SHAREHOLDER HEALTHCARE IS EVIL
or How To Stop The Ghoulish Behaviour of Profiting Off Of Misery
It’s creeping in.
Slowly, but steadily.
The analogy of boiling a frog is so on the nose that it seems almost too obvious.
If we wanted another analogy for the current situation I’d say there’s blood in the water.
Canada’s Universal Healthcare, defined in its most simple terms, is a single-payer system. Who pays? We all do… through our taxes.
It’s the most neighbourly goddamn thing you can think of.
We all put our money in a bucket and then use that money to pay doctors and nurses to help ourselves and neighbours when we get sick or injured.
It means breaking your wrist doesn’t mean you lose your apartment.
It means having a heart attack doesn’t mean you begin your recovery process with a $12,000 bill… and that’s with great health insurance.
Both of those examples are true stories from American friends.
Of late, our healthcare system in Canada has been in crisis.
I get it. The pandemic was MASSIVE. More massive than you or I have properly processed yet. We all faced a giant unknown and invisible foe that made it difficult to plan and made a lot of us re-evaluate what we were doing with our lives. Whenever I try to grasp how big of an unknown and scary deal the pandemic was I remind myself that Disney World temporarily shut down. Disney World is pretend Earth. It is normally immune to reality. It shut down. That huge money making machine shut down. That’s how scary things got.
In conjunction with the scary once in a hundred years/lifetime pandemic, we have also been foolishly underfunding and terribly managing our healthcare system in Canada for years. Like decades.
We have some hospital executives making THREE TIMES as much as nurses. I fully understand that their job is important and at times difficult but I can almost guarantee that not once have they been forced to work an 18 hour shift while being barfed on.
So, our healthcare system is in crisis largely because we’ve let it fall into crisis.
However, instead of unanimously deciding to fix it, some people have decided to cash in.
And yes, I understand that many Family Doctors, lab services and such are private businesses. I get that. However, they are all paid by the government, by the taxpayers. I have never gone to my doctor, like I did this past week, and had to pull out a credit card at the end of the appointment.
I just say thank you and leave.
I’m referring to those misery leeches who think healthcare seems like a great way to make ever-increasing amounts of money.
Those opportunistic ghouls who know that the easiest sale to make is selling health to someone who’s sick or has a sick loved one.
I’m referring to shareholder healthcare.
The for-profit healthcare that has its eyes on the bottomline and not on your vitals.
The wellness mafia that offers to make your sick kid better… but it’s gonna cost ya.
The absolute dicks who are in healthcare because it seems like a great ROI.
And don’t get me wrong… doctors and nurses should be paid very well.
They are shitty (sometimes literally) and demanding jobs that should come with financial reward.
I want my doctor to live very comfortably… so they can focus on their patients and not the electric bill.
But, in the most crass but accurate example, there are ne’er do wells who know that we will pay anything to make our sick child better.
I hate that.
Why?
Because faced with no options, if I can, I will pay more than you to make sure my kid is seen by a doctor before yours is.
Because that’s human nature.
And if those ne’er do wells who know we will pay anything are left unchecked they will be free to increase their prices to whatever the market will bear.
How much will the market bear? Ask yourself…
How much is too much for you to pay to get your kid healthy?
Shareholder healthcare is evil.
Even if started with the best of intentions it gets clouded quickly with the temptation of personal gain.
To those who suggest that private for-profit healthcare will ease the burden on public healthcare… give your goddamn heads a shake.
There is only one pool of doctors, nurses and healthcare resources and if you open those up to a highest bidder system where do you think they will go to?
Two-Tier doesn’t work great.
Ask Britain and their mighty but embattled NHS.
If people can pay for faster care, they will pay for faster care.
I did it myself in the UK. Why would I refuse faster care if I can just pull out my American Express card?
Of course, there were many years when I wouldn’t have had the money to pay £150 for a doctor’s visit but that’s not my problem, right?
It’s ghoulish and values the lives of those with means above those currently without.
As you can tell, this issue is a big one for me.
I can’t even stand the fact that our local medical centre is a privately owned building with paid parking. You have to pay $4 to park and that money goes directly to the building owner.
So everytime a single parent brings a sick child to the doctor the building owner makes $4? Cha-ching!
There were certainly times even in my life when $4 on parking would have meant $4 less on groceries that week.
It’s gross.
Many American friends express the same lament to me about their system.
I cannot fathom how countries like the USA are happy to remove people from the economy by crippling them with medical debt so that a few people can buy more boats. It makes no sense to me. I want better for them.
However, like acid-wash jeans getting popular in Canada years after they were in the US, Canada is starting to see private for-profit services that accept credit cards offering faster and more convenient service.
Pay $69 and see a doctor now on video chat.
I do not fault anyone who chooses to do that, but it shouldn’t be like that.
There are people out there who don’t have the $69. Damn them, I guess?
Canada’s healthcare system is largely based on a triage system.
I like that.
If you need medical care more urgently than me, then you should get that medical care before I do.
Does that mean we have to wait sometimes? Yes.
Is that great? No.
How do we fix that?
We need to hire more doctors and nurses and invest in our healthcare system.
We need to better manage our healthcare system.
We don’t need to hand over the health of ourselves and our families to businesses whose primary goal, like any business, is profit.
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Thank you. I get so angry when the talking head Ford spouts the value of privatization.
Our hospitals and staff were abandoned by the government in favour of filling their backers pockets.
Grrrrrrrrrrr.
You've hit the nail squarely on the head!