Health, health care system, pharmacare
The Access To Drugs movement, in particular the focus on anti-HIV drugs, has achieved an unprecedented level of public awareness for a “Third World” or development issue. It has caught the attention not only of the general public and the mainstream media in Western countries, but even of audiences as congenitally unreceptive as the pharmaceutical industry and the Bush administration in the U.S. These encouraging developments could herald a major positive change in the global attitudes and international policies which have such an immense impact on the health of the world’s poor.
Health care corporations push whenever they can for privatized health care, and the focus of their latest efforts are “private-public-partnership” (P3) hospitals. Currently, as many as 15 P3 hospitals are at various stages of pushing into Canada. Private corporations behind P3 hospital deals are part of a global movement of corporate “sick shops” that are waiting in the wings to reap profits from our health care system.
Even as Canadians struggle to maintain universal health care through our uniquely Canadian method of Royal Commissions, federal-provincial bickering and name-calling, our neighbours to the south are mired in a costly and ineffective private health care system that not only doesn’t work. It appears to be getting worse.
Health-care practitioners with their treatment and advice loom large in the subject of health, but in fact their activity is only one of many other factors that contribute to the level of our well-being. Health-care practitioners have seldom shown much interest in the other factors.
Parliament’s Standing Committee on Health has identified many important and disturbing issues related to prescription drugs in Canada, including the rising costs, the review and control of prices, the approval of new drugs, the monitoring of adverse effects and prescribing practices, the marketing to and lobbying of physicians and other dispensers, direct-to-consumer advertising, the access to drugs, and the misuse, abuse and addiction within the general population.
The recent initiative to form a health co-op in Pictou County has stirred up controversy. The proponents intend to develop a health clinic to provide a range of services. But some patients worry about access to physicians' services and some Nova Scotians are concerned that the initiative signals a further erosion of delivery of public health care.