The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - Canadian Leftist proves his own ignorance on healthcare

00:00:00.080 Every 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.

00:00:10.900 You know, you should hear out what the other side believes and see if they have any merit to their arguments.

00:00:16.740 I'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.

00:00:23.860 And 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.

00:00:36.240 Without further ado, we have a video here where he's talking about conservatives are killing healthcare.

00:00:42.940 And I'm just going to be using the 3-minute and 30-second version of the video that he posted to X here.

00:00:48.080 If recent years haven't made it completely clear, let me say it outright.

00:00:51.300 Conservative provincial governments are trying to destroy healthcare.

00:00:53.280 They are following a very predictable model, and they have been for a long time.

00:00:56.780 They've been playing the same game for decades, and the results are clear.

00:00:59.860 I'm going to tell you right now, as we get into this video, he is going to contradict himself hard.

00:01:06.820 He's telling us right now that the conservatives are destroying healthcare.

00:01:11.040 We're using the same tactics we've been using for decades to undermine the system.

00:01:16.180 Okay, Steve, explain to us what the system's currently looking like.

00:01:19.300 They have created crumbling healthcare systems where the public has been duped into blaming frontline workers instead of the actual people failing them.

00:01:25.860 And every time things get worse, they come up with the same solutions.

00:01:29.120 Adding administrative layers creates something they think is accountability, forcing frontline workers to just do more with less.

00:01:34.860 Just by micromanagement.

00:01:36.140 Sorry, sorry, sorry.

00:01:38.400 Where were the unions protesting the bloat in administration?

00:01:43.160 And sorry, conservatives were the ones expanding the administrative side of healthcare and then blaming frontline workers?

00:01:50.100 If 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.

00:02:00.560 That's currently what is being discussed right now in BC.

00:02:04.560 That'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.

00:02:22.020 That's why wait times are currently going down quite quickly in Alberta.

00:02:26.100 That's why wait times went down in Saskatchewan.

00:02:28.360 And 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.

00:02:39.360 I don't even know what he's talking about.

00:02:40.980 Name a politician in general who blames frontline workers.

00:02:44.560 Nobody has ever actually done that.

00:02:47.100 But 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.

00:02:57.260 Or in many cases, they offload the services to the private sector.

00:03:00.860 And this happens in all sorts of different ways.

00:03:02.880 Some are on a smaller scale, like the private clinics that family doctors operate out of, which are quite common across Canada.

00:03:07.420 Or this can happen on a larger scale, like in my home province of Saskatchewan, where private MRIs become common.

00:03:12.160 And the reason why this happens is...

00:03:13.360 Saskatchewan currently has the best wait times in Canada, so I don't know what point he's trying to make here.

00:03:19.000 The systems that are most centralized in Canada are the worst quality in terms of their care.

00:03:24.740 It's twofold.

00:03:26.060 Failing 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...

00:03:32.820 No, they do not.

00:03:34.780 The private systems in these provinces, though, the way that they allow people to go use their public insurance at private clinics,

00:03:42.100 is basically one-to-one with the amount of money the public system gets.

00:03:46.020 But there's more profitability for the private clinics, for private doctors, for general practitioners, because they are more efficient with their resources.

00:03:54.380 Because 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.

00:04:04.100 So the difference is that people who are in charge of private delivery get effectively the same budget for doing the same amount of service,

00:04:12.100 but 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.

00:04:19.960 Even right there, I'm not sure if you've noticed, he actually just admitted that the current public system is crumbling.

00:04:26.500 Again, he has a conspiracy theory that it's been conservatives all along trying to undermine it.

00:04:32.220 I don't know, like because there's some billionaire...

00:04:34.300 Chip Wilson is telling us to do it so that he can monopolize the system or whatever billionaire boogeyman the left currently has.

00:04:42.280 That's just wrong.

00:04:44.180 The countries that have more choices, more supply of health care, tend to have cheaper and more efficient health care.

00:04:51.960 We 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,

00:05:04.580 you'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.

00:05:13.520 It's a lot that you pay towards health care these days in its proportion of the budget.

00:05:18.760 And your delivery absolutely sucks, because there's no incentives to actually deliver health care efficiently.

00:05:25.840 A health care system I really like is actually in the Caucasus, if you know the country of Georgia. 0.94

00:05:31.500 Georgia technically has a fully private system, but it's still universal.

00:05:36.220 What they do is that there are private hospitals and private insurance companies.

00:05:40.580 But 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.

00:05:50.540 And 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,

00:05:57.820 even if it's just the bare minimum government amount.

00:06:00.560 And so in Georgia, they have triple the number of doctors that we have in Canada.

