Late Night Laugh: Passwords
June 19, 2008
‘How has Canada’s doctor shortage affected your life?’
June 19, 2008
Something for America to think about:
Answers to the question, ‘How has Canada’s doctor shortage affected your life?‘
TallulahRose wrote:
How has Canada’s doctor shortage affected me?
I had cancer (for years) that went undiagnosed. I had a stage 2 borderline stage 3 cancer; had my condition been diagnosed earlier, I may have had a stage 1 cancer, or been pre-cancerous.
At the time I developed very troubling symptoms, we had just moved to Cambridge, Ontario, which is notoriously short of doctors. At the time we lived there, over 10,000 people did not have a family doctor. The only option was a walk-in clinic; really, more of a sit-in clinic, because they were so overwhelmed with patients, you would wait hours to be seen. When CBC featured the clinic on a piece about the doctor shortage, the over-60 doctor who ran it was talking retirement. I shudder to think how bad the situation would be without that clinic.
But back to my cancer.
For 8 months, every Monday morning, I phoned the local hospitals (In Cambridge, Guelph and Kitchener-Waterloo) to find out if any doctors were accepting new patients. I then started hitting the doctor offices. It was discouraging work, but one day I hit the jackpot, and found a family doctor. After three visits over 4 weeks, when my condition was not responding to treatment, she referred me to a specialist. The waiting list was 4 months long. I asked to be put on a cancellation list, and explained the problem. I got in after…. 4 months. Then, it was another wait until I was able to have specialized testing in the hospital. As a young and otherwise healthy 31 year-old, I did not set off any alarm bells, and so according to the triage system, was not a high priority.
When I walked towards the elevator in the hospital after my test, my condition couldn’t have been clearer. The doctor refused to meet with me and explain what had happened, but every nurse on the floor, the lab technician fetching my biopsy samples, the orderlies, all were watching me with eyes full of pity, smiling at me, and making a point of saying “good luck”. That’s when I knew I had cancer.
So all told, it took over 12 months to get medical attention. If I had not been stubborn and persistent, I would have died.
Gallifrey wrote
The doctor shortage is definitely felt where I live. There are very few doctors in my town and the ones that do practice here are either over-burdened with patients and so cannot keep track of who’s who or keep their patient list small, but in either case no new patients are being accepted. At all. Anyone looking for a doctor where I live is out of luck, the drop-in clinic is the only other option. I use the drop in clinic just as much as my doctor due to difficulties in getting appointments.
The number of times myself and my wife are asked questions like “are you still smoking?”, “how many kids have you had?” and such, when neither of us smoke (never have) or have children are numerous. The doctor can simply not keep track of his patients. The system is over-burdened and failing in proper, efficient patient care.
As for whether this has affected my health, I can only assume it has in that I have to be in pretty rough shape to want to try getting appointments or put up with sub-par care. Now it’s not all bad, when things get straightened out I do get the medical attention I need, but it’s quite the undertaking to get it. And it’s clear when I do see a doctor (family or clinic) they are in such a hurry I do not feel welcome in broaching other health matters, concerns or questions.
All in all, we definitely need more doctors. Many more. It’s sad to think there are perfectly competent, capable and caring immigrant doctors in the country not allowed to practice.
OUI-HA! France Brings Line dancing Craze Under State Control
They turn out in their hundreds in Stetsons and boots as hits such as the Crazy Foot Mambo and the Cowboy Strut echo around their village halls.
They are drawn by a love of American culture – although definitely not American politics – and a passion for line dancing, which enables them to swing but avoid all human contact.
Now country and western has become so big in France that the country’s bureaucrats have decided to bring the craze under state control.
The French administration has moved to create an official country dancing diploma as part of a drive to regulate the fad. Authorised instructors who have been on publicly funded training courses will be put in charge of line dancing lessons and balls.
The rules, which come into force next year, come after the rapid spread of country and western in France, where an estimated 100,000 people line dance several times a week. Jean Chauveau, the chairman of the country section of the French Dance Federation, said: “It’s growing at a crazy rate. There are thousands of clubs and more are springing up all the time.”
