Founder: Canada's Socialized Healthcare Not Sustainable

You'd better not get started on Britain's healthcare system, or you'll get a good kicking, Ms Rightwinger.

Tommy Douglas was the founder of Medicare in Canada, not M. Castonguay. To that extent, the headline of this screed is bullshit. M. Castonguay speaks of the system in Québec, and for all that many of les habitants believe that Canada begins and ends at the borders of la belle province, what can be said of Québec cannot necessarily be said of the entire nation.

It's ironic, to me, that the very system that Michael Moore would like to see here is looking more like us every day.

BIGGEST BRAIN DRAIN FROM UK IN 50 YEARS

Britain is experiencing the worst "brain drain" of any country as highly qualified professionals settle abroad, an authoritative international study showed yesterday.

Record numbers of Britons are leaving - many of them doctors, teachers and engineers - in the biggest exodus for almost 50 years.

There are now 3.247 million British-born people living abroad, of whom more than 1.1 million are highly-skilled university graduates, say the researchers.

More than three quarters of these professionals have settled abroad for more than 10 years, according to the study by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

No other nation is losing so many qualified people, it points out. Britain has now lost more than one in 10 of its most skilled citizens, while overall only Mexico has had more people emigrate.

The figures, based on official records from more than 220 countries, will alarm Gordon Brown as tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money is spent on educating graduates. The cost of training a junior doctor, for example, is £250,000.

The most popular destinations are English-speaking countries such as Australia, America, Canada and New Zealand and holiday areas including France and Spain.

Almost 60 per cent of those leaving take jobs, although hundreds of thousands of retired people live abroad.

The report is a statistical analysis which does not study the motivation for leaving Britain. However, high house prices and taxes and poor climate are frequently cited.

A spokesman for the Paris-based OECD said last night: "British people have lots of opportunities to move and work abroad so very highly-skilled people are travelling around. It is seen by many British people as part of their personal development to have some experience abroad."

Britain's exodus is far higher than any of the OECD's other 29 members. Germany has lost only 860,000 highly-skilled workers, America 410,000 and France 370,000.

The OECD found that 27.3 per cent of those emigrating had health or education qualifications, 37.7 per cent had humanities or social science degrees and 28.5 per cent were scientists or engineers.

Britain has a shortage of graduates in many of these fields and universities have long warned that some of the brightest hopes are being lost to higher salaries abroad.

The report cited research suggesting that 62 per cent of the world's "star scientists" live in the US, primarily because of the efforts made by American research universities to attract them.

Danny Sriskandarajah, a migration expert at the IPPR think-tank, said: "There is a long-term trend of British people lured abroad by a slightly better lifestyle. They are actively targeted by countries such as Australia and New Zealand."

The emigration was leading to a rapid change in British society as large numbers of highly-skilled immigrants moved to this country to replace those leaving, he said.

"Britain has been lucky - although it has lost substantial numbers of people, it has attracted more than a million skilled immigrants to replace them. If they stop coming then that would be a problem."

Figures from the Office for National Statistics last year, suggested that 207,000 Britons - one every three minutes - left in 2006. The emigration rate is at its highest since just after the Second World War.

The term brain drain was coined in the 1950s following the mass emigration of scientists and other experts to America. Tens of thousands of people also left the country to escape the industrial unrest and high taxes of the 1970s.

Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, said: "Ten years of Labour has re-created the brain drain. High taxes and Government interference are driving people away."

The study found that foreign-born people make up 8.3 per cent of Britain's population. A House of Lords report into the economic impact of migration is due next month.

Prof David Coleman, of St John's, Oxford, said the brain drain was "to do with quality of life, laws and bureaucracy, tax and all the rest of it".

Prof Christian Dustmann, of University College London, said: "The costs of leaving a country are substantial. The rewards must be very high."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/21/nexodus121.xml

amen brother. Feeding folks and keeping a roof over their head, there's only so much you have to spend, but medicine - we've all got to die so it's a losing game, there will never be enough to go around (till the free market solves the problem) and no one will ever be happy with what they get.

Without a doubt, for whatever flaws or faults may be alleged against the Medicare systems in Canada (each province operates its own program, and they are insurance programs, combined with provincial support for clinics and hospitals), Canadians want their health care system, and will get their backs up faster in response to any perceived threat to that system than by any other political football.

