Nothing wrong with paying for health care
Five letters in favour of Brian Day’s private Cambie Surgery Centre being closed. None for approval of health care by private payment?
So if you get really sick and have the means of saving yourself in this land of endless lineups, and decide to hop the border and buy health care next door, then good luck to you. I envy your good fortune.
This was my experience during my working life. I prevented my early demise by emptying my savings and opting for treatment at the Cleveland Clinic. Hard work and frugality enabled this, and the vastly superior U.S. system at that time was a lifesaver.
My choice enabled someone else to move up the wait list and there was a saving to Canadian health care.
Something like sending your children to private school — selfish maybe, but not detrimental to others.
In this moral climate, Dr. Day will be left waiting another three or four years for sure. He cannot possibly beat the odds against him, no matter what merits he can prove. The enigma of this rich-versus-poor dilemma is not solvable. We are muddling along in life’s lottery and there will be deserving and undeserving rich and poor, as always.
It should not be a sin to choose how you spend the honest coin in your pocket — or why strive at all?
Russell Thompson
Victoria
Keep private health-care money in Canada
It would be useful if the letter-writers understood that there is already two-tier medical care in Canada.
For starters, WCB clients get expedited care.
But more significantly, the wealthy can pay for and do get better treatment. The only question is whether they can do it in Canada, and support Canadian doctors and the Canadian economy, or whether they have to leave the country, and support a foreign economy (their medical system, their hotels and restaurants).
And equally significantly, many of the non-wealthy are willing to forego discretionary purchases in order to save up and get treatment for a painful condition outside of Canada, if it is faster than waiting for treatment in Canada.
Why not keep that money in Canada? Further why should one have to endure pain just because the system cannot respond in a timely fashion?
Stephen Decarie
Langford
First-available-surgeon system would cut waits
Re: “Public solutions reduce wait times for everyone,” Dec. 1.
I agree with the letter-writer that simple health-care management solutions are preferable to plunging down the path of private health care. He mentions the first-available-surgeon option, which has been an established practice in Ontario since at least 2008, and likely used in most other provinces as well.
It manages wait lists and minimizes surgical wait times, and also injects fairness into the health-care system for those awaiting surgery.
Lacking information about particular surgeons’ wait lists, a patient can spend years unnecessarily waiting for a particular surgeon, instead of months waiting for the first available one.
I was surprised to learn that the first-available-surgeon option is not used to manage joint-replacement surgeries at, for example, Nanaimo Regional General Hospital.
Without it, the onus is on the patient to know which orthopedic surgeon has the shortest wait time and request a referral to that surgeon. B.C. health authorities and hospitals have this data already. The next logical step would be to establish a process whereby patients can opt to see the first available surgeon.
Wendy Farrington
Nanaimo
Private OK for education; why not health care?
Recently, multiple letter-writers have expressed their strong objection to the idea of a private, partially subsidized health-care option operating alongside our public health-care system, thus providing choice in health care. I would hazard a guess this is a majority view.
Yet, that is the model that we in British Columbia have adopted — seemingly quite successfully, and without widespread concern — for our education system.
If this model works well for education, isn’t there a reasonable argument it might do likewise for health care?
Rennie Heel
Saanich
Outcome could have been different with help
Re: “Tasered man’s mother dies,” Nov. 29.
What a shame that no Canadian came forward at Vancouver International Airport to help Robert Dziekanski within the first hour of his time waiting in the secure airport area after he had cleared Canadian customs.
His mother was in the airport; she spoke English and tried to get help in finding her son. Where was the ordinary Canadian working at the airport or visiting the airport who could have helped her find her son?
Instead, he was left alone with no Polish translator for hours, while she was given incorrect information and told to drive home. Her son lost his life; the mother’s heart was broken, and four Mounties’ lives were forever changed.
Where was old-fashioned Canadian decency in helping mother and son find each other?
Nattanya Hewitt
Duncan
Use reflective paint on our highways
I recently travelled from Victoria to Parksville after dark and in rain. The only way I was able to know where I was on the road was by seeing the small reflective squares on the Malahat. For the rest of the trip, it was more by luck and the slight visual of the road lines produced by oncoming cars.
Why does B.C.’s highways department not use reflective paint? It seems a small cost compared to the cost of accidents.
Bonnie Dawe
Parksville
Consider removing these names also
Several items in recent editions of the Times Colonist have given me pause for thought.
Lawrie McFarlane wrote about the statue of John A. Macdonald, which was followed by various letters to the editor on the rights and wrongs of that issue.
Then there were a series of articles about the internment of Canadian citizens of Japanese origin during the Second World War. I didn’t see any letters about that, so let me attempt to compare those two issues, starting with the hypothesis that all Canadians are of equal importance.
If we are to remove all recognition of those who were unfair to First Nations people, surely we should accord the same respect to Japanese Canadians. So. The John Hart Highway must be renamed. And S.J. Willis school. And Mount Mackenzie King. And the Pattullo bridge. And … well, I’ll leave it at that, but if anyone cares, I can add 20 names to the list, including some well-known B.C. families who bought Japanese-Canadian property for 10 cents on the dollar during the internment.
Ian Cameron
Brentwood Bay
Fracked gas will follow coal’s path to bankruptcy
Re: “Hundreds protest LNG subsidies,” Nov. 30.
The B.C. government’s claim that provincial subsidies for LNG Canada “will produce around $23 billion in public revenue over its life” is delusional.
Revenue will only come if the project is profitable, and LNG from high-cost fracking in B.C. cannot compete with renewable energy. Existing LNG plants, with lower costs, are already struggling in the face of relentlessly declining wind, solar and battery-storage costs.
LNG has a similar greenhouse-gas footprint to coal. The market for fossil fuels such as LNG will shrink as the world wakes up to the climate emergency.
Fracked-gas corporations will follow coal companies’ path to bankruptcy, leaving behind contaminated sites for the public to clean up.
The teenage climate strikers are right to demand governments fund a just renewable energy future, instead of fossil-fuel boondoggles.
Eric Doherty
Victoria
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