today's letters: cancer-treatment delays simply unacceptable
3 minute read
dr. jean seely, a radiologist and researcher at the ottawa hospital, says the long waits for breast cancer surgeries could be fatal for some.
julie oliver
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postmedia
who will fix our health-care system?
having spent my entire working career in health care, i empathize with those people waiting for surgery in long queues and particularly for those requiring surgery for cancer. although i understand why, i am distressed that our system has gotten to the point where some can seek out and pay a private clinic due to the extraordinarily long wait in the public system. however, a two-tiered system, one for those who can afford private care and one for those who can’t, is unacceptable in our publicly funded system.
the canada health act has national principles that govern the canadian health insurance system, namely, public administration, comprehensiveness, universality, portability, and accessibility. these are not all being met.
our health care system is on life support and eroding at every turn. who is going to fix it and when, so that we can all be treated in a timely and equitable way?
elizabeth e. harris, nepean
‘closing loopholes’ just a euphemism
regarding wording in the canada health act that allows private clinics to function, dr. robert bell says he would like to see the loophole closed. this logic reminds me of a time when soviet authorities ripped up private garden plots during a famine, in the name of universality.
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i challenge dr. bell to meet with any prospective patient of vm-med montreal breast center and explain why it is necessary for them to die on a waiting list. “closing loopholes” sounds so much nicer than “condemning to death.”
david langner, ottawa
waiting-list medicine doesn’t work
why should women who have money be allowed to live, while women without money will die, merely because ontario’s health service cannot provide necessary treatment?
i committed the sin of moving within the province, and as a result have no family physician. i cannot get a physician; although 70 years old, i can only access a zoom-doctor who, i learned, is assigned 72 patient calls per eight-hour shift — or 10 per hour, allowing for a half-hour break for lunch, and including her time writing up notes. no doctor has actually examined me in over seven years. because that’s the way our health “system” works.
i am told by “the system” that currently the expected wait time to get a physician is 15 years — just in time, i suppose, for maid assistance. except that as a person with a family history of various cancers, the odds are much more likely that i will die from a cancer diagnosed far too late (if ever) for treatment to have any effect.
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the supreme court of canada once said that “access to a waiting list is not access to medical care.” so true.
tom curran, prince edward county
problems didn’t start with covid
canadians need faster access to cancer care. due to decades of underfunding and seriously flawed policies, canada is near the bottom of oecd countries in access to ct and mri scanners, medical specialists, hospital beds, and radiotherapy machines. for details, see my book, a short primer on why cancer still sucks.
this did not just start with covid. if canadians had as rapid access to cancer care as the average american, about 8,000 of the 84,600 canadians who died of cancer in 2021 might have survived. compared to other oecd countries, canada also has much poorer public funding for effective new drugs that can alleviate suffering and prolong high-quality survival in patients with incurable cancers. canadians are denied access to drugs that could have meaningfully helped them if they lived elsewhere.
david j. stewart, medical oncologist, ottawa
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