- Sixth Estate's evisceration of the Fraser Institute continues, this time with a response in substance to the claim that private-sector rent-seekers will somehow make prescription drugs more affordable:
(T)he real problem is that provincial drug review, unlike federal drug review, is based solely on political and economic questions of cost: in short, is the drug high-profile enough that the government should devote money to funding it? In today’s political culture, the answer is usually “no.” In any case, both problems are easily solved with exactly the same method: we need more funding for Health Canada if we’re going to approve drugs more quickly, and we need more funding for hospitals and provincial drug plans if we’re going to use them to dispense more new drugs.- Erin provides part of the answer to Robert Silver's overwrought complaint about how the NDP might deal with labour issues while in government. But it's worth completing the picture with a familiar theme when it comes to a party's general view of government.
The Fraser Institute, however, chooses Option B: a nifty bit of sleight-of-hand which is so unrelated to the actual problems as to be classified (by me, anyways) openly deceitful. The Fraser Institute says that we should eliminate drug safety and cost reviews and hand all drug coverage over to the private sector. The Fraser Institute points out that private extended health insurance plans available to Canadians who can afford them tend to approve more drugs, more quickly, than the provincial health plans that dispense drugs to hospitals and to lower-income people. So, the Fraser Institute says, Canadians will get the best access to the best drugs if they all use private insurance plans.
Now, this is akin to saying that people shouldn’t complain about traffic jams because, if they really cared about it that much, they would just use their private helicopters to fly to work. The reason that private health insurance more readily funds expensive drugs is because the people who can afford to buy such plans (or whose employers can afford to do so) invariably spend more money doing it. Bizarrely, I can find in this report no comparison of the cost of comparative programs, which the Fraser Institute is usually obsessed with. Ironically, just one month ago, the authors of this study published an op-ed claiming that only relative cost was a useful comparison when discussing different healthcare systems.
For a right-wing Con government which at base doesn't believe that the public sector can perform any useful function in the first place, it should come as no surprise that we'd see attacks on unions regardless of their effect on public institutions as workplaces. But a party like the NDP which sees the government having an important role to play also has every incentive to make sure that public resources are used effectively - meaning that there's far more reason to expect public interests and unions' collective bargaining goals involved in a labour relations dispute to be appropriately taken into consideration by the NDP than by a party which sees either or both as being inapplicable.
- Murray Mandryk rightly criticizes Rob Norris and the Sask Party for offering false answers to entirely accurate questions about the St. Peter's College/Carlton Trail Regional College merger scandal:
(NDP MLA Cam) Broten first raised some of these very concerns in a May 2010 legislative committee meeting. Norris responded then by calling the allegations "illinformed", "inaccurate" and "completely false."- Finally, on the positive side, it's worth setting aside some time in this fall's calendar for Linda McQuaig's appearances in Regina and Saskatoon.
Sure, such political forums can be partisan and some of the things Broten was raising were coming from members of the Saskatchewan Government and General Employees Union (SGEU) that was accusing the government of privatization by stealth. But nasty, condescending partisanship (Norris lectured Broten on the meaning of the word "merger") overtook any commitment to transparency and accountability.
Asked Thursday if he had anything to say about those specific words he used 13 months ago, Norris repeated that this was a lesson in humility. That he couldn't muster the words "I'm sorry" to those he had berated for telling him the truth was rather telling.
In fact, what Norris mostly offered Thursday was a lot of justification why he shouldn't be responsible for ignoring the warnings offered to him months in advance. He cited everything from the "culture of trust" in post-secondary institutes to the time it took for the reports to be written as the problems.
This not accountability. And waiting until the final day before a summer long weekend to release the report doesn't feel like transparency.
Accountability and transparency aren't just words.
And what's particularly silly is that we also have a lot of right-wingers constantly bleating about how they're hard done by since a couple of outlets are somewhat balanced (rather than joining the cheering section in the majority of the media).
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