We have reached the point in this once-great province where it is easier to get a medically-assisted death than a medical specialist, and where it is easier to buy a handgun on the street than find a family doctor.
This is not hyperbole.
Health-care spending in Ontario is set to hit a staggering $61.3 billion within the next fiscal year. It is the government’s No. 1 expenditure, sucking up 42% of all provincial spending.
Yet the hallways of our hospitals are filled with patients because of the so-called fiscal unaffordability of real beds in real rooms.
Our emergency rooms, many in need of a good hosing down, are teeming with people who have nowhere else to turn because no doctors are hanging out their shingle, all while our bleary-eyed nurses are turning into zombies from being over-worked and whacked out by stress because the Wynne Liberals have cut their numbers.
We are like dirty laundry being hung out to dry.
With the writ now dropped, campaigning for the June 7 election is in full swing and all three major parties are promising with the sincerest of faces to cure all that ails us — from coughs, colds, sore holes and pimples on our bellies—but none has a real plan beyond throwing more of our money at health care and praying that some of it sticks.
They hope bullshit baffles brains because it has worked before.
It explains why the Wynne Liberals were re-elected to a majority in 2014, despite it being scandal-ridden and inept, and already the most politically-corrupt party our province has ever witnessed.
For almost 18 months now, I have been waiting to have an MRI on my lower back, a requirement before I then go on another list — undoubtedly an even longer one— to see an orthopedic surgeon. I do not live in the middle of some rural backwater, by the way, but in the middle of our nation’s capital.
While I wait for the call, I wake up every morning to gobble down a small handful of the narcotic painkiller, Oycodone, just so I can get mobile.
Afraid that I will get addicted to them like I once did with booze, I take no more for the rest of the day, even though the prescription calls for me to take them an additional three times daily.
By bedtime I can barely walk because of the pain.
Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne, deservedly at the very bottom of the polls, is promising to spend $822 million on new hospital care and infrastructure, another $2.1 billion in mental health, and expand the province’s prescription drug coverage to seniors.
Free Oxycodone. Now, won’t that be special?
Imagine, now, if her government hadn’t blown $1 billion of our money to cancel two gas-fired power plants to protect two political seats, if another billion hadn’t been wasted on the e-Health fiasco, and if another billion hadn’t been lost on the Ornge air ambulance disaster. We’d be golden.
NDP leader Andrea Horwath, salivating over the Liberal corpse, is promising $19 billion over the next decade for new hospitals and long-term care facilities, and $475 million for pharmacare and full dental coverage.
What’s her plan to do this? There is none.
She’s winging it.
Winging it, too, is Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford. He’s all in for more long-term beds in hospitals and for more spending on mental health. And he will provide incentives to convince doctors to locate in Northern Ontario.
But as for a plotted-out health plan? None exists.
We’re being played as suckers by snake-oil salesmen.
It’s a tough pill to swallow.
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