Dear editor,
Re: Expect Less, May 5 editorial
When you say that Canadians do and should hold education and health care dear I couldn’t agree with you more.
When you say “just don’t call them free”, again, right on Mr. Editor. As for your statement that the costs are spiralling out of hand and privatization is the only way out I couldn’t disagree more.
How can we reasonably believe a for-profit model would mange increased costs? Privatization will assure a boundless range of services to those who can afford it, a limited range of service to those workers with a limited budget and nothing to the working class poor and the under/unemployed. Now, if you ignore the back door cost to the country of under treated illness, disease and injury you have made a saving but we all know that health goes well beyond health care costs. Budgets are such sweet fiction.
A socially responsible government can offer a reasonable range of health-care services to all Canadians. It would take long-range planning beyond the four-year election cycle, a federal government capable of leadership to set and enforces service standards, and stable long-range funding to provinces. A sustainable, publicly funded health-care system needs incentives to reward cost-effective innovations and reformation of traditional care models, and the authority to reform unproductive practices and models of service delivery.
Our health-care system can overcome problems related to wait times and lack of primary health providers, and grow to provide a wider range of preventative, chronic and mental health services which reduce overall social and health costs. The key is leadership and public will. An end to the shrill unfounded claims of inevitable doom for all social programs would help.
I invite voters to make their political representatives aware of the value they place on health, not just on health-care costs and their “expectations of more not less.”
Penny Hacking
Courtenay