The End of Public Healthcare. Are we Really Ready For This?

On May 8th, 2005, then leader of the Opposition, Stephen Harper, made a bold announcement. He promised that if he was elected Prime Minister of Canada, one of the first things on his agenda would be to privatize the Canadian Healthcare System. (1)

This was just a week after he gave a lecture at the Fraser Institute, where he was in fact introduced as Canada's next PM.

He doesn't speak about that now, but then he doesn't really speak about anything of substance. Have his views changed since 2005? Hardly. On a visit to the United States during the debates over Obama's healthcare plan, he was asked by CBS about Canada's healthcare system, which is the envy of many other nations. He told the reporter that he really didn't know much about it, because it was a provincial issue.

The CANADA Health Act and the country's leader claimed not to know much about it? Given that he once headed up the National Citizens Coalition, a group founded to abolish public healthcare in this country, I contend that he probably knows the Canada Health Act better than most.

Then and Now

In the Spring of 2005, many were worried about the direction of our medicare. Preston Manning and Mike Harris had just released a Fraser Institute report calling for more healthcare privatization. The report said that those who could afford it, should have the "freedom" to choose their own healthcare – whether it is for-profit or non-profit.

The report failed to recognize the demise of the non-profit healthcare system for everyone, once for-profit health care is allowed to escalate.

Why should we care? I can give you an example.

When Mike Harris was premier of Ontario he began to introduce user fees. My daughter, who is disabled and on the Ontario Disability Support Program, injured her knee when at a soccer tournament for the Special Olympics. The injury required surgery, and the surgeon recommended physical therapy, during the healing process. But there was a catch. We were told that if she wanted to use the public healthcare system, she would have to go on a waiting list, and it could be months before she was called.

Or, she could attend a private clinic, partially subsidized, which would cost her $15.00 per visit. I know that doesn't sound like much, but the doctor recommended three visits a week. ODSP wouldn't cover it since there was a public option available.

$45.00 per week for someone on a pension, or who is a member of the "working poor", is a fortune. It means roughly $200.00 out of the monthly budget. She couldn't afford it so we paid for her therapy sessions. I was later told by her worker that if we gave her money for this, she was supposed to claim it, to be deducted from her benefit.

I don't think that worker ever recovered from the strip I tore off her. I was livid. She never pursued it further. (they have since laxed the rules but only slightly) Of course what this means, is that only the wealthy will get top rate care, while everyone else is at the mercy of what will eventually be a virtually bankrupt public system.

And in the spring of 2005, the hot topic at Canadian water coolers was the future of something, that we by then took for granted (2). That the letter and spirit of the Canada Health Act guaranteed the same level of medicare for everyone, and that this was now being threatened.

It didn't help the Neocons that the Alberta premier at the time, Ralph Klein, was traversing about praising the fact that there would be lots of money to be made in the industry (3). And now Stephen Harper had come out publicly with his pledge. And while Harper retracted his statement six years ago, what has he done since becoming prime minister to strengthen, or at least not further weaken, our medicare?

Our health minister has snubbed important medical conferences, prompting the question: "Does Canada still have a federal health minister? And, more important, does it have a government with the slightest interest in maintaining the national health-insurance program called medicare? For all practical purposes, the answer to both of those questions is a resounding “No.”

Erroll Mendes, lawyer, author and Professor of law at the University of Ottawa, was interviewed recently about the Contempt of Parliament charges against the Harper government, and he brought up another important point. Renegotiation with the provinces and the Canada Health Act, is scheduled for 2014.

With Stephen Harper refusing to provide the costs of big ticket items like the fighter jets, corporate tax cuts and his new law and order agenda, how will Parliamentarians know whether or not there is any money to sustain medicare?

Which brings us to another concern. Instead of allowing Parliament to examine the issue, Harper has handed it over to the unelected senate. A senate that he now controls.

Healthcare vs Sickcare

Another issue with the corporate sector taking over the industry, is that the focus will be on what Liberal health critic, Carolyn Bennett, calls "sickcare". An auto mechanic doesn't care what kind of car you buy or its gas mileage. Their only interest is fixing it when it breaks down.

