Canada’s healthcare system used to be a source of pride for my country. It was regarded as one of the world’s best examples of a publicly-funded insurance system, free at the point of use, ranking highly for accessibility, care, compassion and the treatment of major and minor illnesses.
No longer. In 2024, the influential Commonwealth Fund survey placed Canada in seventh place out of ten developed countries, with a particularly poor score for access to care. In January, the Canada-based CD Howe Institute gave the country’s healthcare system an even gloomier diagnosis: it was placed ninth out of 10 countries, with all provinces and territories falling below the international average for overall healthcare performance.
Now the world has begun to notice. Story after story has emerged of patients failing to receive the treatment they require. But none is quite so chilling as that of Jolene Van Alstine.
Van Alstine, who lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, was diagnosed with a rare form of parathyroid disease eight years ago. She has dealt with many health-related problems, including abdominal pain and extreme bone pain and fractures. “It has been horrific,” she told reporters on Nov 25. “Every day I get up and I’m sick to my stomach and I throw up and I throw up. And then it takes me hours to cool off. I overheat. We have to turn the temperature down to 14 degrees when I get up in the morning.”
Her condition is treatable – said to involve complex surgery to remove her remaining parathyroid gland. But no doctors in Saskatchewan are able to perform it. Her case could have been moved on to a surgeon in a different Canadian province, but she needed to get a referral from an endocrinologist – and none of them are reportedly taking new patients.
This is where the story takes a truly sinister turn. Van Alistine sought approval for MAID, or medical assistance in dying. Worse, she was actually approved for medically-assisted suicide. Her husband, Miles Sundeen, told Global News that “she doesn’t want to die. She’s expressed that”, but he understands her position “after watching her suffer for this length of time”.
Read the rest here.
1 comment:
Healthcare is provincially regulated in Canada, and Conservative provincial governments - like Saskatchewan's - have spent most of this century working to degrade and dismember provincial healthcare systems through partial privatization, under-staffing, closing medical facilities, et cetera. It's inhumane and shameful, but many Canadians keep voting for these people who only seem worried about transferring public funds to their private business connections, so here we are...
Post a Comment