Canadian Med Assoc. prez: Let’s fix universal healthcare with … more universal healthcare

Via the Canadian Press:

SASKATOON — The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country’s health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.

Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country – who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting – recognize that changes must be made.

“We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize,” Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“We know that there must be change,” she said. “We’re all running flat out, we’re all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands.”

The pitch for change at the conference is to start with a presentation from Dr. Robert Ouellet, the current president of the CMA, who has said there’s a critical need to make Canada’s health-care system patient-centred. He will present details from his fact-finding trip to Europe in January, where he met with health groups in England, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands and France.

His thoughts on the issue are already clear. Ouellet has been saying since his return that “a health-care revolution has passed us by,” that it’s possible to make wait lists disappear while maintaining universal coverage and “that competition should be welcomed, not feared.”

In other words, Ouellet believes there could be a role for private health-care delivery within the public system.

I wouldn’t hold my breath on that happening. Liberals in Canada are just like liberals here in the US. They think they can resolve problems they helped create by continuing to push for the same types of policies that enabled those very same problems to happen in the first place.

More from the CP:

He has also said the Canadian system could be restructured to focus on patients if hospitals and other health-care institutions received funding based on the patients they treat, instead of an annual, lump-sum budget. This “activity-based funding” would be an incentive to provide more efficient care, he has said.

Just last week, President Obama – while saying we needed a universal healthcare plan that ‘fits America’ – suggested that Canada’s healthcare system is “good for Canada” and implied that opponents of ObamaCare here in the US should stop using CanadaCare as a “boogeyman” against healthcare reform here in the US (listen to video of his remarks here).

Considering how the intense problems with Canada’s single-payer system have been so well-documented, I suppose Obama saying Canada’s healthcare system “works for Canada” was kinda sorta like what he said about how good UPS and Fed Ex were doing, but that it was the post office that keeps having problems – while trying to sell the the “public [read: government] option” contained within the ObamaCare bill in its current form.

Ummm …