How can we improve Canada’s health system? Blaming the professionals who deliver care defies logic.
You may be very surprised to learn that one prominent journalist says the biggest obstacles to health care reform are the people who deliver it – or more specifically, their unions and associations.
Globe and Mail public health reporter Andre Picard comes back to so-called “vested interests” over and over again in a monograph (The Path To Health Care Reform: Policy and Politics) published last fall by the business-sponsored Conference Board of Canada.
Picard says of health care reform: “those who stand to lose the most are principally health professionals – specifically, the organizations that represent them, from unions to professional organizations.”
As such, so his theory goes, “they have a lot of power right now, and they’re not going to give up without a fight.”
Why would health professionals lose from health reform? Picard never says, although makes vague references to the poaching of professionals that is supposedly driving labour costs up. Really?
OPSEU Diablogue 