I have said this before and this recent research begs me to say this again: Someday we will look back on society’s zeal for checking and chemically altering our blood cholesterol in the same way we now regard blood letting and purging: A medical barbarity that good science cannot support.
Entries Tagged as 'Health care'
Cholesterol drugs don’t help the healthy
August 12th, 2010 · Alan Cassels · 1 Comment · Health care
Tags: health care costs
The U.K. having problems with its P3s
July 27th, 2010 · Keith Reynolds · 2 Comments · Education, Health care, Privatization, P3s & public services
Britain, which led the charge for public private partnerships under both Conservative and Labour governments over the past decades, is now seeing problems with the projects. This month the new coalition government cancelled the controversial Building Schools for the Future program. Michael Gove, the Conservative Secretary of State for Education said the P3 school program [...]
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Good news from the BC government – with a couple of caveats
July 10th, 2010 · Keith Reynolds · 1 Comment · Health care, Provincial budget & finance
The BC government’s announcement July 9th that it had signed a deal on generic drugs with the province’s drug stores is good news. As discussed in an earlier blog, British Columbians have been paying far more than consumers in other jurisdictions for generic drugs. Alberta, Quebec and Ontario had already taken steps to correct this [...]
Tags: generic drugs·PharmaCare
British Medical Journal links social spending cuts to increased mortality
June 29th, 2010 · Keith Reynolds · 2 Comments · Health care, Poverty, inequality & welfare
An article and an editorial in this week’s British Medical Journal outline the very high cost of cutting social programs. The article’s authors look at social spending in the OECD and find changes in social spending directly related to changes in mortality. Even more, they find the impact of social spending on health to be [...]
Tags: health·spending cuts
New BC generic drug plan could save millions – but maybe not for everybody
June 18th, 2010 · Keith Reynolds · 1 Comment · Health care, Provincial budget & finance
Very, very quietly, the BC provincial government is negotiating new arrangements for the purchase of generic drugs that could save the province hundreds of millions of dollars. Done right, all BC taxpayers will win as more money becomes available for other health services. Done wrong, much of the savings for the province’s PharmaCare program will [...]
Tags: generic drugs·PharmaCare
When $300,000 isn’t enough
December 21st, 2009 · Adrienne Montani · 2 Comments · Employment & labour, Health care, Poverty, inequality & welfare
I heard today that the Fraser Health Authority is giving its CEO Nigel Murray a $30,000 bonus on top of his $300,000 annual salary. Put that up against the cuts the Authority is making to services for addicted youth and seniors, among others. Remember that hospital housekeeping workers, who are the first line of defense [...]
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Healthy eating put out of reach for the poor
December 16th, 2009 · Seth Klein · 5 Comments · Children & youth, Health care, Poverty, inequality & welfare
Remember the Premier’s “Great Golden Goal” (G3?) about healthy eating? True, we don’t hear so much about it these days. But it was a laudable goal. Eating a healthy diet is important if we are to improve the overall health of the population, and thereby help to slow rising health care costs. And it’s particularly [...]
Technology and the future of public health care
December 2nd, 2009 · Marc Lee · 1 Comment · Health care, Provincial budget & finance
A couple years ago I put out a report for the CCPA that crunched the numbers on health care sustainability (BC version here). The main finding was that public health care was basically sustainable in that it could handle projected increases in population, aging and inflation as long as GDP continued to grow at a [...]
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Something missing from the H1N1 fight
October 2nd, 2009 · Keith Reynolds · 1 Comment · Education, Health care
When the government announced its plans for dealing with H1N1 in schools on August 24th there was something missing. The government’s “pandemic response framework”, announced by the Ministers of Education and Healthy Living and sport deals with issues like transporting the sick, communications, roles of emergency response teams, school instruction and post-pandemic recovery plans. What [...]
Tags: H1N1
Poltergeists and P3s: They’re back
September 24th, 2009 · Keith Reynolds · Comments Off · Health care, Privatization, P3s & public services
In February, with the spectacular collapse of the $3 billion Port Mann Bridge public private partnership, many people thought P3s in British Columbia were a dead item. They’re back. With the Fort St. John Hospital project the government’s privatization agency, Partnerships BC (PBC), has found a way to drastically reduce private investment in P3s while [...]
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