Wednesday Afternoon Links

Assorted material for your midweek reading.

- With market-based quackery being pushed yet again as a quick-fix "solution" for our health care system, Brian Topp reminds us what the most thorough look at the future of health care in Canada actually found:

Roy Romanow rejected the American model for health care. Not just because it produces grossly inferior health outcomes compared to public systems. But because American health care is simultaneously grossly expensive, with out-of-control annual cost increases.

It is also true that Mr. Romanow proposed that Canada's public health system be built on – with a catastrophic pharmacare program, homecare, and a move toward a “primary care” model – change paid for through a modest increase (compared to American growth rates) in federal transfers.

These steps would improve health services – by ensuring people can afford critical drugs; heal at home; and be dealt with as a person instead of as a transaction by the health system.

These steps would also control costs in the public health system. Using the public system's power as a group buyer to hold down the spiraling costs of pharmaceuticals. Getting people out of crowded hospitals (the fundamental solution to crowded emergency rooms). And evolving toward a better model to compensate health providers.

- I'd like to think Douglas Bell is right in his view that Stephen Harper won't succeed in demanding an electoral do-over if he falls short of a majority. But I'd much sooner put money down on Paul Wells' take that there's going to be just as much of a fight after the election as during the campaign.

- Dan Gardner compares the Libs' dilemma to that of WWI-era Germany in being squeezed by strong rivals on each side. But I'd think that analogy only further exposes their folly in declining to try to turn one into an ally.

- Cliff nicely defines why many NDP voters don't have any interest in the Libs' invitation to fold for the greater glory of Michael Ignatieff:

To the casual observer, or the observer deliberately avoiding the details - liberals and social democrats may seem to have more in common than liberals and conservatives - but have you noticed that in provinces where the NDP is a legitimate, even default governing option that the provincial 'liberals' and 'conservatives' have long since merged into default chamber of commerce conservative parties? Have you noticed that in the UK the two parties that felt their policies were most aligned to form a coalition were the 'liberals' and the 'conservatives'? You don't think the same thing would happen in Canada in a heartbeat if it ever looked like the NDP was becoming a viable governing option?

When we say 'Liberal/Tory, same old story' that isn't just a slogan, we New Democrats really do believe that on the really important issues particularly on economics and social spending there is no real daylight between Liberal and Tory policy books.

So pardon us if we look for an alternative to either the 'liberal' or 'conservative' wings of the single corporatist Bay Street Party presented to us as our only options. Pardon us if we fight for every seat where we have a chance - usually because the local progressives are tired of being wooed in an election and then pimped out as soon as the vaguely more progressive sounding corporatists who call themselves 'liberals' beat the vaguely 'conservative' sounding corporatists they agree more than disagree with.

- Finally, Dr. Dawg serves up a disturbing list of what the Cons consider to be normal.