Health Care
"The Romanow Commission: An Opportunity Lost"
It is assumed that you have arrived at this site as a consequence of reading my article "The Romanow Commission: An Opportunity Lost" Hospital Quarterly Journal Spring 2003
By way of explanation:
When I heard the Prime Minister, Jean Chretien announce that his good friend Roy Romanow, was to be a one-man Commission on the future of Canada's health system I immediately saw a "White Elephant."
A retired New Democratic Party Premier from the province of Saskatchewan just didn't come across as having the "moxie" necessary for organizing medicare in a modern world.
On the last day for making a submission to the Commission I received a Spam Email asking for comments with respect to the four main themes of the Commission. I could not resist the challenge. Within two hours I had completed a letter to Mr. Romanow discussing his four themes.
A day or so before Mr. Romanow arrived in Vancouver to begin his cross-country tour I received a telephone call asking me to present at the Commission hearings. I doubt Mr. Romanow would remember my presentation. In comparison with the theatrics displayed just ahead of me by Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute and Alexa McDonough of the New Democratic Party (NDP) my presentation must have come across as being boringly technocratic.
Certainly there was no interest in discussing my concluding quote of Lloyd J. Detwiller, one of B.C.Ős healthcare architects in early 1970s who said, "Health care delivery and finance programs cannot be optimized if they become the battleground for irreconcilable ideologies."
When I heard Mr. Romanow, just before the release of his document, make his "battle cry" that there is "no evidence" of for-profit health care being better than not-for-profit health care, I knew he had been influenced by Canadian Academic Health Interests that has monopolized all health care thought in Canada over the past thirty years. Given the sustainability of this powerful influence relative to the transient nature of political office, it is these interests that are largely responsible for the limitations of Canada's health services today.
After Mr. Romanow brought his tablet down from his Saskatchewan Mountain I was repeatedly being asked to express some opinion on his effort. I always began by saying "I am disappointed -- "It was this sense of disappointment that caused me to write the article that appeared in the Hospital Quarterly Journal of Spring 2003.
Tim Lynch
Email: tim@infolynk.ca
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