Public health care is the only system that makes any sense, from a very capitalistic point of view; it is the cheapest and provides the highest return on the investment (corporate side of Ty says). From my faith perspective I am to love my neighbour as Jesus loved me, it means when one is suffering you heal-health care by need not bank account size.
But we all have to realize that public health care was not created for the type of medicinal advances we have seen since Premier T.C. Douglas stood up to the doctors. Back then life expectancy wasn’t creeping past 80 years of age. Back then someone over 100 years old was unheard of. There was no concept of different types of death (biological or clinical?). No concept that organs would be transplanted, or that life could be extended by tubes keeping the body alive long past the time of passing on to the next adventure. There was no concept that multiple organs transplants or stem cells would become a reality or the possibility of creating a baby in a petri dish.
The realization is that we can now keep the human body alive, long after it should have been dead. As a race we have gone from asking the should questions, to just asking could we and then following through and doing. This now brings Canadian Health Care to a place no Canadian Politician wants to be, it was a place the Romanow report refused to go, but I believe needs to be explored for true pure public health care to return. The tough questions that need to be opened for public debate:
1) Should passive/active euthanasia be legalized? If so what does this mean for the hypocratic oath? How much control does a human being have over their own timing of death? What safeguards need to be in place if this is a route that is taken?
2) How many organ transplants is one person allowed? If one person gets four organ transplants that mean there is three people that did not receive them? Now this is a question that can almost be white washed if we use the standard senior citizen example of a full life, but what if the kidney or heart transplant is for a child? And the first does not take, so they need a second, do we refuse to attempt to save another life?
3) With treatments for life threatening diseases (i.e. cancer) how many relapses are allowed that we continue to try and prolong the life through treatment while creating a wait list for other individuals?
4) How long is acceptable to keep a human being alive by life support and feeding tubes before they can legally be declared dead? When is the line crossed from clinical or biological to just—dead? Should these methods we have be used to indefinitely keep someone alive?
Some may think at this point that I sound like a callous young man. The religious and non-religious alike depending on what part of this article they zeroed in on are angry with me. That is why these are taboo questions at the political debate of health care. Instead of tackling the hard questions, the governments of Alberta and Canada continue to play with funding numbers to create the crisis in health care. Instead of showing true leadership and opening up the debate of these questions Iris Evans (AB Health Minister) investigates private insurance, Premier Ralph Klein vetos it and says NO to private insurance; while Ms. Evans says that both her and the Premier are on the same page? Whose page are they on? Because taking their statements at face value it seems they are not even in the same hymnal never mind the same page.
Health Care is a hard subject when one is allowed to play politics with it. Whether the issue is funding or how long ethically a human life should be prolonged, it comes down to one thing for this monk…Loving one another….and what that means for us as a society.