He said the French shunned the square dancing that is popular among country and western fans in the United States because it involved physical contact. “They don’t want to take anyone by the hand or anything like that,” he said. But they were passionate about line dancing, where participants follow the steps without touching anyone else. “I think this corresponds to the individualism of our times,” Mr Chauveau said.
Village associations boast dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of members; competitions are flourishing, and a country music festival is expected to draw 150,000 people this summer, he said. “Britain caught the line dancing bug a long time before us, but now we are really going for it,” Mr Chauveau said. “It’s complete madness here.”
The majority of enthusiasts in France are women, who leave their husbands and boyfriends in front of the television while they go out for le country. They often spend several evenings a week perfecting steps to the sound of Every Cotton Pickin’ Morning, Country Walking or Irish Spirit.
Yannick Bigard, who has been line dancing for four years, told Sud Ouest, her local daily: “I couldn’t imagine going without the costume or at least the boots and the hat. I spend my time imagining new choreographies.”
Mr Chauveau said the trend illustrated France’s “complicated and ambiguous” relationship with the United States. “We love American magic and the American dream,” he said. “But we hate Americans when we confront the hard reality of their behaviour throughout the world. We go for the cowboy hats but not George Bush.”
In a peculiarly Gallic approach to the phenomenon, French civil servants say line dancing should be submitted to the same rules as sports such as football and rugby. This means imposing training courses for line dancing teachers and a state-approved diploma for anyone who wants to give lessons or run clubs.
Amateur instructors will have to take 200 hours of training under the new rules. Professionals will get 600 hours, including such subjects as line dancing techniques, “the mechanics of the human body” and the English (or at least Texan) language. They will also learn how to teach line dancing to the elderly.
The cost of the courses, about €2,000 (£1,570) for the professionals and €500 for the amateurs, will be largely met by taxpayers. Mr Chauveau said the regulations highlighted the French state’s obsessive desire to organise all public activity. “France is the only country in Europe apart from Greece where sport is controlled through the state,” he said. “Line dancing is now considered a sport, so it is being controlled, too.”
The American left won’t be happy about this.
From The European Forum on Antisemitism:
Something strange is going on in Germany. The Left is rethinking its relationship to Israel. American observers may find it bemusing to hear Gregor Gysi, Co-Chairman of the Post-Communists, or Franziska Drohsel, leader of the radical Young Socialists, use Marxist-Leninist phraseology to argue, tortuously, that Israel is not, after all, an “imperialist” entity. But strange as it may be, this marks a sea change.
By: Alan Posener
Before the Six-Days’ War, the German Left was pro-Israel. Quite apart from the question of historical guilt, the Jewish State was seen as a model of democratic Socialism. Spending time on a kibbutz was almost de rigeur for young socialists – indeed, the kibbutz provided a model for many of the experiments in communal living that the “68ers” became so fond of. But by the time the young revolutionaries had formed their Communes and were arguing about who should be the leader of World Revolution and who was going to do the dishes, Israel had morphed – in their view – from socialist model to imperialist oppressor. Henceforth, the Palestinian guerrilla became the role model for the New Left. German radicals – among them members of the RAF terrorist group – visited Fatah training camps rather than Kibbutzim, and in 1969 the future German foreign minister Joschka Fischer attended a PLO Congress in Algiers dedicated to the “struggle against Zionism” – and to the destruction of Israel.
It’s difficult to say how much this development was motivated by sheer antisemitism. There certainly was an element of antisemitism involved, and it’s worth noting that the first bomb planted by a German terrorist group was set to explode at the Jewish Community Center in West Berlin. (The bomb, by the way, was procured by a police informer and agent provocateur.) Anti-Americanism also played a role, as did anti-capitalist romanticism, which led the Left to support a variety of “noble savage” movements, from the Vietcong via Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge and Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF to the slightly less sinister Sandinistas and the entirely admirable Nelson Mandela.