With health becoming a for-profit industry, again the focus will only be on fixing you when you break down. We will be reduced to a series of pay scales, based on the plan that we or our employer has purchased. There will be free plans for the poor, but what quality of care will they receive?

But healthcare is about more than just tending the sick. It's also about prevention of illness, and under corporate care, prevention is a word to avoid at all costs.

Those in the medical profession understand the need to eat healthy and maintain a healthy lifestyle. But poverty is one of the root causes of illness. So healthcare must also address feeding and housing the poor, if we want to keep everyone as healthy as possible.

The working poor or those engaged in precarious employment, often have no sick leave plan, so they go to work when they shouldn't, not able to lose even a day's pay. Under a corporate system none of these things will be factored in. The more sick people, the more profit. Healthcare should not only be an election issue, but it should be the election issue. And remember, just because Stephen Harper no longer discusses it, does not mean that he has changed his plans. He's just hoping we won't notice until it's too late.


Sources:
1. Stephen Harper Promises To Privatize Canadian Healthcare, Lilith News, May 17th 2005

2. What separates a wrestling match from a health care, Globe and Mail, April 28, 2005

3. "Tories to Klein: keep your mouth shut", cupe.ca, April 28, 2005

My Conversation With Irving Kristol on Welfare and Wages

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

The late Irving Kristol (d. 2009) was a self-proclaimed Straussian and by his own labelling, the "Godfather of Neoconversation". He wrote a series of essays and books that became the basis for the movement.

In one he discusses "welfare" or "relief" and why he finds the concept absurd. I would like to challenge Mr. Kristol, because I find his arguments absurd.

Leo Strauss often had "conversations" with Plato, or at least at times his challenges and insights read like conversations, so I would like to converse with and challenge Irving Kristol.

I realize that he was an intellectual and certainly out of my league, but I'm going to invoke Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. "What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing."

There is too much compliance to what we are told is good for us, and not enough thinking. Because when you break it down, it's pretty simple.

We are continually transferring huge amounts of money to a government who is supposed to be using that money for the betterment of all citizens, and instead are using the money for the betterment of a chosen few.

And that is something, I "think" about often.

Essay on Pauperism

"In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance. " - Stephen Harper (1)

Irving Kristol begins his musings on welfare by invoking Alexis de Tocqueville's, 1835 Essay on Pauperism. Tocqueville asks why, in the most "opulent" nation in the world [England], was there such an extraordinary problem of "pauperism".

Concluding that too much public assistance can create idleness, he and Kristol also see a problem with the definition of poverty or pauperism. To the peasant, the ultimate goal was to have enough to eat. There was no desire to accumulate wealth. The only concern was survival.

However, in a modern city, the standards were different.

... in an "opulent" society, the idea of poverty itself undergoes a continual redefinition. The poor experience not only the need for a guaranteed minimum; they also suffer from what a modern sociologist would call "relative deprivation." Tocqueville puts the matter this way: "Among civilized peoples, the lack of a multitude of things causes poverty... In a country where the majority is ill-clothed, ill-housed, ill-fed, who thinks of giving clean clothes, healthy food, comfortable quarters to the poor? The majority of the English, having all these things, regard their absence as a frightful misfortune; society believes itself bound to come to the aid of those who lack them.... In England, the average standard of living a man can hope for in the course of his life is higher than in any other country of the world. This greatly facilitates the extension of pauperism in that kingdom." (2)

So the definition of poverty in the city, is different than that in the country.

The reasons for that, at least when this was written almost two centuries ago, was first off that those living in poverty in the city, had no land to work for food. But also their impoverishment was visible to those who took so much for granted.

How can you live conscience free, in a society with so much disparity?

The Welfare Explosion

The next body of work that Kristol critiqued was Regulating the Poor: The Function of Public Welfare by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. He calls their book "simpleminded", and "so crude in a quasi-Marxist way, that one is embarrassed to summarize it."