00:06:05.240 You 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.

00:06:13.140 You get a knee replacement in that country.

00:06:15.500 And because they're all private hospitals and they don't want to be sued, they're very careful at what they do.

00:06:20.380 They're very high quality.

00:06:21.780 It will only cost you about $300 and you could probably get the knee replaced within a week or a month,

00:06:26.820 depending on how much consultation is required.

00:06:29.560 Obviously, different people will need different considerations before they get a surgery like that.

00:06:34.020 It's great there.

00:06:35.360 And everyone pretty much has health care.

00:06:36.960 Obviously, 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.

00:06:45.560 But overall, it's a pretty good system.

00:06:47.860 They do not have massive health problems other than it's a former Soviet republic and everyone smokes. 0.68

00:06:52.580 But, you know, you really can't help that.

00:06:54.700 But I've rambled long enough.

00:06:56.660 Let's get back to Steve Boots' conspiracy here.

00:07:00.060 Conservative governments don't view health care as a service.

00:07:02.080 They don't view anything as a service.

00:07:04.020 They view every public service as an expense line because something to be cut, nothing more.

00:07:08.180 You can tell them.

00:07:09.540 Tell me which conservative government cut health care.

00:07:12.700 Which one?

00:07:13.680 They've never done it. 0.99

00:07:15.300 Even Jason Kenney, when he technically cut AHS spending, he did it in the stupidest way possible. 0.91

00:07:20.660 He wanted them to reduce their budget by half a percent. 1.00

00:07:23.820 And he was asking them to voluntarily cut wasteful administrative positions because Jason Kenney was silly, stupid, frankly. 0.99

00:07:31.840 What happened was AHS just cut a bunch of nurses and frontline people to make Jason Kenney look bad and protect their own jobs. 0.99

00:07:38.080 So that was like an issue where Jason Kenney should have probably cut administration directly.

00:07:43.460 But 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.

00:07:53.580 But at some point, you actually get an administration so bloated.

00:07:56.660 It's not just that the dollars aren't helping.

00:07:58.620 They'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.

00:08:06.600 Conservative politician again and again.

00:08:08.220 The public health care is the most efficient way to spend our health care dollars, which is demonstrably true.

00:08:12.580 The 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.

00:08:26.140 He 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.

00:08:38.720 Leaving 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.

00:08:47.420 He's just wrong.

00:08:48.480 Look at the Fraser Institute's efficiency reports from province to province.

00:08:51.700 The 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.

00:09:04.300 In 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.

00:09:14.400 But if you actually look at how many patients the average family doctor has in BC compared to like Saskatchewan, it's monumentally high.

00:09:21.940 And when you actually ask people, do you have easy access to your family doctor?

00:09:26.200 The rates of people who say that they actually can see their family doctor quite quickly plunges down significantly.

00:09:32.640 As soon as you add a profit motive, somebody is going to be extracting that profit.

00:09:36.960 They have an incentive to pull as much value as possible from the customer.

00:09:40.900 Does 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?

00:09:54.420 This is the problem.

00:09:55.580 Just because something is the public sector does not mean that it is operating in the public interest.

00:10:01.220 Do you think executives in these public systems like Dr.

00:10:05.340 Verna Yu, who we actually at the National Telegraph back when we used to write more articles, we got her fired. 1.00

00:10:10.980 She was making more than $700,000 a year in salary and benefits.

00:10:15.580 And 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.

00:10:26.740 Do you think they're not motivated to make money for not doing obviously useless work?

00:10:32.380 The thing in the private sector is that somebody has to voluntarily give you dollars for service.

00:10:38.580 You can't just force them to give you money without providing them actual value.

00:10:43.260 In 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.

00:10:58.920 In this case, a person who's sick or in need of health care.

00:11:02.100 Private health care is a very unique situation because the laws of supply and demand don't really apply here.

00:11:06.540 You can't just demand less health care.

00:11:08.820 You can't moderate your need.

00:11:10.260 You can't just decide not to have cancer.

00:11:12.100 Market principles don't work here.

00:11:13.940 So when this gets turned over to the private sector, that's the point of having in actual fully privatized systems.

00:11:19.440 And I'm fine with having a mix of both, obviously, is that you have people who have insurance that they've been paying into for a while.

00:11:26.740 Yes, you're always going to have the person who never had insurance or who was not looking after themselves.

00:11:31.380 That happens all the time in the public system.

00:11:33.080 People don't look after themselves because, you know, it's free and I don't have to care that much.

00:11:37.020 And then they bog down the system.

00:11:38.440 The thing is that you need incentives for people to act better, whether that's being paying for their own insurance.