Whatever the motivation, however, the result was a knee-jerk anti-Zionism in large parts of the Left, which, even if not primarily racist, was and is in effect hard to distinguish from antisemitism – as when German terrorists helped their Arab colleagues select passengers with “Jewish” names on the hijacked Air France Flight 139 in Entebbe in 1976. This, by the way, was the point where some activists and sympathizers of the radical movement – including myself – began to examine the issue of the Left’s relationship to Israel and Jewishness more critically.
For others, the 1991 Gulf War was a turning point, where the Left continued to support Saddam Hussein even after he had fired Scud missiles at Israel, which, many feared, could have been tipped with poison gas from Germany. However, even then Hans-Christian Ströbele, to this day a prominent Parliamentarian for the Green Party, called Saddam’s attack the “logical, almost inescapable consequence of Israel’s policies”. Joschka Fischer, on the other hand, had already questioned the Left’s anti-Zionism. In an essay written in 1984, he had called Israel the “nightmare of the German Left”.
Within the Green Party, the issue of Israel remained and remains unresolved. The case of Jamal Karsli is fairly typical. Syrian-born Karsli was a member of the Greens from 1993 to 2002. For most of this period, he represented the Greens in the Parliament of Northrhine-Westphalia. In April 2002, he left the party after accusing Israel of using “Nazi methods” against the Palestinians and the “international Israel lobby” of silencing criticism. Karsli then tried to join the Free Democrat Party, where Jürgen Möllemann was running on an explicitly antisemitic ticket. The point is that Karsli didn’t suddenly become an antisemite in 2002, but apparently the Greens accepted his anti-Zionist stance as legitimate “anti-imperialism”. As with Ströbele, the Karsli affair led to no internal discussion and clarification.
This seems to be changing now, and the change is coming from the traditional Left – the Post-Communists of “Die Linke” (“The Left”), and the left wing of the Social Democrats. This is all the more surprising when one remembers that “Die Linke” comprises the hard-core faithful of the one-time ruling party of East Germany, which, like all Eastern bloc Communist Parties, had enshrined anti-Zionism as a central doctrine and refused to acknowledge any guilt for the Nazis’ genocide or responsibility for the victims.
In a speech congratulating Israel on its 60th Anniversary, Gregor Gysi – whose family is of Jewish origin, but who as a member of the East German nomenklatura had never considered himself a Jew – criticized East Germany’s “lack of sensitivity regarding Israel’s security interests” and reminded his party that “solidarity with Israel (is) part of Germany’s raison d’état”. He called the attitude of many on the Left to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “simplistic”, criticized phrases like the “freedom struggle of the Palestinian people” and said that he was “passionately opposed” to the tendency to forget the Israeli victims of Arab terror.
At the same time, Franziska Drohsel, President of the SPD’s youth organization – and under fire for her contacts to left-wing extremists – criticized anti-Zionism as “reactionary” and said that progressives could never align themselves with Islamists against a democratic state like Israel.
Indeed, the Islamo-Fascist threat has helped to concentrate minds. The PLO spoke the language of the European Left. Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Co. most definitely do not. It has also helped that Jews within the Left no longer lie low. Within the Social Democratic Party, there is now a Jewish caucus; and, more bizarrely, within the youth organization of the Post-Communist “Linke” hard-core Marxists have organized “BAK Shalom”, which they describe as a “Platform against Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism and Regressive Anti-Capitalism”. Signs and wonders! Since intellectual life in Germany is still dominated by the Left, the re-emergence of a pro-Israeli Left is of far greater importance than the sheer numbers of the people involved might suggest.
Alan Posener is Chief Commentator of Welt am Sonntag (“World on Sunday”), a leading German national Sunday newspaper
Hassan Nasrallah, In His Own Words
June 19, 2008
On America
“Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan [America] is absolute [...] Regardless of how the world has changed after 11 September, Death to America will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: Death to America.”
“Martyrdom operations – suicide bombings – should be exported outside Palestine. I encourage Palestinians to take suicide bombings worldwide. Don’t be shy about it.”
