PAY ATTENTION AMERICA

Explosion of private clinics raising red flags

Since the first private MRI clinics opened their doors in Canada 10 years ago, there has been a national explosion of private health facilities across Canada: there are 42 for-profit magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) clinics, 72 private surgical hospitals (excluding cosmetic surgery facilities) and 16 "boutique" physician clinics, the Ontario Health Coalition says in a report, entitled Eroding Public Medicare: Lessons and Consequences for For-Profit Health Care Across Canada, being released today. [and as they must be paid for 100% by patients, they must really, really want them. But there's a problem... snip]

"The contention that for-profit health care can exist along with a public system is not true," said Natalie Mehra, the report's author and director of the coalition. "It is a take-away from the pblic health-care system"

Doris Grinspun, executive director of the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario, said the federal government has simply "turned a blind eye" and not enforced the Canada Health Act. [which prohibits private competition]

"Governments have fallen down on it. The Harper government definitely has, but the Liberals did too. This trend needs to be reversed. They need to catch up to the reality that the for-profit clinics are moving into this country and we need to get ahead of them."

[so, the wait times and capabilities of the government system are so bad that an entirely separate industry has sprung up to serve it without a penny from the government, and the government response? Kill it. This is crossing the (fine) line between socialism and communism. More to the point, it is the inevitable evolution of self-serving/protecting governments once allowed into markets: legislatively kill all competition. We've been warned...]

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