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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Lucknow Sentinel, 1979-04-04, Page 5Lucknow Sentinel, Wednesday, .April 4, 1979 --Page 5 McKinley blasts govt on bed cuts To the Editor: Sentinel readers are being asked to protest the proposed hospital bed closings in our area. In order to do so effectively, people should be given all the information possible. We, therefore, wonder that the enclosed was printed in, the Goderich Sig- nal -Star on Thursday, March 8 but did not find it's way to the Lucknow Sentinel. After studying this article we wonder if letters directed to the Federal Government, now, during the election campaign, might bring more positive results than writing only to the Provincial House. Concerned, S. W. Gibson, Brock St., Goderich. Editor's Note: The Sentinel was aware of the following excerpt from the debate in the House of Commons but previously did not have space to carry it due to the number of letters being published recently in the ' Letters to the editor column concerning the hos- pital issue. The following is from. the February 5 House of Com- mons debate on Bill C=2, an actto amend the Health Resources Fund Act. The speaker is . R. E. McKinley, Nip for Huron Middlesex. He is talking about the current bed :cuts in the province of Ontario as well as the pro- posed ' detec�rent fees for chronicpatien`ts, and relating how the government in Ot- tawa must share some of the blame for the problems in Ontario. "Mr. Speaker, we have heard a great: deal of debate on this bill which is very loosely related to the provi- sions of the bill itself. In fact we have heard from the government side a self -con- gratulating account of how it first came to invade the field of health care in the 1960's, forcing reluctant provinces into cost sharing. programs on which it has since unilat- erally welched. "Speakers on the govern- ment side, of course, have taken the strange tack of praising themselves for the good work they did in setting up . these . health care pro- grams, when in fact the whole substance of this bill has to do with knocking down the health resources pro- gram. `Members on the govern- ment side might benefit from reading the 'bill again. It is only one paragraph long in its essential part. • All it says is that the government is backing out of its commit- ment to the provinces two years early, "Three years ago I had occasion to join in the debate on .another bill in which the government was backing out of another aspect of its commitment to the provinc- es. In the mid 1960's the government held outa finan- cial carrot to the provinces to forcethem into cost sharing Medicare programs:" "Provincialhealth minist- ers could see then that the carrot was rotten, but since the federal government had drawn to itself so much a` ',i,rinciple of . good faith. A control over government spending and over programs that belong to provincial. jurisdiction, the only alter- native was to accept this rotten carrot or to .be denied funds that were being offer- ed to other provinces. "The result of joining these cost sharing programs was that the provinces be- came involved in increasing- ly costly programs whose costs have been escalating through the 1970s to dizzying heights. Ontario had already embarked upon a health care program that suited its own needs as a province. The Liberal government in Ot- tawa put it in a position of having to opt for the shared program put forward by the federal government, and it has been saddled with.__ that program since. "I ' do not suggest for a moment that health, costs have risen only because the federal government is involv- ed in them. Costs have risen in almost any direction we care to look in the service industries. "On the other hand, the pace at which costs escalate can be controlled. in certain ways. If the provinces had been left free to find their own solutions to the escala- tion in health care costs, they might wellhave been . saved from the problems they find themselves faced with when the , federal government,. finding the heat in the kit- chen too muchfor it, decides. to quit and suddenly aban- dons the programs into which it had forced the provinces. "Medicare costs are not the direct issue in., this .