On Jews and Israel
Speaking at a graduation ceremony in Haret Hreik, Nasrallah announced on October 22, 2002: “if they [Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
The New York Times qualifies this as “genocidal thinking”[7], whereas the New York Sun likens it to the 1992 Hezbollah statement, which vowed, “It is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.”
Michael Rubin qualifies his goal as genocide too, quoting Nasrallah ruling out “co-existence with” the Jews or “peace”, as “they are a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment.”
“The Palestinian National Charter will live on as long as there is a knife in a Palestinian woman’s hand with which she stabs an Israeli soldier or settler … as long as there are suicide bombers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv … and as long as there is a child who throws a stone in the face of an Israeli soldier.”
The Age quotes him like so: “There is no solution to the conflict in this region except with the disappearance of Israel.” Interviewed by CNN, Nasrallah expressed Hezbollah’s reluctance to fight America, however, declaring readiness to respond if “someone launches an attack [...] We will not take rejection or humiliation.”
Nassrallah has made several statements of anti-Semitic nature. On September 28, 2001, Nassrallah said on Al-Manar, “Throughout history the Jews have been Allah’s most cowardly and greedy creatures. If you search the entire face of the earth you will not find anyone more miserly than the Jews or more greedy than they”.
“Jews invented the legend of the Holocaust,” said Nasrallah on April 9, 2000. During another appearance on Al-Manar on February 23, Nasrallah praised a leading European Holocaust denier, David Irving, for having “denied the existence of gas chambers.”
The scholar Amal Saad-Ghorayeb quotes Nasrallah describing his view of Jews:
“If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.”
From a ’student’ of Nasrallah, on Al Manar, Hezbollah TV:
Just like Hitler fought the Jews, we are a great Islamic nation of jihad, and we too should fight the Jews and burn them.” — Hisham Shamas, political science student, at a symposium hosted by… Al-Manar TV at Lebanon’s Université Libanaise.
What government funded and managed health care looks like:
Roughly 4.1 million Canadians aged 12 or older are without a family doctor, either because they can’t find one or haven’t looked, says Statistics Canada.
Of those, 64 per cent used walk-in or appointment clinics, 12 per cent went to a hospital emergency room, while about 10 per cent went to a community health centre when they needed medical care
A comment left on that same article:
The doctor shortage is definitely felt where I live. There are very few doctors in my town and the ones that do practice here are either over-burdened with patients and so cannot keep track of who’s who or keep their patient list small, but in either case no new patients are being accepted. At all. Anyone looking for a doctor where I live is out of luck, the drop-in clinic is the only other option. I use the drop in clinic just as much as my doctor due to difficulties in getting appointments.
The number of times myself and my wife are asked questions like “are you still smoking?”, “how many kids have you had?” and such, when neither of us smoke (never have) or have children are numerous. The doctor can simply not keep track of his patients. The system is over-burdened and failing in proper, efficient patient care.
As for whether this has affected my health, I can only assume it has in that I have to be in pretty rough shape to want to try getting appointments or put up with sub-par care. Now it’s not all bad, when things get straightened out I do get the medical attention I need, but it’s quite the undertaking to get it. And it’s clear when I do see a doctor (family or clinic) they are in such a hurry I do not feel welcome in broaching other health matters, concerns or questions.
All in all, we definitely need more doctors. Many more. It’s sad to think there are perfectly competent, capable and caring immigrant doctors in the country not allowed to practice
(A large number of Canadian doctors (and nurses) have left Canada for the US and elsewhere, citing the myriad of difficulties of maintaining a practice overseen by government managed healthcare)
Doctor Shortage Twice As Bad As Thought
London’s doctor shortage could be twice as bad as was thought, based on a Statistics Canada report released yesterday.
The report pegs the number of people in London and Middlesex without a regular doctor at 13 per cent, a figure that would translate into more than 44,000 people within the city. Previous estimates prepared for the mayor’s task force on the doctor shortage had put the number of Londoners without a family doctor at between 20,000 and 30,000.