In Ontario, the system is OHIP--the Ontario Health Insurance Program. Additionally, the province supports clinics and hospitals. The current Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, a Liberal, almost completely torpedoed his relative popularity in the province when it was alleged against him (by health care activists, and not his political enemies) that he would shut down provincially-supported hospitals, and that his plans to allow OHIP healthcare premiums to be applied in partial payment of private health care bills was the thin end of the wedge to end Medicare in Ontario. McGuinty quietly let the subject drop, and concentrated on the school funding issue. John Tory, the head of the Ontario conservatives (which is ironic--for dense Americans, conservatives in most of the English speaking world are referred to as Tories), should have gone after him on that issue, but instead, he put his foot in his mouth by calling for public funding of religious schools, and then could not escape a position which wasn't important in his campaign--it was a monster which just wouldn't die. McGuinty's Liberals won handily in last year's election.

McGuinty was lucky, and he hammered Tory on the issue of funding for religious schools, and avoided the health care issue, even though Tory desperately cast about for ways to make the Liberals look bad on that subject. It doesn't matter how bad you make the Medicare system in Canada appear to be, the response of Canadians will be "Well, fix it!" They don't want the system to be dismantled, and the vast majority of Canadians would laugh in your face if you claimed that the American "system" is superior. (As if there were any such thing as "system" in health care in America.)

In the United States, there are tens of millions of people with no health care insurance at all. When things get really bad, they go to the emergency room. You get to pay for that, through increased costs at hospitals and clinics, through increased health insurance premiums, and through your tax dollars which get spent on patients who are deemed to be indigent. The notion that there is a superior system to be found in the United States is pathetic, and would be amusing if the situation weren't so desperate for those without health insurance. Yeah, right, let the "free enterprise" boys take care of everyone--after all, we all know that capitalists only really care about the welfare of all Americans, right?

Mark this thread clueless.

Quebec, the pinkest of the five if my preconceived notions and prejudices are correct. They go hog-wild for socialism, we let 'em build our Camaros for a decade and they're still ready to throw in the towel. The provinces that just went far enough to indulge the proletariat are still doin' alright.

They might be licking it up but that don't make it ice cream. Either way what can we interpolate? The free market, even adulterated, keeps the industry rolling and lets people that can handle their business get what they want.

I keep hearing the overhead's killing the industry. That's BS, nothing produces like the free market - only thing is nobody whines about medicines and technologies yet to be developed - so the tears don't reflect the benefit. And we pay anyway when they stagger into the emergency room right? Cost of doing business, if it gets rolled up in the cost of insurance so what? It's them that can paying for them that can't, to such an extent as we've already decided applies to us all, as in the case of being required to stop and assist at a car wreck, but without them that can't getting preferential treatment.

So what's it mean for us? We're the best right? We don't piss our pants in thunderstorms, we could bomb Iran or not, so why should we be afraid to do what works.

Either you're being ironic, or you are a JERK. I can't decide which, but hey, you guys think irony is like coppery only redder, don't you?

Where to start . . . there is so much bullshit in your latest post, Hanno, that it is almost overwhelming. Québec is about as "pink" as Francisco Franco's Spain. The dominant party in politics in la belle province is the Parti Québecois, and the Federal equivalent of that is the Bloc Québecois, which currently, more or less and grudgingly, supports Harper's Tory minority party. Attempting to imply that the les habitants are leftist is hilarious. Lately, a new party had arisen in Québec, Action démocratique de Québec, the agenda of which is basically to oppose what they allege is the corruption of the PQ, and they've been giving Charest (the Premier) fits. Typically, les habitants vote for parties which at least give a nod to the concept of a distinct national identity for the Quécois, and are mostly conservative in their outlook. However, they have been deeply suspicious of English-speaking Tories since 1760, and small wonder. They don't vote for the Tories because they don't trust the Tories. They give a fair amount of support to the Liberals (and keep in mind, the Liberals in Canada are about as left-wing as Nixon was), but recently, they shocked everyone when an NDP member was elected in a by-election (the NDP, the New Democratic Party, are the only truly leftist political party in North America). The New Democrats crowed, but no one has any illusions about their prospects of gaining wide-spread support in Québec.

