Saturday, June 25, 2005

Health Care

Right now in BC if you have BC Medical it does not cost anything to go and see a doctor or specialist. You do have to pay however, if you choose to see any of the "elective" doctors such as chiropractors, podiatrists etc. Our government is talking about having a user fee for seeing regular family doctors. It would be one fee regardless of your income etc. They feel that if they implement this, it would eliminate all those that take up the physician's time and energy with just colds and flus etc that they can't help patients with in the first place. Other then just telling them to go home, take some Tylenol, drink lots of fluids and get rest. The income that it would generate would allow them to bring in more doctors and specialists from other countries.

Their hope is it will cut down on the waiting lists in the offices, doctors would have more time to see seriously ill patients and it would also cut down on the specialists time. On the opposite view, people here are concerned for the very low income families and seniors who would NOT go to see their doctor because of this fixed cost possibly causing more serious outcomes or even death. One polititian called it collateral damage. They suggested that this small number of percentage of people not going to see the doctor was so mininal it wasn't worth their concern.

1 comments:

Mary Siever said...

I think it is too scary to go down this road. And I am not even one of those who sees my doctor on a rgular basis. But social medicine gaurantees that those who need to be taken care of, are taken care of. And the further we go away from this, the more likely it is that people are NOT going to be taken care of.

Something else I would like to see are our governments (federal and provincial) encouraging more preventative care and education, helping people become more involved in their own health care. I think that those who DO take advantange of the system are those who don't have these skills (well some of them anyway)and who are too willing to let the medical profession assume full control. This is where the major costs come in.

But look at what you already pay for your health care, mum, can you imagine if you had to pay every time? :( And you are one of those who needs to have it accessible. Sigh. They aren't going to fix anything by going down this road, that's for certain.