Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today on behalf of my constituents of Nanaimo--Alberni and my party to enter into this take note debate on health care. It has been an interesting afternoon. With the discussions that began a couple of evenings ago in the take note debate, a lot of ideas about health care have been put forward.
What is it going to take to restore timely quality care to Canadians? There has been a lot of discussion about the Kirby report that was just released. Is that going to provide solutions for us? Senator Kirby and his committee from the Senate are recommending a cash infusion of about $5 billion. In order to fund that, will there be an increase in income tax or in the GST or will it be both? On the government side there is a lot of breath-holding while waiting for Mr. Romanow's report, which is expected to come down next month. It seems likely that Mr. Romanow will be making similar proposals.
It sounds like a pattern we have heard before. Coming into the last election in 2000, there was the health ministers social contract, which was signed with an infusion of dollars to solve the health problems, and yet here we are two years later and more money has not solved the problem. The question that might be asked is, how much money will it take to solve the problem?
There has been a lot of talk about the rising cost of drugs and making sure that there is access to the drugs that people need, especially seniors on fixed incomes and Canadians who are required to take drugs.
I will review what has happened with health care costs in British Columbia. In 1990 when I moved to British Columbia with my wife, about 30% of all provincial government expenditures were on health care. By 2000, during the election, it was 40%. Now, just two years later, we are at 42%.
I know that B.C. health minister Colin Hansen is very concerned about those rising costs. In fact even though the government has put a $1.1 billion increase into the provincial budget for health care in British Columbia, there is still a widespread perception that it has actually cut health care funding because there are hospitals closing and services being withheld. The costs are rising so dramatically.
Perhaps we need to look at how many dollars are going to be sufficient and whether any amount of dollars would be sufficient if we keep going the way we are going.
Madam Speaker, I was remiss in not saying earlier that I will be splitting my time with the member from Surrey.
In our health care spending perhaps we need to look at how we are spending, and perhaps we are not going the right way. I practised for a lot of years as a health professional myself and sometimes I had to use an analogy with my patients. Because we lived on Vancouver Island I would say to patients that if they wanted to drive to Victoria and sincerely believed they were heading that way but noticed communities like Comox and Courtenay as they passed them, perhaps going faster or spending more money would not get them where they wanted to go. They were simply going in the wrong direction.
Perhaps that analogy applies in the health care debate to a certain extent. Perhaps we are missing the mark. Part of the discussion about health care that we need to have is being held to a certain extent, but I do not think it is near enough to the forefront, and that is the discussion about effectiveness and cost effectiveness. That is what I would like to talk a little about.
One of the situations to which I referred during the election involved a person whom I have known for years who ended up with chest pain. He arrived at a hospital on Vancouver Island. His pain was gone in a day but they kept him in hospital for ten days. He would rather have been at home. That was nine days that he did not need to be there. It was nearly $1,000 a day for a hospital bed that he did not need and someone else could have been using. What kind of efficiency is this? It was $9,000 worth of taxpayer dollars spent in the name of health care and it had nothing to do with health care. The only obscure connection is the fact that if they let him go home they knew it would take six weeks before he could get an angiogram in Victoria.
An angiogram was necessary to determine which type of cardiac surgery he would need, whether it would be angioplasty, cardiac surgery, stent surgery or bypass surgery. At that time in British Columbia there was a logjam of 600 people waiting for this procedure and wondering whether they would live or die waiting for an angiogram. Yet if the patient had had the money in his pocket, some $2,000 to $4,000, he might have gone down the street to a very well qualified and I think a very bright doctor in our community who is one of 1,500 doctors in North America who do an alternate form of therapy called chelation therapy. I thought we might talk about that for just a moment. What is chelation therapy? Maybe we should consider alternatives for Canadians.
According to Health Canada, cardiovascular diseases were the most expensive disease category in 1995, accounting for $7.3 billion or 17% of the total direct costs of illness. This is rather serious, as everyone knows, as does anyone who has experienced a heart attack or heart disease. I am sure there are many members in the House who have had surgery. My colleague right beside me can certainly testify to this.
I have here an article about chelation from The Globe and Mail of Tuesday, August 27. It states that patients of intravenous therapy swear that it gives them energy to burn. Now a new study will try to figure out if it works. I am sure this is anecdotal, but the article mentions one gentleman who lives in Burlington, Ontario, Mr. Lathe, who swears that chelation therapy has given him renewed zest. He walks with a spring in his stride, for up to seven and a half kilometres a day. He also testifies that he has had other improvements in his health. He is less forgetful. He said he has had an improvement in his “beep-beep”, something he said is a boon to a man of his age. He is over 80 years of age. In fact it was not a popular drug with a popular advertisement showing a man bouncing like a bunny and singing “good morning” that did it for him; it was an intravenous procedure that restored his function and he was pretty happy about it.
Early this month in the United States the National Institutes of Health announced a $30 million study led by the Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to try to determine the effectiveness of chelation and/or high dose vitamin therapy for people with coronary artery disease. This is a five year trial with almost 2,400 subjects who will be receiving either chelation therapy or a placebo.
In Canada chelation therapy is largely unregulated, but I know from my own community that there are many people who have experienced chelation therapy and swear by it. I have seen people who were at risk of having amputations who have had their limbs spared because this intravenous chelation, which is designed to take heavy metals out of the body, in fact coincidentally seems to strip cholesterol out of the arteries and improves function that way.
There is a person in North Vancouver who has written a book called Addiction by Prescription: One Woman's Triumph and Fight for Change . We talk about the high cost of drugs, but perhaps drugs are not the only answer or in fact the best answer for all conditions. Joan Gadsby has written a book about benzodiazapines. Sadly, up to 30% of our seniors may be taking a drug, a tranquilizer or a sleeping pill that they do not really need.
Going beyond that, a Canadian company has come up with a very creative strategy for mental illness. It has found a very simple mineral supplement that reduces the need for psychiatric medications for patients who are bipolar. An article about it was published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in December 2001. Why is it that Health Canada now has put the brakes on this study that got many patients off their prescription drugs and taking a nutritional supplement that would lead to them becoming low needs patients? This is something we want to see investigated further.
A startling article and new studies coming out are linking SV40, a monkey virus, to being a contaminant in our oral polio vaccine. There are recent studies linking many forms of cancer to a virus that contaminated polio vaccines: mesothelioma, osteosarcomas, retinoblastomas and, I know, non-Hodgkins lymphoma. About 6,000 cases a year are being diagnosed, an increase startling in Canada, but cancer viruses, it appears, can lie dormant in the body for decades before they are activated when the immune system is depressed.
Another article on the same subject states that nine million Canadians were vaccinated between 1955 and 1961. Whether they were infected is a scary thought but if it did come from the polio vaccine, perhaps we ought to look into it.
There are other studies that have just come out. I refer to Maclean's magazine in which it talks about autism and the mercury derivatives that may be causing great problems.
Perhaps we need to rethink some of what we are doing. We need to come up with creative strategies and look at all the alternatives as to how we can reduce costs by effective interventions. Then we would have the money to direct to our concerns for seniors, to palliative and home care and compassionate care for all Canadians.