Saturday, March 27, 2010

Video: David Dodge scrums on health care

After his morning keynote at the Liberal Party's Canada at 150 conference in Montreal, former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge scummed with the media, and I joined in. He had some interesting things to say on health care reform, the political will to act and the need to find that will, as well as the impossibility of balancing a budget and maintaining services without tax increases. He also spoke of the need for an adult conversation on health care.



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1 comment:

CK said...

I caught the discussion on line with the panelists.

While I found nothing particularly new (that whole let's rush to privatize), I was somewhat relieved to hear the panelists while not really against private, they did feel that we shouldn't race down that road so fast.

What I find redundant is that they mention how they examine European models (as did CMA Presidents, supposedly) as well as other models, while carefully and noticeably not mention the American system.

Irony is how many Canadians are actually smart enough to see right through that smoke screen?

Further expansion of private for profit in Canada would only mean the American health care system for 3 reasons: they're our neighbours and we tend to emulate most of what they do: We're bound by NAFTA (our health care system was never grandfathered enough when Mulroney first negotiated NAFTA).

Last but certainly not least is Steve and the Harpercons themselves. Steve has proven to love all things GW Bush Americana. He has pretty much always played monkey see/monkey do with the White House.

Plus, he has proven to not be empathetic. He is more sympathetic to corporations. Insurance underwriting practices are very similar to those of their US counterparts. So, of course, they would have all kinds of small print, discriminate on the bases of pre-existing conditions and socio-economic class.

Give Steve a majority and he will gut what's left of our public health care system for the U.S. model.

One thing I don't get though: it has been established that the US private system costs more per GDP than ours'. Why is he and other con pundits for that matter so ga ga giddy to have it here??

You're lucky. I wanted to attend myself.