Patient care and not phoney bureaucratic metrics or political grandstanding about equality has to be the focus for everyone, writes Philip Cross in the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article, which can be read in full here.
By Philip Cross, January 22, 2021
For nearly a year the COVID-19 pandemic has played havoc with our already dysfunctional health-care system. Shawn Whatley has written an erudite and informative book, When Politics Comes Before Patients, about how the health-care system ended up in this morass and how it can get out. A doctor and former head of the Ontario Medical Association, Whatley’s command of both medicine and management uniquely qualifies him to diagnose what ails our health-care system.
The flaw at the heart of Canada’s socialized medicine, Whatley argues, is the focus on planning and distributional issues instead of results and patient care. The expansion of bureaucracy and government control of health care has led to a deterioration of outcomes, notably the steady growth of costs for taxpayers and wait times for patients. Canada has become the poster boy for Gammon’s Law, which states, based on a British study of the National Health Service, that increases in health-care spending will be matched by lower production: spend more, get less.
