managing the healthcare monopoly, just as it did with the post office, the education system, the immigration system and the criminal justice system.


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Klaus Rohrich -- Bio and Archives

Klaus Rohrich is senior columnist for Canada Free Press. Klaus also writes topical articles for numerous magazines. He has a regular column on RetirementHomes and is currently working on his first book dealing with the toxicity of liberalism.  His work has been featured on the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, among others.  He lives and works in a small town outside of Toronto.

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