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In Your Corner: System can be improved

Universal public medicare is one of the defining aspects of being Canadian. It wasn’t an easily won battle to get coverage for all of us, but Tommy Douglas took up the charge because he believed that everyone matters. Now, he’s considered to be the greatest Canadian for doing so.

Universal public medicare is one of the defining aspects of being Canadian. It wasn’t an easily won battle to get coverage for all of us, but Tommy Douglas took up the charge because he believed that everyone matters. Now, he’s considered to be the greatest Canadian for doing so.

Sadly, Tommy Douglas’s vision is continually under threat. There’s a lot of profit to be had off of other people’s illness, misfortune and health needs. Just ask any health management organization in the U.S. For example, in California, HMOs made $4.3 billion in profits in 2008. This being the case, the drive to privatize Canadian medicare is alive and doing much too well in B.C.

But before you can privatize a public system that costs less and provides greater coverage, you have to break it. You have to destabilize the public system, reduce accountability, reduce service and drive up waitlists. That has been taking place since the BC Liberals got into office in 2001. We can look around and see the changes: appointed Health authority boards, big salaries for administrators, fewer hospital beds, less home care, reduced public health, record high code purples, privatized cleaning services that lead to dirty hospitals, and more.

As this is happening, you will hear the privateers say that public healthcare is too expensive. To be sure, I have heard the B.C. minister of health say this all too often. However, this simply isn’t true. The U.S.’s private system significantly costs more of its gross domestic product (GDP), as well as on a per capita basis than the Canadian public model. This holds true for European countries, like Sweden, that also have a public system. And unlike private models, public healthcare ensures everyone has access regardless of income.

Nevertheless, the current administration of healthcare under the BC Liberals is costly. At over 40 per cent of the B.C. budget, it’s the single largest line item in the province. Without getting into why the costs are so inflated with reduced services, we can all recognize that medicare is also the most important line item in the province. After all, you don’t have anything if you don’t have your health.

This being said, we need to focus on how we can deliver optimal healthcare in our communities. And since it costs less and ensures access to everyone, we need to keep it public.

So what are the things we can do to ensure a strong healthcare system? How do we build it up rather than tear it down bit by bit?

There are many innovations rooted in best practices and follow the old adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

One such innovation would address the growing number of orphaned patients in the Creston Valley, and that is nurse practitioners, who graduate with a master’s degree in nursing and have the skill and expertise to deliver primary care in both hospital and family practices.

We also need to look at how we can better support physicians’ practice in rural areas. The Creston Valley Health Services Working Group has won awards for its successes in recruitment, showing that the province needs to continue its support in this area.

Bringing forward these innovations and best practices is something I continue to work on as your MLA. Building up our public healthcare is imperative for the wellbeing of our communities, so whether it is in a meeting with the Interior Health Authority or in Question Period in the B.C. legislature, I stand up for strengthening public healthcare. My inspiration for this: The greatest Canadian.

Michelle Mungall is the MLA for the Nelson-Creston riding.