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they always start butchering health care by attacking the sick and disabled.
Great post from Doubledown. It deserves a crosspost. I have something to say about it as well, from personal experience. You should read it first before returning to this.
The techniques of cutting people off medical aid are always the same. Slander the old and ill. Claim people are faking illnesses to get out of “work”.
I remember being subjected to this crap in Alberta way back in the 1980s. My home province seems to be the place where the neoliberals test out their ideas. What they do there turns up in other jurisdictions later.
In that time and place, people cut off from medical care there tended to go to other provinces, especially British Columbia. The governments of these provinces, and the federal government, quickly got impatient with that. I believe the behaviour of the Alberta government at that time incentivized the federal government passing the Canada Health Act.
CHA made it clear there was a right to health care. It was a great help to people like me, forced into the very disturbing situation of having to prove we have an illness. As Doubledown notes, the people with the tests and equipment to prove it are the ones trying to drive you away.
When this stopped working, the screw heads then started ‘delisting’ services. They tended eventually to be forced to start paying for them again. Medical associations became more progressive over time and learned they had no choice but to protect critical services.
Also, to protect doctors from harassment from ‘efficiency expert’ types. Medical associations can have a lot of power when they use it. The next trick is always to try quietly removing funding.
The screw heads have been trying to dismantle medicare in Canada for forty years. It is still standing. Trump is after the more limited “Medicaid” in the USA. The advantage he has is that, down there, the recipients who are cut off have nowhere to go.
Cutting medicare is not about saving money. It is an ideological thing. Public medical services are ‘socialism’. That is always a big red flag waved at the mad bulls.
The only way they can really destroy public health care is to privatize it. That is a big cash in for investors looking to create private services and insurance. It does not save neoliberal governments money, it increases costs.
The present government in my province of residence is trying to privatize the medical system and damn the cost. They use some dishonest bookkeeping to conceal how they take the money out of the public budget, and use it to subsidize private clinics, temp nursing agencies, and so on.
The timing of this is wonderful. I have been hit with a serious illness. My doctors are having a hard time figuring out just what the problem is. The big problem is that the tests they need are now harder to get booked.
They are all still there. They are free if you do not die waiting for them. The waiting times are so long because of the staffing shortages, and because ‘private clinics’ are hogging the publicly funded facilities.
One thing I do not have to endure again is the “malinger” slander thrown at me. That really does not go over in Canada. Even the screwheads back in Alberta, who originated it, know enough these days not to use this type of language.
My doctors are doing a good job for me in very difficult conditions. I should have answers by September. I am prepared for the possibility that they may not be happy answers.
At least I will know what it is that has hit me so bad. It does not seem to be covid related.
However, if I was American I would never be able to afford all these tests. I am pretty sure I would just be told to go off somewhere and die.
Thank you for the very informative article, Double Down Day.