Steve Boots has a theory that conservatives are trying to destroy Canada's healthcare system, and it's a conspiracy theory that has been going on for decades. He thinks that the government is trying to get rid of the public health care system by using the same tactics they've been using for decades to undermine the system.
00:00:00.080Every once in a while on this channel, we take a dive into Canadian left-wing YouTube, TikTok, or other content on other social media platforms.
00:00:10.900You know, you should hear out what the other side believes and see if they have any merit to their arguments.
00:00:16.740I'm going to say ahead of time, I don't think that we're going to find much merit here, but it's always good to see the sorts of things that these people say.
00:00:23.860And today, we're going to be watching another video from our favorite internet super sleuth, Steve Boots, a man who truly believes that he is a voice of wisdom on the left.
00:00:36.240Without further ado, we have a video here where he's talking about conservatives are killing healthcare.
00:00:42.940And I'm just going to be using the 3-minute and 30-second version of the video that he posted to X here.
00:00:48.080If recent years haven't made it completely clear, let me say it outright.
00:00:51.300Conservative provincial governments are trying to destroy healthcare.
00:00:53.280They are following a very predictable model, and they have been for a long time.
00:00:56.780They've been playing the same game for decades, and the results are clear.
00:00:59.860I'm going to tell you right now, as we get into this video, he is going to contradict himself hard.
00:01:06.820He's telling us right now that the conservatives are destroying healthcare.
00:01:11.040We're using the same tactics we've been using for decades to undermine the system.
00:01:16.180Okay, Steve, explain to us what the system's currently looking like.
00:01:19.300They have created crumbling healthcare systems where the public has been duped into blaming frontline workers instead of the actual people failing them.
00:01:25.860And every time things get worse, they come up with the same solutions.
00:01:29.120Adding administrative layers creates something they think is accountability, forcing frontline workers to just do more with less.
00:01:38.400Where were the unions protesting the bloat in administration?
00:01:43.160And sorry, conservatives were the ones expanding the administrative side of healthcare and then blaming frontline workers?
00:01:50.100If you've ever heard a conservative talk about healthcare before, they always say that the system is too top-heavy with administration and there's not enough assistance for the front lines.
00:02:00.560That's currently what is being discussed right now in BC.
00:02:04.560That's currently what's happening in Alberta that the health minister, Adrian Lagrange, is using ways of breaking up the current bloated AHS system, turning it into a more regionalized system, and being able to slash a lot of top-level administrative jobs and moving that money towards the front lines.
00:02:22.020That's why wait times are currently going down quite quickly in Alberta.
00:02:26.100That's why wait times went down in Saskatchewan.
00:02:28.360And that's why wait times in provinces like British Columbia are going up, because the BCNBP has been favoring creating more management and efficiency monitoring positions.
00:02:39.360I don't even know what he's talking about.
00:02:40.980Name a politician in general who blames frontline workers.
00:02:47.100But in Steve Boots' world, where conservatives are evil and leftists are nice, well, obviously conservatives were blaming nurses and doctors, as if anyone has ever done that in their lives.
00:02:57.260Or in many cases, they offload the services to the private sector.
00:03:00.860And this happens in all sorts of different ways.
00:03:02.880Some are on a smaller scale, like the private clinics that family doctors operate out of, which are quite common across Canada.
00:03:07.420Or this can happen on a larger scale, like in my home province of Saskatchewan, where private MRIs become common.
00:03:26.060Failing public health sector creates an opportunity for private investment in health in order to squeeze more and more money out of the public, but also...
00:03:34.780The private systems in these provinces, though, the way that they allow people to go use their public insurance at private clinics,
00:03:42.100is basically one-to-one with the amount of money the public system gets.
00:03:46.020But there's more profitability for the private clinics, for private doctors, for general practitioners, because they are more efficient with their resources.
00:03:54.380Because it's not the public system, and they are not going to have like a big board of supervisors, administrators, or HR reps when that's not necessary.
00:04:04.100So the difference is that people who are in charge of private delivery get effectively the same budget for doing the same amount of service,
00:04:12.100but they use their dollars in a more efficient way to see more patients and then be able to take home more money for themselves at the end of the day.
00:04:19.960Even right there, I'm not sure if you've noticed, he actually just admitted that the current public system is crumbling.
00:04:26.500Again, he has a conspiracy theory that it's been conservatives all along trying to undermine it.
00:04:32.220I don't know, like because there's some billionaire...
00:04:34.300Chip Wilson is telling us to do it so that he can monopolize the system or whatever billionaire boogeyman the left currently has.
