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wholehealth4life.ca |
A Bureaucrat's Health Care
I was reading the paper recently and on the front page is an extensive article on our health care system. The article is focused on cross boarder health care due to our lack of facilities and unacceptable wait times for testing and procedures here in Ontario. The people waiting for treatment, and in all their duress, are being asked to deal with bureaucratic paper work and more or less have to prove themselves worthy of this supplementary health care in their most desperate hour.
We have a health care system that is supposed to be free for all to receive equal health care, yet we have some provinces that offer private care for those who can afford to pay their way to the top of an exclusive list; while in other provinces many can't even find a family doctor. We supposedly have one of the best health care systems in the world yet we shut down more facilities every year and then turn around and export more patients to other health care systems outside of Canada; so much so that our government has set up financial accounts with private U.S. health care facilities to care for Canadian patients. We have the Canadian Food Guide to help us make good nutrition decisions. This Food Guide has been supposedly helping and educating us for three generations and now we are being told that this third generation, who are barely teenagers, don’t stand a chance at longevity because of poor eating habits. Our government allows the mega drug companies to advertise their drugs on all media outlets to let us know that there’s a product out there for all our aches and pains, disabilities, moods and any other consequence of general abusive behavior. Rarely do these products ever fix the problems that these unfortunate people suffer with, yet they have become a mainstream avenue for our health care. Our government has also created such slack guidelines for major food companies and their processed foods, that just about anything they produce can be called part of a healthy diet; or because they added extra ‘this’ or are fortified with ‘that’ they can call themselves ‘a good source of…’.
I think it is fair to say that we don’t have a ‘health’ care system at all, what we really have is a ‘sick’ care system. Everything is all geared towards being sick rather than being healthy.
Our bureaucrats keep using the cost of health care as a justification to continue to eliminate our services, facilities and the good people who work in health care. For the life of me I don’t understand what they don’t get (or perhaps choose to ignore). I’ll admit that I know nothing about the politics of such an expansive service, but I’ve got to believe that cross boarder health care would be substantially more expensive in the long term than pouring money back into our own facilities and giving our health care workers what they need to care for us. I'm certain that this would be a lot less stressful for those who are needing this type of health care. I also don’t understand how the concept of preventative health continues to elude our bureaucrats. What are they doing to keep the healthy people healthy and out of the ‘system’ and draining our funding even more? It seems to me the healthy people are a very significant factor in how our health care system is going to survive. The growing cost of our health care and the long waiting lists to receive life saving treatments could be very easily brought under control by providing a front line service of specialists in nutrition, fitness, digestion and stress management – the four big catalysts to deteriorating health. Why don’t family doctors specialize in these things? This happens to be the foundation to which all alternative health care is based on because their focus is on nutrition and genuine healthy living. In a sense their approach to treatment puts some onus back on the patient to do something for themselves. Yet the foundation of our medical society refuses to accept that these alternative doctors and nutritionists have anything to contribute. Instead our health care has increasingly become a system of dependency; and at the same time it’s a system of no accountability. We don’t have to take care of ourselves, it’s our choice. And no matter how badly we let our health deteriorate, the system will be there for us...and it’s free...at least until we get really sick. We have become a society of the ‘magic pill’ syndrome. We see a change in lifestyle as a burden and would rather take something then change something for our health…and why not, it’s a hell of a lot easier. But, once you’re in the system it’s hard to get out because very little attention is ever given to changing the lifestyle that destroyed your health in the first place. All those ‘magic’ pills are so readily available and continue to give us a false sense of wellness and provide no motive to change anything. It’s not likely that our bureaucrats are going to make any difference either simply because the system they created supports the dependency…and let’s face it; nobody gets rich off healthy people.
All factions of our society have perpetually lowered their standards to make it easier for us to accept our own deterioration. We’ve allow processed foods to take over our supermarkets - they now have one outside aisles of fresh wholesome food and 10 aisles of processed foods - and we’ve accepted these foods as part of a healthy diet on our Canadian Food Guide because it makes our busy lives easier. We also accept drugs as a normal part of healthy living rather than just living healthy. Even our clothing manufacturers have expanded smaller sizes to fit larger waistlines just to make us feel better about ourselves. People will always get sick; even those who genuinely take care of themselves, and we should all be thankful for having health care available. For the most part, we really do have it made in this country. But the reality is that we are loosing our ability to care for the growing amount of people needing health care due to our lowered standards of living well.
Bottom line: you need to take matters into your own hands if you don't want to end up on one of those waiting lists; it’s best not to let those bureaucrats show you how to live healthy either - it would seem they have their own agenda. Raising your own standards and a little accountability can go a long way. So do your part to keep yourself out of the system so that the funding will be available for the desperately sick to receive the treatments they need from one of the best health care systems in the world.