\ present bill, but they provide '. the means of getting at the principle underlying the bill. The government isdoing the same thing it did three years ago when it decided unilat- erally to • throttle the cost shared program commitmentte, it had made with the provin- ces. "At that time, finding that, it was spending more than it wanted to be involved in spending, it simply sat down and: said in effect,. "We don't like the terms of the agreement any more; we're going to cut back .on. it." Nowt once again, it is doing the same thing with a program, it set up with the provinces. "Three years ago when thegovernment decided to renege on its medicare com- fnitments, I said, thinking of my own province of Ontario, "we knew at the outset that the provincial medical care program was superior to the federal program that we were dealing with in this cage. There was no way we could be sure that the federal government would honour this agreement. We, like the other provinces, 'jknew that this government's record of keeping its word was hardly conducive to placing very much faith in this particular. federal -provincial agree- ment. "Well, Mr. Speaker, sadly but predictably, I say the same thing again today about the program which is being thrown out in the present bitl.' "The principle involved here, Mr. Speaker, is the government that bargains in good faith does not commit itself to particular levels of 'spending for particular per- .iods of time and then, without consultation and ag- reement, announce a change of heart. _"1n the previous bill three years ago, the 'government pleaded that health ,costs were.rocketingout of control. It couldn't stand the heat. It wanted out. "Well, this time the gov- ernment cannot use that ' excuse, Mr. Speaker, be- cause it sponsored the pro- gram which is being scuttled in this bill, a program to increase the health care training facilities in .Canada and committed ' to it an amount of $500 million. Now, having decidedthat the way to save its own neck is to cut back on spending, it has found this program and has discovered that by 'chopping. it, it can announce a saving of $84 :million. • "The costs of this program can certainly not be said to have rocketed. out of .control. The funds were voted for it back in the mid 1960s - $500 million to be Spend over a 15 -year period. As other , speakers have pointed out, those dollars have shrunk mightily by today's stand- ards. Accordingly, inflation has already taken a great toll on the programs's funding. Now, two years before it had said the program would end, the federal government wants to end it, dealing yet another blow to the building up of health care facilities across Canada. "There are two ways of looking at the principle underlying the bill, Mr, Speaker. There is the way suggested by the minister when she introduced it. She told us the program had already been 83 per cent spent and. had therefore accomplished many of its purposes. Accordingly, she regards it as an easy pro- gram from which to steal, to make up the budget cuts to which the government is committed. . "But there is another way of viewing the principle underlying the bill. It is that , the government, seeing itself in disfavour with the elector- ate throughout the country and realizing that itS 'wild spending habits over the past few years have .landed the country in enormous trouble, its looking for a way to save its skin. It has sifted through its programs looking for ways to appear to save money without losing too many votes. Looked at in these terms, this bill has very little to do with good government and a lot to do with this government as it tries to save its own skin. "If the program was good in its conception, then the government should have the courage to maintain its level of funding, especially consid- ering how much more cheap- ly the government comes by this amount of money these days. Even if it were a flawed program, unilateral decisions' to cut off bilateral agree- ments are far from civilized. They are so close to the law of the jungle that no govern- ment which cares to keep good faith with its electorate would ever be guilty of them. "When the Trudeau gov- ernment suddenly cut the funding of its shared -cost medical aid program three years ago, we in Ontario were faced with the threat of hospital closings in many communities. Now, once ag- ain in Ontario we are faced with the possibility' that a new,fee may be levied on chroic care patients who stay in hospital more than 60 days. There are no easy solutions to the problems of cost in such social programs as these, Mr. Speaker,. "For that reason, govern- ments must work all the harder to make sure their programs are intelligently conceived .,. and responsibly carried out. . How can the provinces plan long term pro -grams if they are bound to the federal government in a shotgun marriage which always threatens a sudden divorce? "How can Ontario to refer again to my own prov- ince - maintain the level of health care it had planned for its citizens if the federal government keeps twisting in the wind? Why did the Liberal government railroad the provinces into these. shared -cost programs at all if it has the gall later to leave them hanging? Turn to page 1:3 • True High Fidelity Performance LLOYO'S. Matched System RECEIVER •30 watts per channel at 0.6% THD from .20Hz to 20kHz *sensitive AM/FM stereo tuner *tuning meters • *facility for 2 pairs of speakees *detente volume, bass,' treble ' controls/Model H430 BELT -DRIVE TURNTABLE •counterbalanced "S"`tonearm *anti -skate control •magnetic. 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