The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - April 08, 2024


The Liberals universal dental plan is already failing


Episode Stats

Length

7 minutes

Words per Minute

194.23598

Word Count

1,458

Sentence Count

65

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary

Justin Trudeau's plan to provide free dental care to all Canadians is already a complete flop. The problem with this program is that it relies on forcing dentists to deliver their services or products at a lower price than they would be normally charging customers. And that means that dentists and hygienists are not being able to cover the costs of delivering these services. Instead, they are being forced to pay out-of-pocket fees to the government for the same services they are already providing at a much lower rate than they should be charging. And the problem with that is that the government is not making any money on the supply that they re providing. They are simply taking the rates that people already pay for their dental care and slashing them even lower, which then raises the question, why would you ever become a dentist if you are being paid nothing for your services?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Well, it appears like the Justin Trudeau Liberals Universal Dental Care Program is already a massive flop in Canada.
00:00:08.240 I predicted this was going to happen as soon as they made the announcement, and a lot of you probably predicted that it was going to fail as well.
00:00:14.760 The problem with this program, which is the problem with a lot of universal governmental programs, is that it relies on them basically being able to force dentists to deliver their services or products at a lower cost than they would be normally charging customers.
00:00:32.280 And while there's a lot of leftists out there saying, well, that's just bulk buying, obviously it should be cheaper if the government is bulk buying these services, well, that's what insurers already do.
00:00:41.920 Dental care is already bulk purchased for the vast majority of people, unless you just, for some reason, don't have dental insurance and you just pay out of pocket every time you go, which is a very tiny portion of people.
00:00:53.680 Most people go through their insurance and then don't have to pay the full cost once they get their care.
00:00:59.680 But with this liberal plan, they were just going to take the rates, the low rates that people already pay for their dental care and slash them even lower,
00:01:08.980 which then raises the question, why would you ever actually become a dentist, a hygienist, or a denturist if you are basically being paid nothing for your services?
00:01:18.460 So in the next month, we have about 1.5 million Canadians, mostly in the senior age demographic, waiting to be able to access their universal dental care.
00:01:29.240 So they were promised that they were going to be able to walk into any dental office and that they were going to be given services at the government's expense, really just on the taxpayer dime.
00:01:39.460 And that's not happening because out of the around 30,000 dentists, hygienists, and denturists, very few of them actually signed up to this program, probably only around a couple thousand out of the 30,000 of those individuals.
00:01:54.440 And it's because why would you work your butt off as a dentist to basically be paid what is minimum wage effectively after all of your expenses are taken care of?
00:02:04.820 That's ridiculous. You paid all the money to getting your dental education, you got your office set up, you pay staff, and for what, $15 per interaction with a client? That's insane.
00:02:17.840 This is also why universal pharmacare is also going to fall apart in Canada.
00:02:22.280 You can't just tell pharmaceutical companies, and I know people like to demonize pharmaceutical companies, some of them deserve it, some of them do not, or at least the ones that deserve it don't always deserve it.
00:02:33.100 But the problem is you can't just say, well, you know, this medicine that you're used to paying $30 for, you're used to charging $30 for, well, how about you just charge $21?
00:02:42.700 What's the point of actually supplying those medications and drugs into Canada if you're effectively not making any money on the supply that you're providing?
00:02:51.520 Same thing with dental care. And frankly, this is the problem with public health care in Canada.
00:02:57.100 There is almost no incentive to actually be a doctor or a nurse in Canada.
00:03:01.220 You get paid very little for the amount of effort you take into providing medical services, and the government is blocking you from being able to charge more despite the fact that you're barely able to cover your costs.
00:03:13.360 Why not just become an accountant? Why not just get into construction? Why not do a lot of other things?
00:03:17.960 Just go work in oil fields, and you'll make way more money than a dentist or someone in the medical field does.
00:03:24.060 Because even when you are making the upper bracket amounts as a doctor, you're making like $150,000 a year.
