National Day of Action for our Health Care

There will be lots of posts made by me in regards to our current state of health care.  I thought it would be a good idea to start with the national day of action being held March 31 (tomorrow) in regards to our health accord.  There has been a failure of our government to reach a deal with the provinces on the health accord.  Even worse is that the government has announced a $36 billion cut to health care starting after this election.  The cuts will happen over the next 10 years and these cuts will change the way our health care is delivered.  This will open up our public health care to privatization.  Over the last decade I have had the privilege of working both in private and public services delivering health care.  Here is briefly what is happening.  The public system is being starved of funds.  They continue to tighten the choke hold on public health care which naturally causes failures.  People lash out and demand changes.  The private side of health care continues to create a monopoly of services.  Currently private health care receives public funding to deliver services.  Steadily the larger companies eat up the smaller ones and are creating monopolies in private delivery of health care.  The companies will be well poised to gobble up the holes the $36 billion cut to public health care will make.  As the choke hold gets tighter and tighter around our public health care the voice for privatization will become louder and louder.  I have already witnessed this and there is a steady stream of media willing to push this agenda.  People have naive hopes that this will result in better quality health care which is utter nonsense.  The whole time I spent in private health care they had one agenda which was and always will be to increase profits.  It is not quality health care and it never will be.  

Before I post a link to the Canada Health Accord I want to pass on one of my many stories from working in private health care.  So the home care company decided there wasn't enough money being made and a new avenue of wealth needed to be exploited.  This time it would be palliative patients.  I was working as a respiratory therapist in the community and often had to set up people dying of various respiratory illnesses with oxygen.  So the time came where they announced their new soul crushing market strategy called Whispers ^TM.  So now we had to sell the idea of this trademarked approach to doctors so we could increase our market to the dying.  This had nothing to do with an improvement in the quality of care we delivered.  No new equipment (in fact we used the oldest most run down stuff) and never once mentioned the shameful ratio of health care provider to patient, which was always well over 100 patients to every health care provider. The more people we had set up on O2 the more money they made.  All Whispers ^TM was was just a slogan that restated in fancy ways what we already did, minus the human side that promoted empathy (something completely absent in health care companies).  The idea of selling Whispers ^TM was devoid of any humanity and insulting to those of us who helped these people be as comfortable as possible as death approached.  Nothing about dying from a respiratory illness is a whisper. The commercialization of the dying and viewing them as a commodity rather than as a someone needing quality health care is revolting.  This is one of many examples of private health care.

Here is link to the day of action about our Health Accord.

http://www.canadians.org/2014accord

So Whispers ^TM is just a buzz-word created by some  consultant?

Sorry - I mean it creates 'strategic synergy' that 'dovetails' with the needs of the 'stakeholders', including the primary health-care 'consumer'...    

The Ontario government cries, "Austerity! Austerity!", then it hires these consultant con-artists for thousands of dollars, they spout new-age gibberish and some current managerial cult-words. Maybe there is a totem animal involved or a vague notion of 'improved performance'.

The irrationality of such managerial initiatives is not accidental.  They do not want to comprehend the suffering they are causing by enforcing austerity and privatization. They do not want to face the true moral responsibility healthcare requires. They do not want reason or morality within a 500m radius.

Just another tale, told by a consultant, full of Whispers ^TM and bureaucratic fury, Signifying nothing....

Ya Whispers was created by a sales employee, which is part of Medigas. I think they had their business degree and got paid oodles to make decisions like this. Private health care removes the human side of health care and turns it straight up into a business. It what messed up world do people with business degrees rule over health care professionals in the realm of providing health care. Of course the worst are the hybrid business/health care professional personalities...they are some of the worst humans. It makes me angry and sad to see and hear the push for this world by everyday people. They have been so blinded by misinformation that I don't think there is much hope left for our health care system.

I also am upset with the current direction of health care and mental health care in this time where there are calls for 'austerity' (for the public sector). It never continues to amaze me that people can believe that a private for-profit system could provide services at a lower cost than a public system (without hits to how its treats people and the service).

I'm not sure if you are aware of this information,

The North Bay Hospital and Psyc hospital were merged into one giant health center a few years back. Every year since then they have had a funding short fall. Talking with the folks who work there they attribute it to the broken transfer of funds.

As separate units they each received funding based on the care they provided, Psychiatric and General / long term. Once they merged they no longer meet the full criteria of either. Being no additional options, they are flagged as a General Hospital with Psychiatric wing. There by not receiving enough funding for either side correctly.

It is also important to note that this New Health Center is a P3, and the even thought the transfer payments to the local hospital are reduced under the formula, the P3 sides funding remains untouched.

Of course they are willing to cut services to the public hospital but when it comes down to the public private partnership (P3s) they keep funding as normal. It is so disgraceful. The private side of the hospital will continue to receive its funding while the public (both workers and patients) get the short end of the stick.

