Castonguay Turns

You know that wonderful Hoser healthcare system?  Well, it’s very architect wants to change it:

Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.

In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It’s as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced.

What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.

Somehow, I rather doubt this will be a part of Sicko II: The Search For More Money.

Olbermoore

From the blog at that notorious right-wing neocon-worshipping rag The New Republic comes this fascinating Isaac Chotiner piece.

Peter Boyer has a fairly long Keith Olbermann profile in this week’s New Yorker which is not necessary reading, although it does feature a notable anecdote. Olbermann is reading over an interview with President Bush in which the following exchange occurs:

Q: Mr. President, you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?
A: Yes, it really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as—to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.

Boyer then goes into great detail about how Olbermann furiously raced home to his computer and typed a blistering 18-page screed which contains the following nugget of genius, which he refers to as the “final blow to our nation’s solar plexus.”

Mr. Bush, I hate to break it to you six and a half years after you yoked this nation and your place in history to the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people, but the war in Iraq is not about you. . . . It is not, Mr. Bush, about your golf game!

Choitner then nails it.

Oh, how quickly we forget!  Just four years ago, in fact, Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11 arrived in theatres, and one of the big scenes featured--you guessed it--Bush playing golf. The president is asked a question about terrorism, he responds by saying that all countries must unite against evil, and then he pauses before saying, “Now watch this drive.” Moments later he tees off. This was of course supposed to prove that Bush does not take terrorism seriously, or is an idiot, or God knows what. But now Bush has sworn off golf, which apparently also proves that he is cruel and uncaring. And something tells me the same people who nodded vigorously at Moore’s movie are now nodding vigorously at Olbermann’s monologues. Terrific.

Of course they are.  Bush playing golf = evil.  Bush not playing golf = evil.  See how logic works in the fantasy world where Olbermann and Moore live?

Guess What?  Socialism Kills People

It’s often been our contention, as vehement critics of socialized medicine and its supporters like Moore, that all government healthcare provides is the same equally shitty service to everyone.  (Except, of course, the wealthy, who can pay for their own treatments.) As usual the Times of London lays it out.

The National Health Service is providing dying cancer patients with drugs that are five times less effective than those available privately and is refusing to treat them if they try to buy medicines themselves.

That’s right, folks.  If you decide to use your own money to pay for the life-saving drugs that your free healthcare system doesn’t provide, you’re shit out of luck on any future treatment.  Their policy is, “Use our substandard care or you’re on your own.” Ah, compassion.

One drug for kidney cancer, routinely available through public health systems in most European countries but not to British patients, can reduce the size of tumours in 31% of patients, compared with just 6% of those prescribed the standard NHS drug.

The growing row over “co-payments” has prompted the government to reconsider the ban. Alan Johnson, the health secretary, has promised a “fundamental rethink” of the policy.

Just not a fundamental rethink of the socialist disaster which created the problem in the first place.

A woman with bowel cancer is fighting for the right to pay for a drug that could extend her life long enough for her to spend Christmas with her grandchildren.

Sheila Norrington, 59, a former NHS medical secretary from Maidstone, Kent, has been told by doctors that if she buys the drug Erbitux, which the health service will not pay for, she will lose her state-funded cancer care. Erbitux is the only drug capable of treating her advanced bowel cancer.

Norrington’s husband, Goff, 61, a former sales manager, said: “We have been told that if we pay for it ourselves we will be thrown off the NHS completely and we will need to pay for everything privately. We are devastated. This is not going to cure my wife, but if it keeps her alive a little bit longer, then we would pay for it.”

The couple say that although they could pay for a few cycles of the drug, which costs about £3,000 a month, they could not pay for all Norrington’s care, including scans, blood tests and consultations.

Goff Norrington added: “We have two young granddaughters and this could make the difference between sitting round the table with them at Christmas or not. We think it is deplorable that patients can get this drug almost anywhere in Europe but we cannot get it in the UK.”

A spokesman for Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust said: “We are governed by Department of Health policy on this issue.”

And why shouldn’t they be?  The government is the one paying for it.  They aren’t concerned with individuals, they’re concerned with doling out their limited resources in the most compassionate and fair manner, which in this case is simply letting people die.

A poll for The Sunday Times shows strong support for allowing co-payment in the National Health Service, with 89% saying that people who buy additional cancer drugs should continue to get free NHS treatment.

Only 5% think allowing co-payment would create a two-tier NHS. Until now this has been the position taken by Alan Johnson, the health secretary.

Ministers had feared that allowing co-payment would upset less well-off patients, but the YouGov poll of nearly 1,800 people shows strong backing across the social spectrum and supporters of all three main parties.

This, of course, begs the question.  If compassionate free government healthcare can’t provide, y’know, actual healthcare to patients, and they are forced to paying massive amounts of money to buy their own treatments, maybe the solution to the problem is less free government healthcare and more private sector solutions.

Wow, paying for healthare.  What a concept!

Moore set to publish an “Election Guide” in the fall

I must be honest… I’m not quite sure what to make of this yet:

Michael Moore is coming out with a new book. The tome, titled “Mike’s Election Guide,” a manual of mockery for the 2008 presidential election, will be published Aug. 19 by Grand Central Publishing, Jimmy Franco, a spokesman for the publisher, said Friday.

Promotional material for the book reads: “Perfectly timed to coincide with the national political conventions—and to capitalize on massive campaign coverage.”

That is the sum total of all the details I’ve been able to find as of now, so I have no real idea what this book will be about. “Manual of mockery”? What does that even mean?

Moorewatchers… any guesses as to what types of shenanigans Moore is cooking up this time?