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Health care needs more accountability

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by Ted Townsend

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by Russ Francis
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by Lulu Sweet
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B.C. doctors closed their offices in protest again Friday. Nurses were walking a picket line at Richmond Hospital and other facilities around the province. The health care headache is becoming a full-fledged migraine.

The doctors and nurses want more money and also have raised legitimate concerns about chronic understaffing. Patients must cope with a deteriorating level of service while often facing lengthy waits for service. Governments lament that they can't possibly keep up with all the demands. Some have even suggested the concept of universal health care is no longer workable and should be abandoned.

That's hogwash. There's more than enough money available to solve all our ills. Canada's per capita spending on health care is among the highest in the world. And more money could be made available, if needed. But first, we need to be more effective with the dollars being spent now.

It's all about accountability. If we really want a better health care service, we need to stop being passive consumers and trusting the politicians and medical experts to make the right decisions.

We need to become more self-reliant when it comes to health care. We can't rush to the doctor, hospital (or chiropractor or physio) with every minor ailment. And once we get there we need to be more questioning. Too many times, we allow medical practitioners to counsel additional visits to their offices or prescribe costly lines of treatment, while ignoring effective, less costly alternatives.

But it goes farther than that. We need to demand more input and accountability into the administration of the health care system. For example, the nurses' union recently revealed that, last year, Richmond Hospital administrators used taxpayers' money to pay for golf games, junkets and a stage play. The hospital claimed, rather unconvincingly, that the golf games and travel claims were important hospital business, while proudly proclaiming it had eliminated the stage play this year. Excuse me, but hospitals have been facing varying degree of budget restraints for more than a decade. Those sort of expenses should have been eliminated long ago.

But it's little wonder hospital administrators get so easily off-track. We allow them to go on answering to an arcane bureaucracy led by unelected, politically-appointed health boards, which have no direct accountability to the public.

There's plenty of other examples of ineffiencies in the health care system from misplaced government spending priorities to sweetheart deals with health care unions to unnecessary duplication of technology and services. Wasteful spending in the health care sector is a multi-headed hydra that will be difficult to slay. But it's a task we can and must take on, for the sake of our own good health.