He scoffs at the notion from Piven and Cloward, that "Relief arrangements [under capitalism] are not shaped by the impulse to charity ... [they are] created and sustained to help deal with the malfunctions inherent in market economies."

Poverty in a modern society is often created by unemployment, and unemployment is often created when the "market economy" is in turmoil. The first to be cut by the corporate sector, during hard times, is the labour force, which creates a downward spiral.

The misguided notion that by giving more money to the corporate sector, jobs will be saved or created, has been proven over and over to be a myth. When companies were bailed out at the beginning of the latest "downturn", much of the money was used to give bonuses to executives and to buy up other companies that had gone bust.

Unemployment is still high, yet headlines in financial sections of newspapers, repeatedly include the words "record profits".

Piven and Cloward also wrote:

Relief arrangements are usually initiated or expanded in response to the political disorders that sometimes follow from the sharp economic downturns or dislocations that periodically beset market systems. The purpose of relief-giving at such times is not to ease hunger and want but to deal with civil disorder among the unemployed. (2)

Revolutions are often ignited by the lack of bread, real and metaphorical. And since Canada's crime rate is now at the lowest in our history, could this be why Stephen Harper is so intent on building more prisons?

"Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" - Ebenezer Scrooge

So My Dear Mr. Kristol. This is What I "Think"

“These proposals included cries for billions of new money for social assistance in the name of “child poverty” and for more business subsidies in the name of “cultural identity”. In both cases I was sought out as a rare public figure to oppose such projects.” - Stephen Harper, (The Bulldog, National Citizens Coalition, February 1997)

Tocqueville also wrote that "There are two incentives to work: the need to live and the desire to improve the conditions of life." The basis of Neoconservatism or Libertarianism, is that everyone should look after themselves. But how can you find work when you have no clothing to wear, no food to eat, or no roof over your head?

Maybe if we take care of the first incentive, the second one will have a better chance of prevailing. We can always find money to give to Big Business or war, so there is no excuse not to channel a bit to our nation's disadvantaged, who might actually want to get out of the cycle of poverty.

Apparently the NDP and Conservatives are negotiating terms for the acceptance of the January budget. NDP finance critic, Thomas Mulcair, wants "future corporate cuts to be more targeted to ensure companies are investing in jobs and productivity."

"Future corporate tax cuts"? What happened to the NDP? Those terms should have been compulsory 50 billion dollars ago. From the day that Stephen Harper invited his corporate backers to slurp from the public trough. That is our money and we don't want "corporate tax cuts" that promise so much and give so little.

That money could have gone, and should be going, to actual job creation. If the NDP buy into this, they are going to lose most of their base.

Maybe they need to read Linda McQuaig's column: The growth of extreme inequality in Canada

The massive upward flow of income has largely been invisible to the public, even though it may well amount to the most significant change in Canadian society in decades. The impact on Canada's social fabric is huge and likely to grow. Recent research -- particularly the work of British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett -- shows that less equal societies almost always have more violence, more disease, more mental health problems, higher infant mortality rates, reduced life expectancies, as well as less social cohesion. The effects are most pronounced at the bottom, but are evident throughout the society.

Or John Grace's review of the new book, Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, that he wrote for the UK Guardian.

They say, it's not just the deprived underclass that loses out in an unequal society: everyone does, even the better off. Because it's not absolute levels of poverty that create the social problems, but the differentials in income between rich and poor.

That is the only issue that the NDP should be raising. Not what to do with "future corporate tax cuts".

Irving Kristol speaks of the fact that welfare payments were based on the poverty level, which means that they are at the same as the lowest wage earner's income. But the problem is not the amount of "relief" but the fact that wages are so low. There's no reason for it.

And if he felt that this meant that people wouldn't work, as a result, he might want to think about a national childcare plan, because often those on assistance are single parents, who can't work for poverty level wages, and pay someone else to look after their children while they work.