It is set up to fail and continue paving the way towards private health care. Private, private-public health care doesn't work.

Its hard watching this happen to our health care. It is hard watching a compassionate principle (universal health care) get strangled to death so that a toxic ideology of profit under the guise of efficiency can be allowed to flourish

I used to volunteer and work for the North Bay psych hospital both pre and post merger. I still have friends who work for the new merged hospital who also talk about all the job cuts now being made and the loss of services due to cut in funds.

Similarly the children's inpatient psych unit beds I worked with at that place was divided out by the province around the time of the merger to the individual areas we served (in the guise that the services would be closer to patients) however the new local services are not provided enough funding to provide the same level of care that the larger regional centre (which served north eastern ontario) provided (i.e. province de-regionalizes service in the name of 'closer to home' services but instead saves money as level of care is greatly reduced and # of total beds in region is reduced-and there was a huge gap of years between the closure and the opening for some of the new services).

On P3s-I heard from someone who returned from a recent union conference that one of the presentations mapped how the top advisers to the provincial liberal government are bay street lawyers who are connected to P3s (both through their political power/advice and by the fact that they work/connected to the companies receiving the p3 contracts). I also heard that the connection between weakening public services by reducing funding/scope of practice which lead to calls of privatization for 'better' services was prominent at the conference.

Torgo did you attend the conference and have any other info to share?

It is crazy. There is a TV show based out Vancouver "Continuum" its Sci-Fi, but every time I watch it I hope that's not the road we go down. Essentially Governments fail and Corporation buy them out in exchange for our devotion to a new Corporate Congress.

I did attend the conference.

Here is a link to a speakers corner from the conference, other union leaders from throughout the province. There were just under 900 of us at the 3 days conference.

This video shows the link the Liberals have with the p3 firms. Here is a link to the details, http://opseu.org/news/its-their-dna-0

Dr. Brian Day was defeated by Dr. Alan Ruddiman in the election to be president for Doctors of BC. Dr. Alan Ruddiman is a public health care advocate.

Dr. Brian Day is the doctor who has launched a constitutional legal challenge against public health care. He believes that we have to accept Economic Reality (whatever that means) and implement user fees as well as severely limit the public health care unions. He wants more money and he doesn't care how that affects health care delivery. He feels that revenue should follow the patient, which makes zero sense is actually providing health care. Care will no longer be based on need but rather on who can pay. Those that can pay get care first. The ones who need access to health care the most are the ones who can't afford to pay. They are the ones who are disabled and no longer have a large income. Is the patient with cerebral palsy going to be able to get the care they need when it is now based on pay rather than need? I have heard many people say that there will always be a public system to look after people who can't afford care which I find infuriating. The public system will be gutted once privatization occurs. So many doctors will leave and the funding for the public system will be abysmal. They will leave scraps for the ones who really need it. It is like an after thought, it is an idea born out of selfishness.

This should at least show that Day does not speak for all B.C doctors in his constitutional challenge.

Remember that when HealthCare was first instituted in Saskatchewan by Premiere Tommy Douglas in 1962 the the doctors went on strike (link) to try and kill it. 90% of the province's doctors shut their offices. The CCF/NDP government brought in doctors from Britain, the US and other provinces in order to staff community clinics set-up to meet demand for health services. Lacking public support the doctors were defeated.

HealthCare came to Canada by defeating doctors - and as far I'm concerned that profession will always be suspect. Glad to see the B.C doctors trying to make-up for the historic hatred of public healthcare promoted by their profession.

Thanks for the conference links Torgo!  

The one video really highlighted how agencies across different sectors have the same shared experiences concerning government attacks on services.  It really reinforced to me that agencies need to support each other  instead of what is happening for example in the mental health sector - which is agencies trying to reduce their waitlist and financial strain (because of the public austerity agenda) by pushing/demanding for other public agencies (who are in the same financial position) to do more.

As this video described the 'attacks' on public services, I look forward to seeing other videos which describes the tactics for pushing back against austerity.

Since the TPP got signed today, it seems like a good day to tell this story.  The TPP will heavily impact pharmaceuticals and I am sure other parts of our healthcare.  

So when I was working in home care I provided oxygen to those who needed it either in a palliative or recovery phase of their lives. One patient I had who was a palliative case had a form of aggressive lung cancer that wasn't responding to generic chemotherapy drugs.  He was a janitor for his whole life and his wife had done office work.  They did not have a lot of money but they owned a small well kept house.  The man didn't want to die.  His wife didn't want him to die either.  They were willing to do whatever it took to enjoy another month together.  What that amounted to was a pharmaceutical bill of over $3000 a month for one chemotherapy drug.  I knew the man for several months as his health continued to deteriorate. He told me how much it was costing him and that they have just remortgaged their house to continue paying for his medicine.  It wasn't long after that this man died and I went and picked up the equipment again.  