00:11:44.020 That's something like dental care in Canada.

00:11:46.520 Most of the people who don't have dental care, it's not really because they can't afford it.

00:11:49.960 It's because they care about having dental care.

00:11:52.200 And 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.

00:12:03.140 So it's just going to make everyone with private dental plans go up private market, as is the case in the United States.

00:12:09.300 You 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.

00:12:20.200 Do you know why also Americans pay a lot for their private insurance and medical care?

00:12:25.780 It's because, well, actually, one, America actually does a lot of just health care type work for people who fly in.

00:12:33.740 So that also gets added to their GDP and then gets added to their GDP per capita on health care spending.

00:12:38.780 The reason why private plans in the U.S. can cost a lot is because it's not actually a private system.

00:12:44.960 Medicare, Medicaid, because those systems do not pay out to doctors who are required to see a certain amount of Medicaid and Medicare patients.

00:12:52.400 They then have to pass the cost on to those who are paying.

00:12:56.120 So 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.

00:13:05.160 And 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.

00:13:16.060 All of this adds up to a public system that is set up to fail so the private system can swoop in and profit.

00:13:21.080 And that's exactly what's happened in Saskatchewan.

00:13:22.800 So 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.

00:13:30.000 And they've been doing a good job?

00:13:32.800 Like, I don't even know what to say to this guy.

00:13:35.160 It's like he just hates private health care.

00:13:40.460 Really, that is what he hates.

00:13:42.020 He doesn't like any private delivery not being done outside of a government that the government owns.

00:13:50.500 Saskatchewan's been doing the best with one of the oldest populations on average in Canada.

00:13:55.140 We should be copying what Saskatchewan's doing, but because he's a leftist who lives in Saskatchewan,

00:14:00.480 he now considers it like his job to just stump against the, like, he just, just to stump against conservatives.

00:14:08.340 And yeah, so now he doesn't like whatever the Saskatchewan government's doing because it's not fully leftist.

00:14:15.280 One example of this is the private MRIs that the Saskatchewan government introduced.

00:14:19.200 They brought in private clinics where you could pay to skip the line. 0.86

00:14:21.640 And that forces everybody into an impossible situation where you have to wait an extended period for a publicly funded MRI,

00:14:27.540 or you could pay a thousand bucks for a private one.

00:14:29.200 Oh, wow. It's almost like, though, that that took people out of the public lineup.

00:14:34.420 Whereas 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.

00:14:42.320 At least Saskatchewan actually has it in the same province, and it allows more people to get through the line.

00:14:48.280 This is the thing.

00:14:49.880 Leftists think that when we have a problem with too much demand for too little supply, we need to subsidize demand more.

00:14:56.680 Or, you know, there's not enough, like, you know, homes are expensive.

00:14:59.300 People can't afford them.

00:15:00.260 Just give those people money and they can afford them.

00:15:02.460 That's not how that works.

00:15:03.640 Like, it doesn't actually work out in the long run.

00:15:05.920 And you can't really do that with health care when more money doesn't get people more MRIs.

00:15:11.540 But 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.

00:15:18.120 While, yes, you could potentially pay for more doctors to be doing more MRIs,

00:15:22.900 the thing is that the systems that he supports never actually do that.

00:15:26.220 They feed more money into the systems, increase administrative jobs, increase some frontline jobs.

00:15:32.140 But 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.

00:15:39.720 That's the thing with Saskatchewan. 0.96

00:15:41.240 Once you introduce people who are able to deliver private MRIs, they're incentivized to do as many of them as possible.

00:15:48.500 That's because that is their incentive from the government, that they only get paid when they're actually delivering this service.

00:15:53.700 Now, the Saskatchewan government sold this to the public on the claim that every time you paid for a private MRI,

00:15:58.820 they would cover an MRI for the public system as well.

00:16:01.320 But the actual effect of this has been a massive increase in wait times.

00:16:04.680 The data is incredibly concerning.

00:16:06.400 90% of patients had their MRIs within 50 days in 2015.

00:16:10.180 Today, that number is up to 82.

00:16:11.660 Yeah, and that's, just letting you know, that's still like the best in Canada right now.

00:16:17.680 During that entire period of time, wait times have gone up.

00:16:20.720 Just look at the Fraser Institute, who's been tracking this since 1998.

00:16:24.460 1998, even though that was back when the economy was kind of starting to recover,

00:16:28.980 after we had that big debt crisis in the early 90s, wait times were like 19 weeks for things.

00:16:35.220 Or not even 19 weeks, I think it was like nine weeks, seven weeks.

00:16:37.780 This is very good for an average Canadian wait time.

