Reduced wait times

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Aug 22

RE: Waiting for care, and Ford to act.  Spectator editorial 8 Aug 22

RE: End the war against female health care workers.  Op-ed by Oxlisiwe (Connie) Ndlovu,, who is a home care worker and president of CUPE Local 7977, located in Toronto.  Published in the Hamilton Spectator 10 Aug 22.

Remember the 2004 Federal election?  Paul Martin did nothing but chant “reduced wait times” as the goal of his government, if elected.  Wait times and dysfunction in the health care system have been endemic for a long time.  We’ve been here before, we’ll be here again, and inelasticity is an endemic feature of socialized medicine.

So, don’t expect a quick solution from Ford or anybody else.  The answer to a shortage of doctors and nurses is to graduate more young Ontarians from Ontario’s medical schools.  But that will take a minimum of four years just to see the first fruits of that program.  Poaching doctors and nurses from other jurisdictions is a costly, short-term bandaid, as it’s a zero-sum game.

The chronic problem is that in a socialized system doctors and nurses are “costs,” and to keep costs under control the number of “cost units” needs to be carefully managed.  When a pandemic comes along and burns out the older “cost units,” there’s just not enough elasticity in the system, and it may take several years for the upset to stabilize.

If Ontario truly wants to eliminate the wait time problem, it needs to bite the cost bullet.  Ontario needs to graduate young Ontarians as doctors and nurses so plentifully that some have to go to other jurisdictions to be paid satisfactorily.

It takes an extra helping of Kool-Aid to think that there’s a war on female health care workers.  A Marxist persecution complex is not availing in this instance.  Modern medicine maintains that “people” get pregnant, not “women” , and that’s straight out of neo-Marxist progressive nihilism - transgender branch.  Since the onset of the pandemic, and the absurd, spastic, Chinese Communist Party response to it, the pressure’s been on everyone in the health care system.  Home care workers don’t rank high on the medical pecking order, however necessary and useful their work is.  I can understand and sympathize if they think they’re being neglected.  I’m going to put on my helmet and declare that “women” (i.e. adult, human females) are almost exclusively those who are engaged in front-line home care.  That said, there is no “war on women.”

What Ms. Ndlovu complains about is insufficient socialism.  In particular, the partial use of free-market measures to keep the costs of home care down.  Of course, low-cost means low-wage.  I get all of this.  But Canada opted for socialized medicine over fifty years ago, and complaining about evil Conservatives being tight-fisted with health care dollars is simply complaining about the government budgeting process in action.  Complaining that greater use of for-profit companies to deliver home care drives down wages is tediously predictable.  More socialism simply drives up the tax burden because yet another segment of the economy doesn’t know what its true costs are.  And the government is responsible for covering those costs - whatever they are - out of tax revenue.

Maybe it sucks to be in home care because wages are low.  But complaining about Ford being a miser simply means he is being effective in controlling rising health care costs, and in turn managing the tax burden on Ontarians carefully.

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