It disgusted me that these people of little means were exploited for profit in their most vulnerable time.  I don't know how well the wife will fair with her new economic burden of a mortgage and loss of her husband.  All I do know is that banks and pharmaceutical companies are bit richer and we as a society are a whole lot poorer.

These increased costs for pharmaceuticals will bankrupt people as well as the provinces in healthcare costs.  It is simply not affordable and will put immense pressure on an all ready cash strapped system.  More and more services will be put into the P3 category or just privatized out right.  I think our public healthcare (one that we were once proud of) is now circling the drain.

I am not sure how much hope we can have that a political leader will have the balls to stand up to the TPP and the perverted side of globalization.

Thanks to WikiLeaks we have some idea what the secret pact says....

When a drug is under patent, no 'generic' versions can be brought to market. Generics cut costs by 30-80%. Under current WTO rules, pharmaceutical companies can obtain 20-year patents. The TPP will enable these corporations to extent patents beyond 20 years, to re-patent medicines that are already known and block the registration of generic products.

On every issue discussed US negotiators advocated the position of big drug companies and always demanded stricter intellectual property provisions. For example the US insisted on “patent linkage” bars TPP member countries from approving generic drugs if there were any outstanding patent disputes. This allows drug companies to quash competing generics simply by filing patent claims.

H.E. Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi wrote:Among the most damaging concessions developing countries make in regional and bilateral agreements are those enhancing the monopolies on life-saving medicines, which reduce access and affordability and those that provide excessive legal rights to foreign investors, limiting the policy space for nations to promote sustainable and inclusive development.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) wrote:The TPP trade deal is currently being negotiated between the U.S. and ten other Pacific Rim nations. The negotiations are being conducted in secret, but leaked drafts of the agreement include aggressive intellectual property (IP) rules that would restrict access to affordable, lifesaving medicines for millions of people.
Proposed by U.S. negotiators, the IP rules enhance patent and data protections for pharmaceutical companies, dismantle public health safeguards enshrined in international law, and obstruct price-lowering generic competition for medicines. “There’s very little distance between what Pharma wants and what the US is demanding,” Rohit Malpani, director of policy for Doctors Without Borders,

Doctors Without Borders urges the U.S. government to withdraw—and all other TPP negotiating governments to reject—provisions that will harm access to medicines.

Two powerful statement from 'Doctors Without Borders' this week:

1) The barbaric US bombing of their hospital in Afghanistan was a "war crime" because “Under the rules of international humanitarian law, a hospital is a hospital and the people inside are patients — to target a medical facility in this way is a violation of that, whatever the circumstances.”

http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-10-05/doctors-without-borders-calls-us-bombing-its-hospital-crime-against-humanity

2) The barbaric US-led TTP "will still go down in history as the worst trade agreement for access to medicines in developing countries, which will be forced to change their laws to incorporate abusive intellectual property protections for pharmaceutical companies."

http://www.msfaccess.org/about-us/media-room/press-releases/statement-msf-conclusion-tpp-negotiations-atlanta

1.) The bombing of the hospital was a war crime. I just can't see it any other way.  Every one knew it was a hospital as it had been operating as a hospital for some time.  Everyone knew Médecins Sans Frontières was operating there.  After the hospital got hit the first time they contacted the coalition and told them they were a hospital yet the bombing continued for several more hits.  

Of course this is not the first time and likely won't be the last time a hospital has been targeted by US forces.  Here is a link to a short article about hospital bombings.  

"Scores of hospitals and clinics were said to have been hit by U.S. bombs in the last dozen years; sources differ on the numbers of raids and casualties. Iraqi hospitals were bombed under George H. W. Bush in his 1991 Persian Gulf War and under William J. Clinton starting in December 1998. During the Clinton-NATO war on Yugoslavia, air attacks on hospitals in various cities, including Belgrade, Nis, and Surdulica, took lives in April and May 1999. In George W. Bush’s war on Afghanistan, 2001-2002, bombs struck hospitals in Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar; some reports placed the death toll in the hundreds."

There are also some brutal accounts of civilian casualties in that article.  

2.) There is no doubt in my mind that the TPP will be catastrophic for developing nations, especially in terms of healthcare.  Developed nations, like Canada, won't be able to afford to support public health care with the skyrocketing costs of pharmaceuticals, developed nations won't even be able to begin to afford to pay for necessary medicine to get a decent health care system started.  These ideology will be part of the very fabric of new healthcare systems and will cost a lot of people their lives or at the very least their health.  The pharmaceutical industry has so much potential to do good but nature of capitalism corrupts it to the core.

Here is a link to an article about the US driving a tank into the bombed hospital, potentially destroying evidence of their war crime.