He also felt that welfare took away a man's masculinity: "... welfare robs the head of the household of his economic function, and tends to make of him a "superfluous man." And he suggests that if single mothers are paid to raise their children, they will stay single or get rid of their male partner.

Notwithstanding the inequality of that notion, the problem again relates not only to unemployment, but the ability of people to work. Food, clothing, shelter and childcare. Those needs must first be met.

And jobs paying higher than the poverty level, provide revenue from income tax, that can go to helping others to abandon their pauperism.

Yes, there will always be cheats, just as there will always be Big Business demanding more and more of our tax dollars, in some perverse sense of entitlement.

So my dear Mr. Kristol. Neoconservatism is failing society, but thanks for playing. And to my dear Mr. Mulcair. Give your head a shake.

"Courage, my friends; 'tis not too late to build a better world." - Tommy Douglas

Soures:

1. Full text of Stephen Harper's 1997 speech, Canadian Press, December 14, 2005

2. Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, By Irving Kristol, The Free Press, 1995, ISBN: 0-02-874021-1, Pg. 43-49

When the Foxes Take Over the Hen House

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

Ronald Reagan was a "B" movie actor. By the early 1950's his career was in the toilet and he was reduced to print ads in magazines, and parts in forgettable pictures.

But he had a look and a voice that was homey enough to convince people of anything. And that brought him to the attention of a man named Lemuel Boulware, General Electric's vice president of employee, public, and community relations, who hired Reagan to be his company's spokesperson.

Corporate America was tired of having to give in to worker's demands and wanted to shift public sympathies away from the labour force, to what journalist Murray Dobbin calls "the good corporate citizens".

But first GE had to be seen as the company reaching out to workers.

Over the past few years, few contract negotiations in U.S. industry have been as bitter and bumpy as those between General Electric Co. and the C.I.O.'s International Union of Electrical Workers. With out fail, the I.U.E.'s trigger-tempered Boss James B. Carey peppered the company with shouts of "chiseling," called its offers a "sham" and "an obvious trap." Once, in a crescendo of rage, he bellowed that G.E. was an "aid and ally" of the Communists. Usually G.E.'s negotiator, Vice President Lemuel P. Boulware, gave every bit as good as he got.

This year the script was totally rewritten. After a month of calm discussion, G.E. and the union signed a new five-year contract that made everyone happy. Cooed G.E.'s Boulware: "A splendid settlement." Echoed I.U.E.'s Carey: "A splendid settlement." (1)

General Electric were the good guys. And until his retirement in 1957, Boulware never stopped reminding his workers of how good the company was, and they had Ronald Reagan selling the same notion to the public. This strategy became known as "Boulwarism".

As personnel and press boss at General Electric, Vice President Lemuel R. Boulware, 62, was one of the most controversial labor-relations managers in the history of a new art. A tough, trap-jawed Kentuckian, Boulware was a hard bargainer during contract negotiations and never failed to point out what a company like G.E. did for its employees. Many businessmen considered "Boulwarism" a smart strategy for combating Big Labor, imitated it widely, even though unions bitterly hated it. (2)

The unions began losing the battle for public opinion. And by 1960, when GE had to renegotiate with it's workers it was a whole new ball game. They could afford to be tough because any bad press could be directed at the union bosses.

The milling picket lines, the fire hoses, the club-wielding police were all reminiscent of the bloody strikes of the 1930s. When the International Union of Electrical Workers struck General Electric last week, the company vowed it would keep its plants open for all employees who wanted to work. Both sides knew the vow could lead to violence. It was not long in coming.

The last time G.E. faced a strike of comparable proportions—in 1946—it closed down its plants, but since then it has hardened its policies. Under Vice President Lemuel R. Boulware, who now serves only as a consultant, G.E. developed a broad policy known through the industry as "Boulwarism," in which the company makes an unceasing effort to sell itself to the workers. In bargaining, the company first listens to the unions' demands, then puts all that it is willing to grant in its first contract offer; after that it will make only minor concessions, thus making gains from a strike problematical. (3)

But it wouldn't be enough to simply bust the unions where possible, so they also targeted government, launching a lecture circuit for Ronald Reagan, "as a crusader against big government." (4) The man who had been a liberal all of his life, was now the "spokesman" for neoconservative policies.