London’s situation, according to the survey of 65,000 people across the country, was better than Canada as a whole — where it found 15 per cent of people without regular access to a doctor — but worse than Ontario as a whole, where less than 10 per cent don’t have access.
4.1 Million Canadians Without A Doctor:
Over the four times Dawn Beharry has been stricken with the same, persistent infection since January, she has had one wish: that she could see a family doctor who would remember her.
She can’t find one.
“I’ve settled on coming here to see whomever, randomly,” she said, referring to the Doctor’s Office walk-in clinic at Bay and Dundas Sts. she has visited over the past three years.
Beharry, 26, is one of 4.1 million Canadians aged 12 or older who are without a family doctor, according to the 2007 Canadian Community Health Survey, which questioned more than 65,000 Canadians about their health. The report was released yesterday.
I in 5 Canadians Can’t Find A Doctor: Survey
Canadians continue to suffer from a doctor shortage, according to a new report that found 1 in 5 people have not been able to find a physician to treat them regularly…
This proportion was up by 3 per cent since the 1996/1997 National Population Health Survey.
“The overall picture of the study is that we’re not doing as well as we need to do in the whole picture,” said Dr. Brian Day with the Canadian Medical Association. “A 26,000 doctor shortage falls short of the average of other developing countries.”
The survey also concluded that Canadians are not necessarily healthier than they were a couple of years ago…
Canadians Wait Longer For Medical Care:
In recent years, patients treated by the Canadian health care system have increasingly experienced lengthy waits to see providers.
According a new study on medical care in Canada, released in October 2006 by the Fraser Institute, “waiting times are the legacy of a medical system offering low expectations cloaked in lofty rhetoric.”
Since the mid-1980s, the Vancouver-based think tank has produced an annual report on how long patients are required to wait for medical care in Canada. As a result of the group’s research, treatment waiting times are now part of the public policy debate on the quality of the Canadian health care system…
“Despite all of the promises made by Canada’s provincial and federal governments, and despite the fact that Canadians are spending more on health care than ever before, the total wait time in Canada continues to hover near the 18-week mark as it has since 2003,” coauthor Nadeen Esmail said in an interview for this article. “Equally troubling is the reality that the total wait time in 2006 is 91 percent longer than it was in 1993.”
These findings should give pause to proponents of universal coverage, who often cite Canada as an example of a country where health care costs less than care in the United States and everyone has free health care at the point of service.
“While many proclaim Canada’s Medicare program to be one of the best in the world, or suggest it should be the model for reform in the United States,” Esmail said, “the reality is that health spending in Canada outpaces that in most other developed nations that, like Canada, guarantee access to care regardless of ability to pay, and yet access to health care in this country lags that available in most of these other nations.”
If you think health care is expensive now, wait till it’s free.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said on Thursday he needed to see more progress in Turkey-mediated indirect peace talks with Israel before he agrees to a meeting with the Israeli prime minister.
There is speculation the two could meet on the sidelines of a summit of European and Mediterranean countries on July 13 in Paris.
“This is not like drinking tea,” Assad, in India on a four-day visit, said when asked if he would meet Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Paris.
“The meeting between me and the Israeli prime minister will be meaningless without the technocrats laying the foundation, without reaching the final stage.”
Israel and Syria concluded a second round of indirect peace talks on Monday and agreed to continue the negotiations over the fate of the Golan Heights in July.
What does it say when the likes of Bashar Assad has a better grasp of reality than Barack Obama?
Along the same lines, Jennifer Rubin gives us the ‘Never Mind’ candidate:
All that NAFTA bashing? Barack Obama didn’t mean it. Austan Goolsbee can get in line to get his apology behind Samantha Power, who told us “never mind” on Obama’s plans to withdraw troops from Iraq. So could we get a definitive list of what Obama didn’t really mean? Undivided Jerusalem is a “never mind.” And opposition to Kyl-Lieberman is, too. Are there others? And where does Hillary Clinton go to cash in on her “I told you so’s”? It really was all “just words.”