00:04:44.180The countries that have more choices, more supply of health care, tend to have cheaper and more efficient health care.
00:04:51.960We actually pay a lot in Canada for our public health care, because when you take the portion of your tax dollars that would be going towards health care in terms of its rate percentage of the budget,
00:05:04.580you're paying as a family of four, I believe it's like over $6,000, maybe even $7,000 as a middle class family through your taxes.
00:05:13.520It's a lot that you pay towards health care these days in its proportion of the budget.
00:05:18.760And your delivery absolutely sucks, because there's no incentives to actually deliver health care efficiently.
00:05:25.840A health care system I really like is actually in the Caucasus, if you know the country of Georgia.
00:05:31.500Georgia technically has a fully private system, but it's still universal.
00:05:36.220What they do is that there are private hospitals and private insurance companies.
00:05:40.580But if you live below a certain rate of income, the government will give you a stipend that you can then go use at a private insurance company.
00:05:50.540And because there's so many private insurance companies, they will bend over backwards to give you as much service for the amount of dollars that you have,
00:05:57.820even if it's just the bare minimum government amount.
00:06:00.560And so in Georgia, they have triple the number of doctors that we have in Canada.
00:06:05.240You can go see your general practitioner same day for about $25 or see any doctor.
00:06:10.900$25 Canadian dollars would be the equivalent.
00:06:13.140You get a knee replacement in that country.
00:06:15.500And because they're all private hospitals and they don't want to be sued, they're very careful at what they do.
00:06:35.360And everyone pretty much has health care.
00:06:36.960Obviously, there's going to be a gap of people who are above the line of money that you get a stipend for who then don't choose to get their own health care.
00:06:45.560But overall, it's a pretty good system.
00:06:47.860They do not have massive health problems other than it's a former Soviet republic and everyone smokes.
00:06:52.580But, you know, you really can't help that.
00:07:15.300Even Jason Kenney, when he technically cut AHS spending, he did it in the stupidest way possible.
00:07:20.660He wanted them to reduce their budget by half a percent.
00:07:23.820And he was asking them to voluntarily cut wasteful administrative positions because Jason Kenney was silly, stupid, frankly.
00:07:31.840What happened was AHS just cut a bunch of nurses and frontline people to make Jason Kenney look bad and protect their own jobs.
00:07:38.080So that was like an issue where Jason Kenney should have probably cut administration directly.
00:07:43.460But we're talking about a minuscule tiny cut where he was probably intending that they cut not only positions that were not useful, were probably holding back the efficiency of the entire system.
00:07:53.580But at some point, you actually get an administration so bloated.
00:07:56.660It's not just that the dollars aren't helping.
00:07:58.620They're actively hurting you because it's creating more hoops for people on the front lines to jump through in order to be able to deliver service.
00:08:06.600Conservative politician again and again.
00:08:08.220The public health care is the most efficient way to spend our health care dollars, which is demonstrably true.
00:08:12.580The research bears that out again and again, but they don't care, even though this is coming from a man who's very likely never actually looked at the research.
00:08:26.140He has seen headlines from lefty organizations who say that, oh, public health care is actually more efficient than private health care because maybe private health care was charging more for like an MRI to the public system than the public system does.
00:08:38.720Leaving out the fact that the private system does not require as many dollars from the public for their administration because they're much more slender when it comes to their other spending.
00:08:48.480Look at the Fraser Institute's efficiency reports from province to province.
00:08:51.700The more centralized systems in Canada have the longest wait times and the fewest amount of like the highest amount of patients per capita to each available general practitioner or family doctor.
00:09:04.300In BC right now, they're playing this kind of shell game where we have 85% of people in BC have a family doctor, which makes it one of the highest in Canada.
00:09:14.400But if you actually look at how many patients the average family doctor has in BC compared to like Saskatchewan, it's monumentally high.
00:09:21.940And when you actually ask people, do you have easy access to your family doctor?
00:09:26.200The rates of people who say that they actually can see their family doctor quite quickly plunges down significantly.
00:09:32.640As soon as you add a profit motive, somebody is going to be extracting that profit.
00:09:36.960They have an incentive to pull as much value as possible from the customer.
00:09:40.900Does he believe that the public system does not have profit motives for individual administrators, for individuals who are providing services and providing like overall support?
00:09:55.580Just because something is the public sector does not mean that it is operating in the public interest.
00:10:01.220Do you think executives in these public systems like Dr.
00:10:05.340Verna Yu, who we actually at the National Telegraph back when we used to write more articles, we got her fired.
