I have a friend who doesn’t have a family doctor.
He’s been on a waiting list for years, but to no avail.
Like many Quebecers, when he needs to see a doctor, he opens his wallet, takes out $500 and goes to the private sector.
Oh, by the way, my friend is a doctor.
In the public system.
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Health is a commodity
Before reading the file that The newspaper devoted to the terrible effects of the glaring lack of general practitioners in Quebec, I believed that the system was on the verge of collapse.
Now, I was in the field.
It’s not about to collapse.
He collapsed.
More than two million Quebecers do not have a family doctor. No one monitors their health. No annual exam, no routine visit, nothing.
How did we get there? How could we have allowed the system to deteriorate to this extent?
With all the money we send to the state?
All your life, you finance a system that you don’t use because you are in good health. And when you get older and need services, you have to pay again to go private because the system you paid for for 40 years is not able to take care of you!
We subsidize with our taxes the studies of future doctors who, when they graduate, will go into private practice directly to make more money!
Québec solidaire is absolutely right: health care has become a product, a commodity, that only wealthy people can buy.
Are we moving towards a two-tier health system?
But let’s see, friends, we’re not moving along, we’re in it! To the teeth!
- Listen to the Martineau – Dutrizac meeting between Benoît Dutrizac and Richard Martineau via QUB :
It was all predictable
I have written it many times and I will continue to do so: if there is something that we can predict, in this increasingly changing, increasingly unpredictable world, it is demographic changes. .
Currently, we can know how many workers there will be in 50 years in Quebec. And young people. And elderly people.
There are specialists who do this for a living.
Are we listening to them? Do we read them?
We knew that the Quebec population was aging at great speed, that the age pyramid was going to be reversed and that the tsunami of retirements, Alzheimer’s and injuries of all kinds was going to hit our health system head on.
Demographers and actuaries have been saying this for years.
What did we do as the wave approached? Thousands of nurses were allowed to retire early!
By the summer of 1997, six months after the retirement program was launched, 37,000 employees, including 4,000 nurses, had left their jobs.
We closed hospitals and made thousands of beds disappear!
We tried everything: the ambulatory shift, the Toyota method, the GMF, the CSSS, hypercentralization, lark.
Result: the system is still just as sick.
Can we force our ministers and governments to take demographics into account when they launch programs?