I regret that I am not able to make a direct FB link between my column and the Oran, so I am pasting the un-proofed version below. A counter argument to this column, written by John MacDonald, was also printed in the Oran but I cant place it here, which would be fair to all concerned. Perhaps someone else can do that. CT scans - this is a much larger debate than which CT scan we want Frank Macdonald (Inverness Oran, September 24, 2014) Inverness has been a hotbed of discussion around the acquisition of CT scanner for the Inverness Consolidated Memorial Hospital. There is a strong lobby in the community on behalf of Atlantic Medical Imaging Services Inc. (AMIS) of Bedford, which is willing to provide a high tech CT scanner for the hospital. According to those advocating for this offer, instead of the CT scanner that was promised and is being delivered by the Department of Health, AMIS is offering a “free” scanner. Accepting it would spare the communities served by Inverness Consolidated the need to raise between $300,000-$400,000 as it’s share of the original scanner. That’s a tempting offer. The Department of Health isn’t helping its own argument when it offers only a vague cost analysis suggesting the CT scan it is purchasing is less expensive to operate. What is not being discussed in this debate is the most crucial aspect of the debate. Do we want to protect a comprehensive public health care system, or are we prepared to allow temptations from private, for profit corporations to lead us in a direction that can (and I believe will) ultimately undermine Nova Scotia’s public health care system. We are in a situation at the moment where strong evidence indicates Canada’s public health care system is under assault from within and without. While, technically speaking, there is no national health care system, but ten provincial ones, the federal government’s role in funding public health care has been invaluable, especially to smaller, less prosperous provinces. Under the government of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada, that federal commitment has faltered. Harper refuses to renew a Health Accord with the provinces, and is reducing its contribution. Beginning in 2017, the federal health payments will be reduced from 6 percent of the GNP to a payment equal the GNP of each year, anywhere from 1 to 3 percent. This removes billions of dollars from the provinces’ health care systems. Without that larger federal contribution, provinces like Nova Scotia and New Brunswick will have a difficult time providing public health care, if they can deliver it at all. From without, there are corporations that sense opportunities to take advantage of this weakening of the public health care system and the $100 billion spent on it. What the public health care system in Canada covers consists of two aspects of health care, hospitals and physicians. Outside those parameters there are examples aplenty of private, for profit health services. Some are covered by MSI, some are not. What happens inside Nova Scotia’s hospitals is something Nova Scotians need to monitor closely because those services provided to us within our hospitals constitute the core of our public health care system. The “free” CT scan that local advocates lobbying for Atlantic Medical Imagining Services Inc. think we should have isn’t free. The company is willing to install a CT scanner in the Inverness hospital at no cost to us, but it won’t be ours. According to an Oran report of September 3rd of this year, AMIS is willing to install the scanner, pay for the installation, the heat for that space, and they would pay the staff for two years. In return, the corporation would bill the Department of Health for each scan. The figure quoted at the public meeting held in Inverness was somewhat over $600 a scan. Ultimately, what an individual scan costs us as taxpayers still isn’t the question. What is being asked of us is that we agree to turn over a portion of our hospital to a private, for profit company. Where can this lead? The newspaper report stated that Atlantic Medical Imaging Services Inc. would pay the IMCH diagnostic imaging staff for two years. After two years, those employees could decide whether they want to remain with the union or become employees of AMIS. What does that mean for the current employees in that department at Inverness Consolidated? AMIS CEO Jamal Instrum told the Oran “We pay everything, even the heat for the space and it will be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” What does that mean? Any CT scanner we have will be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year on an emergency basis. Or does the CEO mean the company will be operating the CT scan after normal lab hours as an private company offering CT scans for individuals who can pay, as it does in its lab in Bedford, Nova Scotia, where the cost of a similar CT scan is $895, according to a January, 2014 CBC news report on the company? For those for whom the province’s public health care system matters, this offer gives off a fox-in-the-henhouse scent. Those employees who will have a choice of staying in the union or leaving to become employees of AMIS, what is their future if they opt for the union, choosing to remaining employees of Inverness Consolidated’s diagnostic staff? Will they even be needed by the hospital since AMIS will have its own employees? If AMIS is offering CT services and billing the Department of Health, what other diagnostic services can it eventually propose to offer? Ultrasound? X-ray? Why not simply replace our current diagnostic imaging staff by contracting it all to AIMS or some other private provider and the staff they hire? Good luck tracking the costs of that because if the government is a shaky source of financial information, the private sector is a master of its own privacy. What a private company profits from us is, in a nutshell, none of our business. We still have no idea what we paid for the P3 schools constructed during the 1990s. My personal feelings about this proposal are obvious. A private, for profit corporation is looking for a toehold into the public health care system through its flagship, our hospitals. It hopes that Inverness will be the first of what the company anticipates will be a contracted diagnostic franchise inside Nova Scotia hospitals. It would be an appalling irony if that thin edge of the wedge happened here in Inverness, home of Allan J. MacEachen, who, a half century ago as Canada’s federal Minister of Health did more than most other Canadians to ensure that our public health care system remained just that, a public health care system.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 20:23:59 +0000
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