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 McGuinty’s Manor

The Beat goes on—The tragi-comedy which could be  known as “The Mad Minions of McGuinty’s Mansion” is in its last year, so the frenzy is showing.  If we are to learn anything from this comedy, it is to remove the legislated four year terms for Provincial and Federal governments -- with a peek at Municipal Councils as well.  It has to be cheaper to have more election options than to expose ourselves to the havoc created by the present Ontario Government we are stuck with.. No Parole Board escape for the electorate!!

My title refers to Minions, but the Oxford Concise Dictionary defines a minion as a “servile agent or slave”.  The Ministers of Health, starting with Smitherman and including Caplan and now Matthews and their highly paid staff of consultants, are no minions--we can add the LHINs and some of the Boards and CEOs of amalgamated hospitals and the Ontario Hospital Association. (The CEO of the OHA‘s salary was $700.000. a year or so ago). You know who pays this exorbitant  amount!.

All of these extremely well paid “experts”are far from being ”servile servants or slaves”—they are the ones calling the shots in the ongoing decimation of normal health and hospital services— and especially their goal to eliminate the Primary Care,-- rural hospitals. They have also declared war against Doctors who have the nerve to question the weird - and less than wonderful -decisions promoted by these so called (by themselves) experts, including  their sycophantic, appointed  Board Members.)

What these 'dim bulbs' want to do now, is eliminate the small local hospitals by replacing them and creating  individual  Specialty Hospitals—here and there--  for many of the separate ailments, such as heart problems,  hip and knee etc. (with our luck we would be the Proctology Center of Excellence!!!). 

We have no word on the ways and means of patients' transportation to these central but distant facilities ... perhaps they can envision a great fleet of Helicopters--- available to them for a fee, to deal with this minor (to them) problem.  More costs to the patients are entirely irrelevant!! This plan must have entered their craniums (cranii ?) from the commercial business world - the success of the big chain stores setting up business in a town and seeing how quickly the locally owned small merchants were bankrupted!!

A  former surgeon in Wales has said it all (to describe our Ontario situation) ... “You can’t break up a (local) district general hospital.  A certain number of core services are interdependent and, if you remove one, the others will gradually go — it’s a house of cards. The core services are -- A&E, general surgery, general medicine, obstetrics and pediatrics.”

Stay tuned for the next episode describing the plans emanating from the “Wonderful World of Wonks”—unless sanity erupts and spoils the show.

Ian L Mitchell

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Sunday, November 14, 2010