🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jun30.182416.20107@unixg.ubc.ca> buckland@ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland) writes:
> I'm cross-posting to soc.culture.usa to let Americans know that

> The current chapter in a continuing series of various health care
> crises in British Columbia concerns doctors' outrage and 
> countermeasures in the face of the Provincial Government's actions
> to cap the health care budget and, to that end, to cap billings to
> the (only) health insurance agency by individual doctors.

To the government's credit, they concede that the well is not bottomless,
and that there is but a finite supply of money. That this cap only affects <
5% of the provinces doctors matters not at all :-)

> I wonder if the Governmment has also taken the precaution of
> imposing a cap on cancer cell division rates, LDL and blood pressure
> levels, and the incidence of hip fractures in elderly patients.
> No?  Well, I did rather doubt it - divine rights of rulers were
> out of fashion well before the French Revolution, and alteration
> of the laws of nature by decree was shown definitively not to work
> by King Canute (note to Americans; an early English king who
> ordered the tide not to come in).

Given my wife's doctor's refusal to call her with (negative) pap smear test
results, and his insistance that she appear before him, thus creating
another billing for a system that cannot afford it, when a simply phone call
would do, I think your somewhat cynical commentary misses the mark. It is
time our doctors realized that they cannot draw upon a bottomless pit.

> Well, then, the expectable result will be sick people left to
> suffer and/or die.  Not all of them, of course; the rich will
> always find care somewhere.  But we will experience a strange
> inversion of the American two-tier system of a large insured class
> who get what they need and a poorer uninsured class (the almost-poor
> who have to spend their lives worrying about whether tomorrow's
> illness will force them to choose between their house and their
> child, and the truly poor who get along on what charity provides
> in the hell of urban emergency rooms).  We will have a large
> insured class, including all the poor, who will get whatever the
> Government feels like paying for this year - which I somehow feel
> will always be less than the year before - and a substantial richer
> class who will get what they need because they can pay for it,
> likely at the horrifically high-priced American for-profit
> hospitals our best BC doctors will flee to.

Losing a few doctors isn't likely going to do any harm - I have heard it
said (with some apparent truth to it) that there is an optimum number of
physicians which can/will provide optimum health care - the folks making
this claim also assert that costs being rising dramatically when the number
of physicians rises above the "optimum" level. I haven't seen stats, either
way, but there seems a ring of truth here, and if nothing else it points to
the need to drop the political posturing and take a closer look at the real
issues affecting the care and the cost of the care.

> Coming up on three years into the emergence of the New World
> Order, and we have the irony of a BC Government seemingly intent
> on inventing anew Socialism With An Inhuman Face.

Phooey. I see it as a government that's trying to do what it promised it
would - live within its means. More power to them, and a pox on the doctors.

Ken McVay (who can't afford medical insurance)


-- 
| "The floors  of Sobibor's gas chambers were  constructed to tilt, like the
| body of a dump truck, so that stacks of corpses slid out smoothly." [Abram
| L. Sachar.  The Redemption of the Unwanted.  New York: St. Martin's/Marek,
| 1983. p. 43]    == The Old Frog's Almanac == Vancouver Island == CANADA ==