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The following is excerpted from Canadian Medicare: We Need It and We Can Keep It by Stephen Duckett and Adrian Peetoom.
Medicare is more than laws and regulations. As the Romanow report
(2002) pointed out,
from the beginning medicare has been an expression of our care for one another.
As some other writers have said, it is as binding an element of Canadian life today
as the railroads that connected East and West in the nineteenth century. Our
medicare is a commitment Canadians made to one another more than half a century
ago. In times of need brought on by health problems, we will continue to help
each other financially. Medicare is ours. It is not the beneficence of governments,
be they federal or provincial. Nor is it the goodwill of health care
corporations. However much appreciated, it is not even the kindness of
front-line health care professionals: physicians, nurses, equipment
technicians, medical administrators, and hospital orderlies. All those simply
represent the will of the people fed by a spirit of generosity and care for one
another.Canadians sometimes forget this fact, and who can blame them? In a
country as large as ours, with a population steadily growing and now well over 33 million, we
need complex organization to give expression to our generosity. Our generosity
gets to be mediated, almost overshadowed, by organizations. Many hospitals and
drug companies are involved, and these institutions often obey their own
primary rule: “got to be looking good.” Governments want to appear to be the
source of citizen wellness, be it economic, social, or medical. Drug companies stress
the presumed benefits of their chemicals and suppress their often highly
questionable marketing strategies. Physicians don’t always possess superb
bedside manners, and some believe they hold the key to unlocking the secrets of
the human body and must be regarded with a special type of awe. However, the work
of all of these contributors to the health care system, even the kindest of
nurses, only happens because of the generosity of the more than 33 million
neighbours who share our country, those we know and those we don’t know: our
tax dollars pay for all of the costs of the Canadian health care system. This generosity
sets the context for our medicare and must be kept in mind in any discussion
about how to change the system.
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For media inquiries, contact MQUP publicist Jacqui Davis.
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