I haven’t had a family doctor for more than four years, I’ve been dropped from the system. According to official figures, there are at least 800,000 of us in Quebec in this situation. Probably more.
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
But between you and me, even if I had a family doctor, it wouldn’t make a very big difference under the current circumstances. Making an appointment with your doctor is now an obstacle course and if by chance you are found to have a serious health problem, good luck in passing all the required tests and, above all, in obtaining treatment.
I am a dump of the health system, but there are worse than me. Let us think of all those elderly people who live alone in a small apartment and sometimes even in a large empty house.
A few years ago, passers-by saw a swarm of flies in the living room window of an opulent house in Anjou. In the house, the remains of an old couple were found, both bodies lying in an advanced state of decomposition. And realized that those around them… just didn’t exist. How many are there like them in Quebec?
And there are all those other people who are left behind: the homeless, the intellectually challenged, the mentally ill. I know, it’s not pretty to call schizophrenics, psychotics and other severely emotionally handicapped people that way. But it was even less pretty to abandon them to themselves as we have done for 40 years with deinstitutionalization. Younger people may have never heard this word before. To sum up, deinstitutionalization was the operation by which psychiatric hospitals were emptied in the early 1980s under the pretext of restoring dignity to people kept for years in institutions, but in reality to save money for the system which already suffered from underfunding. Deinstitutionalization was nothing more than “shedding” before the word became fashionable.
The art of diverting attention
The jettisoned from the system is therefore an old reality in Quebec, a Quebec that is certainly less united than our Prime Minister likes to make believe since the beginning of the pandemic. However, what still works very well in Quebec are the communication campaigns. The tendency in public relations seems to be to repeat the same lies in the hope that they will become reality and, above all, will divert the attention of a population from which this is the main deficit, even greater than the gigantic deficit built up by governments to fight the pandemic.
This communication campaign fed by solemn press conferences is carried out with slogans, such as that of our supposed solidarity. She also points the finger at those responsible for the situation: the non-vaccinated conspirators. They would be hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated responsible for our collective sinking, which implies enemies of the people. They would be more or less responsible for 50% of the beds occupied in hospitals. However, the testimony of doctors working in the field is much more nuanced. These speak of people who are often poor, destitute, sometimes illiterate.
A good part of the unvaccinated patients would therefore have a profile similar to those dropped from the system of which I spoke above. They are not subscribers to wireless networks, but subscribers to the wireless network, without family and without anyone.
If it is true that we are at war against the virus, then we must take back these famous words of Kipling: “The first victim of war is the truth. And it’s a safe bet that our Prime Minister’s latest idea to get us out of trouble, to impose a tax on the unvaccinated, fits into this logic. It will also take the same path as that of requiring the vaccination of employees of the health system: sector 13.
A good number of those thrown out of the system have this in common: they are poor and insolvent. What’s the point of trying to “contribute” them more. And it will probably be the same with the vaccination obligation, if we ever come to that. Compulsory vaccination will come up against the same difficulties as the desire to penalize those dropped from the system. Want to isolate them further? But it is precisely the tragedy of these people, to be too isolated. It is often because of this isolation that they are not vaccinated. And if there is a “plot”, it is probably not theirs, but ours to have kept them on the margins of the community. Without care and without recourse.