So who better to put forward as president when corporate America decided that life would be better if they simply ran the country? Ronald Reagan. The ultimate company spokesman.

And he did not disappoint. In 1981, Congress enacted the largest tax cuts in U.S. history.

GE was one of the biggest winners in the tax cut bill, getting a S283-million tax rebate for the period 1981-83 despite making profits of $6.5 billion. The tax windfall allowed GE to go on a buying spree of other companies, including RCA and NBC. This was a pattern for all the corporate giants as capital investment increased dramatically, with almost all of it going to other countries. In effect, the billions in tax dollars sacrificed by the American people were used to further deindustrialize their own heartland and boost the growth of super-corporations.

And taxpayers would also fund the propaganda that would allow the wholesale dismantling of the industrial infrastructure, because corporations used their enormous tax cuts to buy up media outlets, further shifting public opinion to their cause.

And besides enormous tax cuts to the wealthy, Reagan also allowed CEOs to run the treasury, beginning with Donald Regan, director of Merrill Lynch, who became secretary of the treasury and White House chief of staff under President Ronald Reagan.

In the following video clip, we see Regan bark at the president, telling him to speed it up. Which begged the question. Who was really running the country?



And Merrill Lynch has done very well indeed. When they were "bailed out" by the American people, 75% of the taxpayers' money given to the firm, was used to pay bonuses to their CEOs.

General Electric also represents the new corporate government:

GE has the resources to develop and promote new political ideas and to organize public opinion around its political agenda. "It has the capacity to advise and intervene and sometimes to veto. It has the power to punish political opponents." And its political opponents are usually Democrats, because like most large U.S. corporations GE has consistently supported the party of business ...

GE nurtures its good corporate citizen image with an $18.8-million fund for its foundations (less than half of 1 percent of its net earnings). But even here much of the money is directly self-serving, going to business think-tanks, business associations, and coalitions fighting government regulation. So the Institute for International Economics lobbies for the corporate line on trade, and the Americans for Generational Equity campaigns for cuts to entitlement programs like social security. GE was a key funder of the Committee on the Present Danger, which propagandized for the massive military buildup of the 1980s, and of the Center for Economic Progress and Employment, which, despite its name, is a front group of industry giants determined to gut product-liability laws.

While corporate Canada always had a voice in political matters, it was Brian Mulroney who first moved lobbyists right into government. And now Stephen Harper has also cut out the middle man.

His first defence minister, Gordon O'Connor, went right from lobbying for military contracts with Hill and Knowlton to helping to decide which of his former clients got to cash in.

Bernard Prigent, the VP of Pfizer, was appointed to the governing council of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the federal agency that distributes about a billion dollars annually for health research.

Guy Giorno, Harper's former chief of staff, was one of the most influential lobbyists for the oil and gas industry, and his new chief of staff, Nigel Wright, was with the firm given the sole source contract for our new fighter jets.

And if you don't think that corporate Canada is in charge of the country, why are they getting further tax cuts, while Canadian citizens are being told they will have to tighten their belts?

Fascists no longer wear uniforms. They now wear three piece suits and Testoni shoes.

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini

Continuation:

A Deceptive Democracy: A Confidence Game

Redefining Populism as Fraser Institute Drafts Policy

A Just Society: Oil, Americans and Mythology

The Success of Neoconservatism is Based on Emotionally Fuelled Ambiguity

Sources:

1. LABOR: The Splendid Settlement, Time Magazine, August 22, 1955

2. PERSONNEL: Boulware Bows Out, Time Magazine, September 23, 1957

3. LABOR: Violence on the Picket Line, Time Magazine, October 17, 1960

4. The Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen: Canada and Democracy in the Age of Globalization, By Murray Dobbin, James Lorimer & Company, 2003, ISBN: 1-55028-785-0, Pg. 43-45