Let's place blame where blame is due...
Seemingly you won't find a politician anywhere who will admit to causing the health care crisis in Canada. But history has a lesson to teach us: continual, decades-long budget cuts have long term consequences.
Circa 1973: the Davis government in Ontario started following the trend of "re-organizing" their health care spending, defunding institutions such as the Rideau Regional Center in Smiths Falls ON, dumping all 2,500 mentally and physically challenged residents onto the streets, who then had to depend on inadequately funded group homes and various hospital's out-patient facilities throughout the area. And that’s just one example of many other budget cut projects throughout Canada. Geeze, I wonder how the urban homeless street-people problem started? It's actually a no-brainer; ask any soup kitchen volunteer.
Following the corporate model of hacking and slashing at a budget with the purpose of finding more "efficiencies" through re-orgs, etc. is a fool's errand when it comes to health care, and only suits the short-term quarterly report mentality. Thinking that we can continuously do more with less with "fiscal restraint" is like saying we can eventually do everything with nothing.
The current health care crisis happening across Canada with over worked and burned out staff wanting to retire begs the question: why is no one recognizing the source problem of decades-long under-funding? Our health care system needs serious RE-funding if we want to save it from collapse. I'm not suggesting we re-institutionalize health care recipients; only that we should apply adequate funding to our current system that is circling the drain thanks to a half-century of blood-letting, which only encourages the refinement of a two-tier health care system, Tommy Douglas be damned.
