HEALTH CARE FEAR MONGERING
Your front-page coverage of the recent meeting on the threat of privatization to public health care (P.E.I. Health Coalition sounds alarm over privatization, April 25) only serves to continue the misinformation and fear mongering that surround this important issue.
P.E.I. has 35,000 citizens without a doctor, increasing wait times and decreasing services at hospitals. Our provincial health-care system itself is on life support and requires urgent radical surgery. Having an academic from Toronto tell us we just need to accentuate the positive rather than change anything is not helpful at all.
A better purpose would be for The Guardian to actually investigate and present to its readers what is taking place in the rest of the country where limited privatization is helping to ease the public burden by introducing efficiencies into the system, with no risk to the public system.
For instance, in Alberta, private clinics assist the public system with diagnostic imaging services (CT scans, X-rays, ultrasounds). A person who used to work here but now works in Alberta describes the difference as motivation and productivity. Under the private clinic, the worker there is motivated to handle more cases by higher pay and a bonus system. In a normal day they handle more than twice the number of cases as required in the public system here.
But here is the important point that readers of your coverage of the misinformation provided at the meeting April 23 would not know – the Alberta patient does not pay for this. They do not reach for their credit card as implied in the article. The private clinic sends a bill to the provincial government, who is only too happy to pay a reasonable price to achieve double the throughput and help relieve the burden on the public system. The private clinics must buy their own expensive equipment and handle all the personnel. They have developed a business model that appears to benefit the patients, the workers and the shareholders, all at the same cost to the taxpayer. No credit cards involved.
We would be much better served in P.E.I. if the public was to be informed about options available to improve the system without providing poorer service to lower income people. These options exist and are possible to accomplish.
But we must first get our heads out of the sand and believe there are better ways of doing things for the same cost that will bring about improvements in the system.
Your publication could play a vital role in informing us of the options already being employed in other provinces. That would at least be a start. Reading your coverage on the recent meeting reminded me of the fear mongering over the building of a bridge 30 years ago. Some people simply do not know what they are talking about, and the rest of us should stop listening to them.
Cleve Myers, CPA,
Fairview, P.E.I.