Once again I feel the need to reiterate that my comments about health care are personal opinions only, and do not reflect anyone’s positions but my own. Part of the reason I am so opposed to the private delivery of health care is that the market tends to work on a principle of caveat emptor - …
Category Archive: health care
Dec 07 2011
Health care dollars, health care sense
This will be one of my (rapidly becoming less) rare posts in which I discuss something I’m actually qualified to talk about – health care and economic allocation. The reason I do this so rarely is that I emphatically do not wish to have my blogging here confused with my day job. Nothing that I …
Dec 06 2011
Canada doesn’t have a race problem – Attawapiskat edition
Canadians have a reputation as being polite and rather passive. I am not sure what in our history has given us this docile stereotype, or if it is even actually true that Canadians are more well-mannered than our American cousins. What I do know is that there is no faster way to completely invalidate the …
Oct 05 2011
Anti-abortion or anti-contraception: pick one
One of my favourite bits of trivia about Christianity specifically is that the teachings attributed to Jesus say far more against hypocrisy than they do about sex. This, of course, does not seem to faze his ‘followers’ whose anti-sex crusade seems to be taking notes directly from Orwell (who are we kidding? They’ve never read …
Oct 04 2011
Another victory of evidence over ‘common sense’ in Canada
There are few terms so intellectually offensive to me as ‘common sense‘. Every time someone invokes ‘common sense’ in an argument, I immediately stop listening to them. What they invariably mean is “I have no evidence to support my position, so I will substitute what I think is obvious”. The problem is that there is …
Oct 04 2011
Rationing, policy, and woo
I am a passionate believer in publicly-provided health care. Despite the narrative that seems to be fairly widespread among the Americans I speak to, public health care delivery is a much better model than for-profit care. Like any human system, it has its flaws that should be examined and improved upon. However, as both a method …
Sep 29 2011
News blast: police edition
Once again, because of time constraints and my lack of willingness to let things simply slip through the cracks and into my delete bin, I am giving you abstracted versions of news items that I think should have been developed into full-length blog posts, but for the lack of time. Sometimes my trouble as a …
Sep 08 2011
Ageing, health care, and sustainability – memes vs. evidence
One of the frequently-raised buzzwords in discussions of the Canadian health care system is the idea of ‘sustainability’. It is a bogeyman argument that crops up every now and then, particularly as a way of softening the rhetorical ground for increased private-sector involvement in health care. The argument often invokes the spectre of a meme …
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