So the Fraser Institute has launched it’s latest assault on our public institutions, this time a ranking of BC hospitals. The part they and the news media, who are very receptive to any Fraser report, are in a tizzy about is that the Provence will not give them the information to allow them to identify individual hospitals. Their argument: that we are consumers who should have this information to choose which hospital we go to, treating hospitals as hotels, as they put it.

Now it is clear that Health-care systems across Canada are in a sorry state. Years of mismanagement, poor vision, and increasing demand have left them all the worse for ware. But does this report help?

Well, as an internal document that would allow the ministry of health to target problem areas within the system, yes, such a report could be of great value. But, if the Provence were to allow, as the Fraser institute demands, that the rating of each hospital be made public, disaster would ensue. All at once high rated hospitals would be flooded and lower rated hospitals avoided, probably to the point where those dying in ambulances would try to direct the ambulance to the hospital of his or her choice. Resources would have to be relocated from low rated hospital to higher ones, making the low rated hospitals even more strained. The strategy of distributing different types of specialty care and surgery to different individual hospitals would collapse. The lower rated Hospitals having to transfer these high resource services to the better equipped hospitals.

You see dear friends at the Fraser institute, a hospital is not a hotel, the easiest way to tell the difference is to look at the sign out front. If your literacy isn’t up to snuff, you notice that in a hospital there tends to be ambulances and lots of sick and troubled people from every walk of life. A hotel, on the other hand, tends to have limos out front and be filled with rich fucks like you. There are other important distinctions but I know you’re a little slow so we’ll just take it one step at a time.

So, would this information help make our public health care system better? No, that’s a big ol’ steaming pile of Fraser Valley horseshit. These are not stupid people, they know what effects their reports have on people. What it does do is it helps the privatization agenda. The strategy of this brand of conservative has long been to pressure the public and government to put into place policies that will hurt public institutions. The institution then becomes dysfunctional and they then insist that they only way to fix it is to make it privately owned. Rinse and repeat until you get that institution privatized, often at a discount price, making lots of money for the rich plutocrats who donate to the Fraser Institute and lots of trouble for a beleaguered public.

So, here they go again. Lets try to sabotage our own institutions rather then try to fix them. Let’s privatize everything! Let’s have that ownership society that the rich have been scheming Mr. Burns style to get since the Great Generation decided they had had enough of Robber Barons in the forties. Let’s bring the Robber Barons back! Yippee!

Unfortunately these conservative economists are rather ignorant about history and do not realize that this extreme economic system has already been tried. It was called feudalism, where a few people own everything and most people own nothing, not even their lives. I for one would prefer not to go back to the way of serf’s and autocrats, although it does go along with their continued confusion about acting like an indignant absolute monarch when you are in fact an elected representative of the people of Canada in a minority government. Oh well, back to the dark ages I guess. I mean, it couldn’t have been that bad, being enveloped darkness with no end in sight? Could it?

Last 5 posts by JohnEdgar

• The Fall of Harper - November 30th, 2008
• Brake Cuttings A Bad Fucking Sign - October 7th, 2008
• SHAME!!! - July 15th, 2008
• Midnight At The Rio - July 6th, 2008
• Canada's Copyright Crackdown - June 23rd, 2008

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 8:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.