00:16:41.020 Now it's like 28 weeks, 32 weeks on average.

00:16:44.680 Saskatchewan still, for these more complex procedures, are still better than everywhere else.

00:16:50.620 But he is going to use Saskatchewan as a specific example when he wants to get mad at the Saskatchewan government,

00:16:56.560 but he'll never actually put it in the broader context of Canada,

00:17:00.000 where there are more centralized systems that he, in theory, is in favor of,

00:17:03.860 because they don't perform as well.

00:17:06.100 ...out of pocket to wait nearly twice as long.

00:17:09.180 Awesome.

00:17:09.740 And I've had personal experience with this.

00:17:11.140 My wife has MS, and when we were waiting for our initial diagnosis,

00:17:14.280 we had to wait for months.

00:17:15.660 And we were left in the position of deciding whether or not we were willing to lay down $1,000

00:17:19.020 in order to get our MRI right away,

00:17:21.320 and get answers to those time-sensitive medical questions,

00:17:24.900 or wait.

00:17:26.040 Fortunately, the MRI came quickly enough that we don't have to make that difficult decision,

00:17:29.580 but not everyone's so fortunate.

00:17:30.700 It's because Saskatchewan's actually doing a much better job than other places.

00:17:34.660 I guarantee you.

00:17:35.880 And that's bad.

00:17:37.540 Of course it's bad whenever you have to deal with something like MS in your life.

00:17:41.120 But he should actually look at how the other systems perform.

00:17:44.060 Saskatchewan is doing far better than the rest of them.

00:17:46.520 And so all this seems just backhanded when he's going after conservatives,

00:17:50.440 because wait times have gotten bad in Saskatchewan over the past eight or nine years.

00:17:55.380 But if you look at any other province, it's gotten far worse.

00:17:57.920 And in the provinces where they're actually starting to use more private delivery,

00:18:01.680 and they're starting to decentralize the system like Alberta,

00:18:04.460 they're having wait times for surgeries go down significantly.

00:18:08.080 I think that Adrienne Lagrange's track record in Alberta since she became the health minister

00:18:12.940 after the last provincial election has been,

00:18:16.040 I think, wait times for certain types of surgeries going down by an entire third.

00:18:19.800 That's really good in just over a year of her being on the job.

00:18:23.100 But whatever, because it's private, it's bad.

00:18:26.580 And like, wow.

00:18:27.800 This is almost like Steve's video could be advertising for private care.

00:18:31.920 He is showing that the Saskatchewan government is providing more MRIs.

00:18:36.400 Nobody else was providing, the state wasn't providing those MRIs.

00:18:39.280 And the Saskatchewan government actually found a better way of doing it.

00:18:42.500 And the thing is that you could say, well, the state could have done it.

00:18:45.180 They could have just bought more MRI machines.

00:18:46.660 Well, over the decades, it's never happened.

00:18:49.940 Because the government doesn't directly manage the system.

00:18:53.860 They should, in a certain sense.

00:18:55.120 I think they should take out a lot of these executives who keep wasting money.

00:18:58.620 Just look at the way that executives running things like the CBC waste money. 0.89

00:19:02.980 That when the executives who are currently in charge, who are the experts that the left trusts,

00:19:08.300 whenever they get a hold of the money, it never actually goes to increasing supply of care.

00:19:12.400 Because their incentives are not to supply care because they get the money from the taxpayer,

00:19:16.920 regardless if they supply the care or not.

00:19:20.420 Anyways, that's it for me today, guys.

00:19:23.020 I'm not sure if that makes you feel hopeful or not.

00:19:26.840 Because of like, you know, healthcare in Saskatchewan is doing well.

00:19:30.720 And we find out that the left is bad at arguing.

00:19:33.520 But yeah, this is what a lot of kids will be watching.

00:19:36.260 Steve Boots' videos, because he has a decent following on places like TikTok and YouTube.

00:19:41.180 With content quality like this, I hope a lot of kids are starting to, you know, find other sources of information.

00:19:49.820 That should be it for me today, guys.

00:19:51.300 If you want to donate to the Give, Send, Go, that's in the description below,

00:19:54.360 as well as pinned at the top of the comments.

00:19:56.500 It really helps me out if you do that.

00:19:58.280 Let me know if there's any other TikTok videos from other creators you want me to respond to.

00:20:02.080 I think stuff like this is decently fun and it's a good frame for me to talk about issues like healthcare

00:20:08.040 or, you know, other things that these people talk about in their videos.

00:20:11.760 See you guys later.

The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - October 08, 2024

Canadian Leftist proves his own ignorance on healthcare

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