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Roll Over Tommy Douglas!

I say take money from Medicare to pay for more important services.

Rafe Mair 4 Jul 2005TheTyee.ca

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I've just finished a blockbuster book, The World Is Flat by New York Times columnist superieur, Thomas Friedman, who also gave us From Beirut to Jerusalem and more recently, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, both considered masterpieces. Friedman's message in his latest book is that globalization with all its attendant benefits and horrors is here to stay and will get better or worse depending on how you look at it. The story who now does what, why and where in today's world takes the breath away.

A couple of years ago I was surprised to get my Amex bills from India. That's nothing today. When you read Friedman's book your hair will curl too. The power of some corporations such as Microsoft and Wal-Mart vastly exceeds that of many countries.

You may recall that during the Nafta negotiations, the "Left" cried that all our labour would be outsourced to Mexican "machiladoras," namely industrial strips along the US-Mexico border. And some of that did happen - until the Mexicans themselves were "outsourced" to Thailand and other Asian countries! (Outsourcing simply means doing an industrial or other business function somewhere else where the labour or other costs are much less. It becomes, in essence, a transfer of jobs from home to places with cheaper labour and lower costs.)

Not unnaturally, this phenomenon has North American workers angry and scared. And so they should be. Especially if they work for GM or Ford, both teetering on the brink of very bad things because, in addition to being unable to compete with Asian cars, they have hugely overstocked on SUVs just as they're losing fashion with consumers who want more fuel efficient vehicles.

What to do?

One thing is for certain - we must train our young people to face an utterly different world than we faced, a world that changes by the day. Friedman's view that the new training must not only be massive but that all education, from Kindergarten to college degree must be paid for by the state. He says that every young person must have the same chance - whatever his or her background - to be properly educated. I agree.

There must, of course, be standards. I would have scholarships for all who reach a certain level of competence with forgivable loans for those who do less well but show effort and competence. When you think of it, publicly financed education from grades one to twelve has been with us for as long as we can remember. Surely, as a society, we must acknowledge that it makes no sense to give children no more essential learning than one had 150 years ago.

It's illogical, as well as grossly untrue to say that in the 21st century our public educational needs are the same as they were in the 1900s. (I would extend publicly financed education to the trades as well).

The question is, of course, how do we pay for all this?

The first answer is by changing our priorities from the less important to the crucial. If Friedman is right, we will be in very deep trouble within the next decade if we don't have properly trained people to deal with an utterly different workplace. We're not talking about frills here but economic survival.

But I have a partial and perhaps full solution for the cost factor -- finance it out of healthcare! Yes, you read that properly, pay for post-secondary education out of health care.

Here's how

Medicare in British Columbia takes about four billion dollars per year to run, and at that it is not running well. Why not, then, permit the private sector to pick up part of this cost, in what I would call a two parallel streamed system, (wrongly called a "two-tiered" system by the left who want to make it sound as if those on the public system will be even more badly served if some remove themselves from public surgery line-ups by having them done privately.)

The mere suggestion of any private involvement in the health care system immediately raises the ghost of Tommy Douglas from his eternal peace and arouses his daughter Shirley from out of wherever it is she haunts, to cross the country screaming about an impending American system which will drive our poor from their hovels onto the streets to die from want of medical attention.

Then the doctrinaire medical eggheads, the elite health economists, who ply their prosperous trade as High Priests of the Mysterious Order of Healthcare, produce models proving that if you let people pay for their own health, somehow saving Medicare money will bankrupt it. All high priests have the knack of obscuring obvious and making nonsense into holy writ -- health professions are no exception.

'Common sense' and number crunching

I offer the argument of common sense and admit that someone else will have to crunch the appropriate figures.

Let's suppose that people on the private system save the Medicare ten percent only. I think it would he higher. But surely ten percent is a modest assumption. That not only reduces if not eliminates the surgical line-ups, it frees up $400,000,000 for financing students. That in itself may not be enough but it's a hell of a start.

The crux of my argument is this - governments have to look beyond the budget year and move into the budget decade. There must be careful thought and research into what BC, requires not just in this year will need but will require, as a minimum, in 2010, 2015, 2020 and so on. Governments must learn to budget expenses that won't show pay-offs for some time in the future and won't be expected to. Politicians, realizing that bad news in 2010 will likely be visited on another government, feel no pressure to deal with that future. We must force politicians to break this mold.

Up to us

This will mean examining old priorities and making difficult and unpopular decisions changing and sometimes overturning that which has hitherto been held as articles of Canadian faith.

It also involves sending Tommy Douglas back to his well deserved eternal peace and Shirley back into retirement.

Most of all, it means that the "left" must cast off old philosophies and bone tired cliches and start thinking.

The alternative will produce still lousy healthcare and kids unready to take their places in the job market.

When that happens, others will be blamed, but in fairness it will be our fault.

Rafe Mair, a regular columnist for The Tyee, can be heard every weekday morning from 8:30-10:30 on 600AM, His website is www.rafeonline.com.  [Tyee]

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