Madam Speaker, for those watching TV today the Bloc has put forth a motion. This motion is one where the Bloc directs the debate and is asking for some money to be put back into the health care system.
This is a fascinating debate because how often do we see the provinces in Canada united. Every province in Canada is calling for some funds to go back into our health care system. They have basically said that unilateral federal actions are unacceptable. They have also made a unified call to reverse medicare cuts.
It is very difficult to get unanimity even in one party. I note that there are individuals from a host of parties who have joined in this call.
Why have they in fact united in this way? I will try to be absolutely non-partisan in my comments by suggesting that health is important individually for each of us. Nothing has more import for our loved ones. Ill patients do not care how, when, what or where the funds come from for their care. They simply want good and timely access to cost effective care when they need it. They are quite annoyed by jurisdictional or party arguments on this subject.
Why has the public expressed this degree of concern on health? While I have been a member of the federal government the public has watched funding drop from $18.7 billion to $11.1 billion. According to my math that is $7.6 billion in cash that was designed to go to the provinces for health care. I call that the free fall of funding.
I listened to a couple of colleagues on the other side of the House say that there has been a reinvestment in medicare. I would like everyone to know what that reinvestment means. It means that in the free fall of funding it did not go to $11.1 billion. The government pulled the rip cord and just before we slammed into the roof top it stopped the funding reduction at $12.5 billion.
A young student in elementary school would be able to calculate that we did not drop down quite as far as we were intending to go. We stopped at $12.5 billion and that is not an increase in funding to medicare. That is pulling the rip cord before medicare is finished.
Some other things have happened during my tenure in the House. I came here in 1993. I left my surgical practice to try to bring my viewpoint to the medicare debate. We have lost 1,400 trained Canadian physicians in the last two years to other jurisdictions. We paid for, we looked after and gave them all the advantages, and they chose to leave this country. They are lost to us.
During that same time span we dropped from number two in the world when it comes to spending on health to number five. Waiting lists, which were really quite small in 1993, have grown until we now have at any one time in Canada around 190,000 people waiting in pain. The drop in public spending is 3.1%. We are talking about billions of dollars.
Interestingly enough, in terms of confidence of the Canadian public in our health care system in 1993—and this question has been asked for years—55% of Canadians rated health care as excellent to good. Asked the very same question with the very same words today in 1998 and 29% of Canadians are willing to say that our system is excellent to good. We certainly have a change in the confidence level of the public.
It is instructive to talk about individuals. I get a lot of individual stories about people who are concerned. Today I will tell two stories.
The first story is about a fellow from Saskatchewan who contacted me two weeks ago. He had been healthy all his life. He is in his mid-fifties. He was diagnosed with a sore on the back of his tongue. It was biopsied and came back as cancerous. It luckily did not spread. He went to the nearest big centre in Saskatchewan and because it was a severe problem he was referred immediately to a surgeon. Canadian health care still does pretty well on major issues like this in terms of immediacy.
The surgeon said he needed a radical neck dissection, a dissection of all the nodes in his neck. He wanted someone with some experience in the area because it was major surgery. He was told that he would lose his voice, that he would need a feeding tube and that he would probably never be able to swallow again. The surgeon he had been referred to said that he did about one of these operations a year. The man felt he would like to have someone with more experience than that. He found there was no one available to him in a reasonable time span. He was told he needed to have the surgery within six weeks.
During the six weeks he tried to find someone in other provinces. He tried to find someone in Ontario but was unable to do so. There was no one available to him in British Columbia. He heard there was a surgeon who could do this surgery in the U.S. at the Mayo clinic, so he went there. He said that he was not a wealthy man or guy with a lot of resources but that he valued his life more than anything. He found a surgeon who did about 30 of these operations a year, almost one a week. The surgeon, who was vastly experienced, said that he would not have to remove his voice box or put him on a feeding tube. He told the man he was pretty sure he could get him fixed without those terrible side effects.
The man came immediately back home and said that his system said we would be looked after here but that it did not look as if he could be looked after here. He was asking to go elsewhere and wanted health care to look after him if he went to the Mayo clinic. The answer was no, that he would need to have surgery in Canada. He chose to go to the Mayo clinic with his own resources. He spent a huge amount of family money that could best go elsewhere.
He had successful surgery at the Mayo clinic. I am very thankful for that. He can still talk. He is not on a feeding tube. He is able to swallow and he is back home. To my mind the fellow was let down by our health care system in terms of the waiting list he would have to go through at home. Having to go elsewhere out of the country says to me that the system is not acceptable for this man.
I will now talk about a fellow from Ottawa who visited me last week. This gentleman is a little older than the first man I mentioned and is diabetic. He had something that sounded much less serious. He had an infection in his toe. Diabetics lose some of the blood supply to their feet and are susceptible in that way.
In May he went to the diabetic foot clinic in Ottawa. He was told there was not enough space in the foot clinic and that he would have to go to a private clinic where there were significant costs. He could not afford that so he was told to take antibiotics and that he would be able go to the public clinic in October. By the time October came around he had very nearly lost his toe from a simple infection. He treated his toe with an antibiotic which made no difference and he felt he had to wait.
That relatively minor problem could have literally become serious. He should have been able to see somebody sooner but he was turned away. He was probably too shy to know that he should have gone back to his family physician.
On one hand there was a fellow with a very serious problem who was able to see a specialist but could not get treatment. On the other hand was a fellow with a relatively minor problem but with such a long wait the problem could have been much worse.
Because health is so important I cannot imagine why we would not simply say let us look at any solution. Really that is what I would hope the government will do.
If there are extra funds available is there any room now to put some of those funds into health care? In that way I listen very carefully to the government in response.
Opposition parties criticize and look for faults but on this topic we should not just do that. We should be constructive. We should be looking for solutions.
So what I tried to ask is who is calling for some more health money other than politicians who are always looking for an advantage. I picked up a few who are asking for exactly what the politicians are calling for. Maybe they have more credibility than politicians.
I looked at the nurses association of Canada. I am holding up a document that names virtually every health group in Canada. They are all biased too, we might say. They are trying to look after their own interests, trying to put more loot into the old pocket. All those nurses are just looking after their jobs.
Okay, so we will set aside those individuals but what is the public asking for? What do the patients want? I go back to my statement that they really just want timely care and they do not really want arguments about where that timely care comes from.
The public does for sure want a small government doing a few things well. The public does want wasteful spending weeded out. Because I said I would not be partisan I am saying these things as broad principles.
Does the public want forgiveness of other countries' debt when we have some shortfalls in health? I do not think so. Does the public want long waits for substandard services? I do not think so. But it wants co-operative federalism especially in health. It wants a dispute settling mechanism if there is disagreement. If the federal government says one thing and the provinces say another, the public would like to have a neutral dispute settlement mechanism. That is fair. All provinces are calling for that.
I suggest that Canada works best with co-operation. Medicare works best with co-operation. My plea today as somebody who did surgery, somebody who dealt with patients directly, is for us to think of the patients. My plea is to think of the sickness. My plea is to stop thinking of jurisdiction or political party or ideology. When the patient is happy and well Canada will be happy and well.