00:03:30.740 Some make more, obviously.
00:03:32.080 And after taxes, you're only coming home with like $80,000, and you could have probably just worked a far easier job for the exact same amount of money.
00:03:39.320 So this whole dental care program is utterly failing.
00:03:43.240 And I was reading a CBC article earlier today, and I'll link that in the description below.
00:03:47.900 They actually did a really good job on this one of reaching out to seniors.
00:03:51.460 And even the seniors, and I'm not saying that like, oh, the public's usually very ignorant.
00:03:55.700 I'm more so saying that usually I find that the CBC cherry picks the few people who are very pro-liberal in their viewpoint.
00:04:03.220 They talked to a lot of seniors who knew exactly who was responsible for this mess-up, and they point to the finger, rightfully so, at Justin Trudeau, the liberals, as well as the NDP Collagen Partners.
00:04:14.400 Because this program was a dog's breakfast.
00:04:17.220 They basically just fluttered a $5 bill in front of dentists and say, do you want to deliver dental surgeries for free for this $5 bill?
00:04:24.500 They did not want to do that.
00:04:25.920 And now the whole program is falling apart.
00:04:27.760 Basically, no dental associations signed up for this thing.
00:04:30.600 No, like, you know, chain dental care association was going to mess with this.
00:04:35.120 They have crazy high overhead costs, and they're not going to do teeth cleanings for $100.
00:04:40.220 That's not, you can't do that when there are two people, the dentist or the hygienist and a dental assistant involved in the procedure.
00:04:47.300 That is insane.
00:04:48.720 The only people probably signing up are probably new dentists who don't have a lot of clients.
00:04:53.260 So at least maybe you're the only guy in town who's doing the universal dental care procedures.
00:04:57.940 But if you're a new dentist, you're probably not as efficient at delivering these services.
00:05:01.920 So you're getting underpaid while doing more working hours in order to make less money.
00:05:09.020 Justin Trudeau, in all of this, is effectively just trying to abuse the actual service providers, pretending like he is somehow equalizing, giving out equal or equity providing services to Canadians.
00:05:22.900 It's not.
00:05:23.800 People deserve to be paid based on how much service they are providing people.
00:05:28.980 If you're not going to pay people, they will go to the U.S.
00:05:31.320 This article from the CBC also mentioned that a lot of dentists are probably just going to retire early and head down south, start a practice there, or just frankly go down to the U.S.
00:05:39.920 because it costs less to live in the U.S. these days.
00:05:42.040 This is a program doomed to fail because it is based on the idea that altruistically dentists were just going to do a bunch of public health care type work for free.
00:05:53.460 And like, you know, doctors and nurses, frankly, they're not going to do it and they're just going to go somewhere else to provide their care.
00:05:59.800 Dental care was the one last bastion of medical care, also optometry, where you could actually make decent money if by applying your trade.
00:06:08.240 And now the liberals are trying to cut the legs up from under these doctors or these dentists.
00:06:13.460 And what this is probably going to end up doing is that the liberals are going to start having to force dentists to meet quotas on universal dental care procedures,
00:06:23.280 or they're not going to be able to bill regular clients on normal insurance that actually pays them out good amounts of money,
00:06:29.460 or they're going to have to raise rates on people with normal insurance because the universal dental care program caps how much they're allowed to make at an extremely low level.
00:06:39.760 This is what happens with all of these subsidy programs.
00:06:42.660 Rent control does not actually lower rent.
00:06:45.120 It lowers rent for one person and raises it for somebody else.
00:06:48.280 I hope more people end up getting this in the future.
00:06:50.900 Anyways, that's it for me today, guys.
00:06:52.920 If you enjoy the program, consider donating to the legal fund that I'm running with the National Telegraph.
00:06:58.220 We're being sued by a ridiculous billionaire who, after two years of suing us for defamation,
00:07:02.440 still hasn't actually come up with any reason that we defamed him.
00:07:05.800 He's not provided any evidence, and he is just simply trying to bully us so that we will give him a fake apology
00:07:11.040 so he can pretend all of the media who's ever said any negative things about him are, you know,
00:07:16.840 he can claim that they were all wrong because he has this piece of paper saying that the National Telegraph apologized to him
00:07:21.640 even though the Globe and Mail reported the exact same things about him a year and a half before we did.
00:07:27.320 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:07:29.560 Have a good one.