The "Big Three" automobile manufacturers have been in Canada for a hell of a lot longer than a decade, and they are almost exclusively in Ontario and not in Québec. As for what "we" let them do, the Canadians manufacture autos and auto parts there because its cheaper for the American auto manufacturers to make them in Canada to sell in Canada, and make a hell of profit because they charge a hell of a lot more than we pay in the United States. Ontario has been a lap dog to the American auto industry, and it's against provincial law to buy a car in the States and bring it back to Ontario--which assures that Ontarians continue to pay the inflated prices. General Motors has been in Canada since 1916. Ford has been in Canada since 1906. Chrysler has been in Canada since the 1920s, but i couldn't find a source for a firm date.

The first major, successful left-wing party in Canada was the CCF--the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. They were immediately smeared as Bolsheviks, but they managed to stagger on in the prairie provinces because things were so bad, and they were the only ones who represented hard-scrabble farmers, factory workers and miners. In the Depression, Tommy Douglas was a Baptist minister who organized the congregation to make up "Care" packages for the families of striking factory workers and miners. One day, while delivering food and clothing to these families, he saw the RCMP (the "Mounties") shoot three strikers down in the street, and leave them to bleed to death. He got mad, and he got into politics. The Baptist Church took a dim view of his activities, so he gave up the ministry, and went into politics full time. He was elected to the Federal House of Commons in 1935. He joined up when World War II rolled around, but medical examiners disqualified him for field service, so he spent the war years working in an office in Canada.

After the war, even though he was still a member of the House of Commons, he was elected the leader of the CCF in Saskatchewan. He finally resigned from the House, and in June, 1944, the CCF took over the Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly, with 47 out of 53 seats. This was the first socialist government in North America. They were very popular, despite the fact that the Tories were increasingly successful in their campaign to brand the CCF commies, and despite the slow death of the CCF in other provinces. Tommy Douglas and the CCF won five straight elections in Saskatchewan, and governed there for 16 years. He was popular because of a blend of government bureaucracy and private enterprise. He created the Saskatchewan Power Corporation, which was publicly owned, and which eliminated the competing and price-gouging small local companies, and brought electricity to almost all of rural Saskatchewan. He created a government auto insurance corporation, and then turned it over to be run as a publicly owned corporation, assuring that all the citizens of Saskatchewan could get auto insurance and would not be red-lined. He and the CCF passed the first bill of rights in Canada.

His greatest accomplishment was Medicare, which assured medical care for all citizens. The Tories tried to block the measure, even though they had no power in the government, and they organized a doctor's strike to attempt to bring down the government. It was close, but it failed, and Saskatchewan got the first health program in Canada. Thanks to Douglas, a movement was started for a bill of rights for all of Canada, and for health care for all Canadians--and he lived long enough to see it all accomplished.

The Tories succeeded finally in sinking the CCF by identifying them with the Communists. But they allied themselves with the leftist Canadian Labour Congress, and formed the New Democratic Party. The New Democrats have formed governments in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and the Yukon Territory, and even once in Ontario (a traditional conservative stronghold). The success of the NDP and their appeal in provinces in which they were not able to form a government lead the Tories to emulate them. In those provinces in which the NDP could not form a government, it was usually because the Tories co-opted their message by passing social legislation, and especially the Medicare program, themselves. Tories have done well in Canadian politics, but they have always been a numerical minority, so they either form minority governments (Stephen Harper's government is a minority government), or they hold their noses and pass popular social legislation to steal the thunder of the Liberals or the NDP.

You write:



The only difference between this system and Canadian Medicare is that the American way is less efficient, more expensive and doesn't deliver basic medical care to all citizens. You expect Canadians to admire and emulate a crackpot "system" like that?

Whether it is the PC (the Progressive Conservatives--they even want to sound like a kinder, gentler party), the Liberals (and as my Sweetiepie says, just because they're called Liberals doesn't mean they are liberal), the New Democrats or the Bloc Québecois, no one is going to take an ax to Medicare. It would be political suicide. Apart from a handful of rich Canadians (and Canada is a very plutocratic country), there is no one in Canada who thinks the Medicare system is a bad idea.

A couple of years ago, the CBC polled the Canadian people to choose the "Greatest Canadian" in all of Canadian history. Tommy Douglas won, hands down.