I’m in BC, and technically have a family doctor… and it sucks. My doctor is only seeing patients a couple of days per week, so appointments are currently booking out around 4 months. There’s ONE walk-in clinic where I live (Nanaimo), and they take a limited number of patients per day - they put out signs on a Saturday morning like “Only accepting 10 patients today” (I have a photo of this one to prove it). TThe ER is backup up so bad, you could die before they even triage you (18h or longer wait is normal). The staff at the Critical Care unit in the neighboring Parksville yells at you and tells you to go back to Nanaimo (it’s happened to both my wife and I at different times… and we both actually needed medical care). We’ve ended up driving to Port Alberni or Courtenay for medical care… or in my case, I’m travelling for business and have booked a doctor visit in another damn country to get some checkup work done because I can’t get it done locally… OK, I can get it, but the local wait times are so fucking long that I can book a flight, fly overseas and see a doctor, get my results and be back home a month before I’d even start the process with my family doctor.
Talkign with the parents at the local school… many are afraid that their kids will catch something… and thehy won’t be able to see a doctor to get the help they need
Yeah this was a disturbingly common theme in what many of the other panel members were experiencing. Canada has a great public healthcare system - if you have a family doctor (who isn’t overbooked). I do feel some optimism though as it seems like this current provincial government is actually making changes that are causing things to head in the right direction, but our panel had a lot of other suggestions that would help alleviate some of the burden on family doctors (the tl;dr is that family doctors provide way more care than they did 50 years ago and are also overburdened with paperwork, on top of an antiquated business model where they have to run a business with employees, bookkeeping, etc.)
The whole “run a business” thing is bonkers. No wonder so many family doctors give up and go do something else.
With that change in the CBC article that you linked… there’s hope. My family doctor told us that she’s going to retire this year… hopefully there’s a replacement or 10 at the clinic so people can start getting that initial care they need and relieve the pressure on the ER :-(
Better keep voting for governments who are determined to make it worse then. Why do so many Canadians want better public services yet vote Conservative? There seems to be a disconnect.
Tbf as much as I hate cons, when the liberals or ndp take power, they rarely reinstate the cuts.
Recently I’ve had issues with my back that requires physio, plantar fasciitis which requires a foot doctor, medication for anxiety, and a skin condition that requires a dermatologist.
None of my issues are covered by Ohip. Not physio to heal me, not a podiatrist to fix my feet, not the meds, not the dermatologist.
It’s like what do I even pay taxes for at this point if nothing is covered. How is it better or cheaper for the government that I go on disability and take welfare, instead of them just paying for my healthcare so I can do my job?
If you want better care, ensure you’re voting for better care than the cons. Get your friends on board with the idea of voting in better government if they aren’t already.
I’ve voted for liberal and ndp throughout my life. I’m happy they won but they didn’t end up helping me one bit. I would never vote conservative, but I can see how people would, when the liberals and ndp are also all talk
Honestly, sounds fair to the cons to me - the Liberals clearly suck and the NDP has been out of power long enough that I can’t tell if they’ll suck or not (I hope they won’t though)… but neither comes close to the astronomical levels of shit eating the CPC manages. The comment above was rather generous to the CPC.
Tbf as much as I hate cons, when the liberals or ndp take power, they rarely reinstate the cuts.
That’s deliberate: the only way to reverse the cuts is to increase taxes, and because the system was broken, taxes have to go up more than they were previously to rebuild the system, and there’ll be an interregnum between when taxes go up and when the service is delivered and people notice the benefits.
This was Mike Harris’ masterclass lesson in Ontario: break the state so comprehensively you effectively tie the hands of anyone who comes after you, making it impossible for them to fix it without a heavy political cost. You’d need a very dynamic, charismatic leader, one willing to weather years of criticism from capitalists and their lapdogs, to reverse those changes and (to use an Ontario example) McGuinty was the opposite of dynamic and charismatic.
Yeah the Québecois Liberal party was like the BC Liberals. Coopted by conservatives.
I hear they are back to being Liberal though. I know one thing, I can’t stand more years of Legault, so whoever is against that pos I’ll vote for them.
What does it mean for them to be “Liberals”? Both the Liberals and the PCs, at least, are right-of-centre neo-liberal parties who see their role as budging the “free market”. They both fundamentally believe that what they really need to do is fine the right set of passive conditions that will make the market fix everything. They just disagree on the exact settings.
And the NDP have been playing catch-up with them on that issue for 20 years now.
The neo-cons and so-cons differ somewhat, but the various big-C Conservative parties don’t do well at the polls when they’re in charge.
There absolutely is. Parties encourage people to treat elections like a sport and identify with a “side.” Corporate media play along with the horse race paradigm, rather than pushing back on this kind of framing that distracts from actual issues. (And heavens forbid we talk about conflicts of interest, especially when they cross party lines and are endemic to entire governments-- ruling and opposition parties alike.)
It’s been increasingly normalized for vast swathes of the voting public to pay little to no attention what each party stands for now, and what they’ve done in the past. Media also fails to give fair attention to a variety of methods by which a given crisis could be tackled, since the interests of the corporate world tend not to be in line with the interest of the public.
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