Western Standard - May 31, 2022


CORY'S RANT： The refusal to accept that Canada’s health care system is broken.

Topics
doctor shortage province by healthcare sustainability
Mentioned
Tommy Douglas
CORY'S RANT： Anti-enterprise ideology is killing essential projects Triggered： Handgun law is a vanity project for Trudeau.

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

191.97

Word count

790

Sentence count

50


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Healthcare is in short supply across Canada, and it's getting worse by the day. Is it because of the UCP government? Or is it because we need to spend more money to fix it? In this episode, we take a look at the root cause of the problem and try to find a solution.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The Alberta Medical Association is sounding the alarm bells due to a shortage of doctors in the province.
00:00:04.920 Yes, the emergency rooms are filling up with patients with minor ailments due to a lack of family doctors in many areas.
00:00:11.920 Of course, throughout the story, it was implied that the hostile UCP policies have caused doctors to flee the province for other jurisdictions,
00:00:18.480 and we have to spend more money.
00:00:20.580 They use the term invest, of course, but it's spend, and we have to spend it right away if we're going to stop this problem.
00:00:26.580 The lack of doctors is indeed a concern.
00:00:28.220 Healthcare is always the top issue in provincial elections, and it appears that things are getting worse.
00:00:33.700 Is it really because of the UCP, though?
00:00:35.920 So, in doing a short search of the term doctor shortage province by province, news stories in every province sounded exactly the same.
00:00:43.600 Every province in Canada is running low on doctors, in fact, in health professionals in general.
00:00:49.700 If Alberta's UCP is indeed driving medical professionals out of the province, they apparently aren't going to the other provinces.
00:00:55.180 I mean, it is believable that many of them are leaving the country for greener pastures, though.
00:00:59.880 The world market for medical professionals is competitive.
00:01:03.400 Many countries with less restrictive healthcare systems than ours have been actively headhunting for medical professionals here.
00:01:09.920 So, can we pay enough, though, to keep medical professionals from leaving?
00:01:14.600 I mean, labor makes up the majority of healthcare spending, a lion's share of it.
00:01:18.440 Even small salary increases across the board can blow up a healthcare budget.
00:01:23.400 And while there still might be room to compensate healthcare professionals more, we can only spend so much.
00:01:29.260 Are we spending enough on healthcare, though, in general?
00:01:32.220 Well, if you listen to unions and public healthcare advocates, you know, you think we're not.
00:01:35.320 No, it sounds like we're starving them.
00:01:37.200 But the budget statistics tell a different tale.
00:01:39.900 Healthcare spending has been steadily increasing in every province in Canada for years.
00:01:43.780 Spending spiked in the last two years due to the pandemic, of course.
00:01:48.080 In 2021, the national per capita amount being spent on healthcare was $8,019.
00:01:54.960 That's in 2021.
00:01:56.780 Ten years prior to that, in 2011, it was $5,806.
00:02:00.520 It's almost a 40% increase over 10 years.
00:02:03.500 We can't sustain that spending trajectory.
00:02:05.500 We can't pretend that we aren't spending enough on healthcare.
00:02:09.140 And spending that much per capita, Canada spends more on healthcare than most countries in the developed world.
00:02:13.480 Yet our outcomes are lagging by just about every measure.
00:02:16.780 Access is abysmal, and people are literally dying on waiting lists.
00:02:20.380 Medical specialists, in particular, are in short supply everywhere.
00:02:24.200 So, if we can't spend our way out of the problem, maybe it's time we stop trying to and examine the system itself.
00:02:29.800 See, there's where the problem comes in.
00:02:32.080 Canada's created a mythology around its healthcare system and spent decades tirelessly telling us we have the best system on Earth.
00:02:38.900 The CBC dedicated an entire game show to determining who the best Canadian ever was,
00:02:43.900 and it was handily won by Tommy Douglas for founding our healthcare system.
00:02:47.940 Whenever anybody dares to question the system in Canada, they're labeled as a blasphemer,
00:02:52.020 and horror stories of the heartless American system are sure to follow.
00:02:56.300 What the stalwarts defending the status quo with Canada's healthcare system refuse to acknowledge is
00:03:00.580 there's hundreds of healthcare systems on Earth, and dozens of them offer universal coverage better than we do and for less money.
00:03:08.740 We can't let people keep shouting down any discussion of systemic reform if we want to see improvements.
00:03:14.980 Anybody who's been in a position of employing people knows that while good compensation levels are essential in retaining good staff,
00:03:20.700 the work environment itself is critical as well.
00:03:23.100 If people are stressed, underappreciated, or overwhelmed, they're going to leave.
00:03:26.660 And this is happening in healthcare, and since spending more money won't fix it, we need to change how we do it.
00:03:32.640 It only makes sense.
00:03:34.220 It's hard to say, though, how bad it's going to have to get before people are ready to pursue changes to the system.
00:03:39.620 But when we double health spending, when our waiting lists truly become the longest on Earth,
00:03:44.380 we're on a trajectory to meet both of those metrics right now.
00:03:47.800 Sustainability is a popular buzzword these days.
00:03:50.200 Well, let's apply it to our healthcare system and add a dose of reality.
00:03:52.940 Our system right now is rigid, inefficient, and unsustainable, and we need to make radical changes to it.
00:03:59.760 Until we do, those healthcare headlines that look the same across the country about the shortages won't be going away anytime soon.