Stephen Harper and the War on Medicare Continued

As you probably know, there is nothing I fear more than what Stephen Harper is planning to do to our precious medicare system.

Because he has always hated it, it represents everything he loathes about Canada, and its values.

He went into politics with the support of an organization that was created to destroy it.



And now he's starting to put his monstrous plan into action.

In its 2012 budget, the Harper Conservatives made significant cuts to health care. Health Canada faced reductions of $200.6 million; the Public Health Agency of Canada planned cuts of $68 million, a reduction of almost 11 per cent; and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research faced a budget decrease of $45 million.

According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, the federal share of the health care envelope, now at 20 per cent, will fall to just 12 per cent over the next 20 years should the current government stay in office.

He's making plans to attack it from every direction.

Another regressive change is to occur in 2017 when the six per cent annual increase for the health transfer will be replaced with a formula that links the health transfer to economic growth. 

This is positively perverse. It means that in times of high unemployment and economic downturn, when Canadians need access to care the most, the federal transfer will be reduced. This measure alone cuts $36 billion from federal health care funding over the next decade.

And those plans are all too familiar. Make the provinces too poor to afford it, cripple medicare with cuts, turn it into a second-rate service, then claim it isn't working, and set it up for privatization.



And what scares me is that Canadians who don't know how well it's working, could be fooled into thinking that's the only way to save it.

Even though those savage cuts, at a time when the system is gearing up to deal with a flood of aging baby boomers, could cause almost unimaginable MISERY.

So you can imagine how happy I was to see this Canadian doctor defending our system in the U.S. Senate, from those who would destroy it 



As the debate about Obamacare rages on in the United States, a Toronto doctor calmly defended her country’s health-care system before a partisan U.S. Senate committee in Washington this week and explained that the single-payer model is not to blame for wait times — and that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is not a socialist.

Reminding those who need to be reminded that although our medicare system isn't perfect, it's still one of our proudest accomplishments. One that defines us as Canadians.

And that if Stephen Harper thinks he can quietly destroy it in his usual stealthy way...



He's got another thought coming eh?

Because the resistance is just beginning.

Mark that day in your calendar, join the protests. 

Standup for our precious medicare system and our Canadian values.

Or live and die in his savage Canada...



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