Bureaucracy killing health care system
By robert brown
Feb 10 2007
If you are from the Prairies, as I am, you will understand what is meant by the expression “to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
In regard to our understanding the problems of our health care system and offering potential solutions, this separation of fact from fiction is essential.
The first hard fact concerning Canadian health care is that we spend enough on health care as a percentage of our gross domestic product, but we do not obtain the results which we should.
This statement has been substantiated by the World Health Organization in its summary of our system. In a nutshell, our input in health dollars does not match our output in health results. This leads to the logical assumption that the problem of our health system lies in it’s administrative format.
The second hard fact is that each provincial Ministry of Health directly oversees their system using outdated principles of central control and authority, collective bargaining, arbitrary decision making and disregard for the individual rights of the masses they are purported to serve.
The Ministries hide behind thick layers of central bureaucracy, as well as front men (and women) called regional CEO’s who either do the bidding of the government, or are summarily fired. Anarchy seems to prevail, as we can see on a daily basis in the health care arena. In our system, both health providers and health recipients are left out of key components of decision-making.
This dogmatic and narrow view of health administration is killing our publicly controlled system and causing its worst enemy, private medicine, to gain a foothold in a populace which is angry, discouraged, afraid and plainly fed up with government mishandling of health care for the past generation.
People fund the system through taxation, yet feel completely cut out from having the least bit of control or understanding of how our health system works. If ordinary people knew half of what I know concerning how health dollars are squandered, it would probably trigger a taxpayer revolt.
Unless action is quickly taken to address the core problem of inefficient administration of our health system by central bureaucracies, the system will only get worse. The application of more money is not the answer. It will only exacerbate the disease. What’s more, private health care will become more powerful in our society, causing a growing rift between classes of society.
Fortunately, there is a way to change administrators and keep all five principles of the Canada Health Act. That way is for health regions to directly take over all aspects of health operations in a given region.
The people living within a respective region would elect a health board which would run the system and be answerable directly to the people it serves. Each health board would receive every public dollar for health operations from both levels of government and would run the system to meet the needs of its local populace.
In case you didn’t know, billions of dollars are spent directly by the federal government in poorly administered initiatives through Veteran Affairs, Indian Affairs and Federal Prisons.
If each health region were elected by the citizenry it serves and operated the system with the government rules in mind, we would all feel a sense of ownership in our system. People would become directly involved and not sit on the sidelines as we now do. All sorts of volunteer organizations would spring up, and we would take a certain pride in ownership of what really and truly belongs to us.
The two most infamous words to describe Canadian health care, in my opinion, are apathy and inertia. It will take a monumental effort to turn the locomotive of health care around and point it in the right direction.
We could adopt a motto: “Liberty from government inefficiency or death from health care anarchy.”
Robert H. Brown is an Abbotsford physician.
http://www.abbynews.com/portals-code/list.cgi?paper=38&cat=48&id=830322&more=
By robert brown
Feb 10 2007
If you are from the Prairies, as I am, you will understand what is meant by the expression “to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
In regard to our understanding the problems of our health care system and offering potential solutions, this separation of fact from fiction is essential.
The first hard fact concerning Canadian health care is that we spend enough on health care as a percentage of our gross domestic product, but we do not obtain the results which we should.
This statement has been substantiated by the World Health Organization in its summary of our system. In a nutshell, our input in health dollars does not match our output in health results. This leads to the logical assumption that the problem of our health system lies in it’s administrative format.
The second hard fact is that each provincial Ministry of Health directly oversees their system using outdated principles of central control and authority, collective bargaining, arbitrary decision making and disregard for the individual rights of the masses they are purported to serve.
The Ministries hide behind thick layers of central bureaucracy, as well as front men (and women) called regional CEO’s who either do the bidding of the government, or are summarily fired. Anarchy seems to prevail, as we can see on a daily basis in the health care arena. In our system, both health providers and health recipients are left out of key components of decision-making.
This dogmatic and narrow view of health administration is killing our publicly controlled system and causing its worst enemy, private medicine, to gain a foothold in a populace which is angry, discouraged, afraid and plainly fed up with government mishandling of health care for the past generation.
People fund the system through taxation, yet feel completely cut out from having the least bit of control or understanding of how our health system works. If ordinary people knew half of what I know concerning how health dollars are squandered, it would probably trigger a taxpayer revolt.
Unless action is quickly taken to address the core problem of inefficient administration of our health system by central bureaucracies, the system will only get worse. The application of more money is not the answer. It will only exacerbate the disease. What’s more, private health care will become more powerful in our society, causing a growing rift between classes of society.
Fortunately, there is a way to change administrators and keep all five principles of the Canada Health Act. That way is for health regions to directly take over all aspects of health operations in a given region.
The people living within a respective region would elect a health board which would run the system and be answerable directly to the people it serves. Each health board would receive every public dollar for health operations from both levels of government and would run the system to meet the needs of its local populace.
In case you didn’t know, billions of dollars are spent directly by the federal government in poorly administered initiatives through Veteran Affairs, Indian Affairs and Federal Prisons.
If each health region were elected by the citizenry it serves and operated the system with the government rules in mind, we would all feel a sense of ownership in our system. People would become directly involved and not sit on the sidelines as we now do. All sorts of volunteer organizations would spring up, and we would take a certain pride in ownership of what really and truly belongs to us.
The two most infamous words to describe Canadian health care, in my opinion, are apathy and inertia. It will take a monumental effort to turn the locomotive of health care around and point it in the right direction.
We could adopt a motto: “Liberty from government inefficiency or death from health care anarchy.”
Robert H. Brown is an Abbotsford physician.
http://www.abbynews.com/portals-code/list.cgi?paper=38&cat=48&id=830322&more=
posted by Bill at 10:31 PM
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