00:10:10.980She was making more than $700,000 a year in salary and benefits.
00:10:15.580And in the AHS in Alberta, I think the quote is that I've heard that there is like three, there is like 350 plus people who work in management positions who don't actually manage anybody.
00:10:26.740Do you think they're not motivated to make money for not doing obviously useless work?
00:10:32.380The thing in the private sector is that somebody has to voluntarily give you dollars for service.
00:10:38.580You can't just force them to give you money without providing them actual value.
00:10:43.260In the public system, you can take people's tax dollars, work in some useless department of HR or administration or efficiency monitoring, and nobody can actually say boo to you because you got those dollars and they can't track them down and demand them back.
00:10:58.920In this case, a person who's sick or in need of health care.
00:11:02.100Private health care is a very unique situation because the laws of supply and demand don't really apply here.
00:11:06.540You can't just demand less health care.
00:11:38.440The thing is that you need incentives for people to act better, whether that's being paying for their own insurance.
00:11:44.020That's something like dental care in Canada.
00:11:46.520Most of the people who don't have dental care, it's not really because they can't afford it.
00:11:49.960It's because they care about having dental care.
00:11:52.200And so by putting in universal dental care, you're going to bog down the system with people who really didn't pay money and who are not giving doctor or dentists payouts that are actually worthwhile for them to see them.
00:12:03.140So it's just going to make everyone with private dental plans go up private market, as is the case in the United States.
00:12:09.300You wind up with massive overspending on things like insurance premiums, administrative costs and the cost of things like deferred care or lack of access lead to way higher costs down the line because they're not investing in preventative care.
00:12:20.200Do you know why also Americans pay a lot for their private insurance and medical care?
00:12:25.780It's because, well, actually, one, America actually does a lot of just health care type work for people who fly in.
00:12:33.740So that also gets added to their GDP and then gets added to their GDP per capita on health care spending.
00:12:38.780The reason why private plans in the U.S. can cost a lot is because it's not actually a private system.
00:12:44.960Medicare, Medicaid, because those systems do not pay out to doctors who are required to see a certain amount of Medicaid and Medicare patients.
00:12:52.400They then have to pass the cost on to those who are paying.
00:12:56.120So it turns into a system where someone who probably actually could have been able to afford their own insurance just sits on Medicaid because or Medicare because they qualify based on their age.
00:13:05.160And somebody who actually struggles to pay for private Medicaid or private insurance is now burdened further by that person who's just choosing not to pay and using the easier, cheaper system.
00:13:16.060All of this adds up to a public system that is set up to fail so the private system can swoop in and profit.
00:13:21.080And that's exactly what's happened in Saskatchewan.
00:13:22.800So Saskatchewan health care is collapsing across a number of fronts, and the Saskatchewan government's using that as an opportunity to turn things over to private health care.
00:13:42.020He doesn't like any private delivery not being done outside of a government that the government owns.
00:13:50.500Saskatchewan's been doing the best with one of the oldest populations on average in Canada.
00:13:55.140We should be copying what Saskatchewan's doing, but because he's a leftist who lives in Saskatchewan,
00:14:00.480he now considers it like his job to just stump against the, like, he just, just to stump against conservatives.
00:14:08.340And yeah, so now he doesn't like whatever the Saskatchewan government's doing because it's not fully leftist.
00:14:15.280One example of this is the private MRIs that the Saskatchewan government introduced.
00:14:19.200They brought in private clinics where you could pay to skip the line.
00:14:21.640And that forces everybody into an impossible situation where you have to wait an extended period for a publicly funded MRI,
00:14:27.540or you could pay a thousand bucks for a private one.
00:14:29.200Oh, wow. It's almost like, though, that that took people out of the public lineup.
00:14:34.420Whereas if you're in places like B.C., they actually have to tell you to go down to the U.S. to go get an MRI because they have nothing available there.
00:14:42.320At least Saskatchewan actually has it in the same province, and it allows more people to get through the line.
00:15:03.640Like, it doesn't actually work out in the long run.
00:15:05.920And you can't really do that with health care when more money doesn't get people more MRIs.
00:15:11.540But people like Steve Boots thinks that if we just add another billion dollars to the system, well, then somehow things are going to get better.
00:15:18.120While, yes, you could potentially pay for more doctors to be doing more MRIs,
00:15:22.900the thing is that the systems that he supports never actually do that.
00:15:26.220They feed more money into the systems, increase administrative jobs, increase some frontline jobs.
00:15:32.140But because it's a public system, there is no requirement for them to actually be efficient because they're not running on any motive to be efficient.