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July 22, 2009 As a Canadian in behoves me to comment on our health care system, what with so much discussion going on down there in the US. In Ontario we are part of a provincially and federally funded system: the Ontario Hospitalization Insurance Program, (OHIP). Money is deducted from our pay checks which automatically go into OHIP guaranteeing coverage, or so the theory goes. In Toronto there is a shortage of doctors leaving twenty seven percent of the population with no doctor. People use clinics which can eat up two or three hours. Restrictions often apply on the type treatment available although to be fair I should not go too far into this as I myself have no cause to use a doctor. I can however give an example of the kind of treatment available to one I often accompany to the doctor, clinic, hospital and pharmacy. The person suffers from oesteo pherosis, an infection of the lungs, arthritis, rhumetism, and I suspect an addiction to painkillers. every three days I accompany her to her doctor’s office where we wait sometimes an hour and a half before opening time in order to avoid an even longer wait Crowds of patients are jammed together, some with their families. A TV playing videos is invariably switched on in order to keep the kids quite. Great consternation is often caused by the fact that a large segment of the patients have recently arrived form East Africa not underanding how the Canadian system works. I suspect they have spent years in camps administering a kind of ad hoc medical service and so feel that they have to demand their due or not be seen. The person gets into the doctors office and after a few minuets comes out with a prescription which she takes to a nearby pharmacy. The number of separate items she is assigned on these three times a week visits contain, in the main, two to five items. The cost of drugs are covered by OHIP, the prescription fee isn’t. This person receives the basic old age pension of 1200 a month, the check gobbled up by the payday loan and bank as soon as she gets it leaving me in the position of having to shell out twelve to thirty dollars for each prescription. This has been going on for eighteen months now. In addition I have to shell out transit fair for the both of us and any ancillary expenses have asked her why she just doesn’t go by herself to which she is silent.. I suspect she is afraid of being robbed by addicts. And then there are the hospital visits when she runs out of medication. These can take all night and so far occur about once a week. She has been trying to get into a pain management treatment program but due to her limited communication skills has difficulty setting up appointments using a recorded message. I did set one up for her but as she missed her subway stop was five or ten minutes late for the information session and so had to start all over again, the new sessions now longer apart. I myself am on a pension and but for the odd buck I make out of writing would be destitute .(What really galls me is that she is legally married to a man who holds the mortgage on the house in which she lives which is on today’s market worth 350,000-400,000).
As far as I can see she has zero support from her family, her finances not enough to cover her drugs, my dropping out of the picture leaving her with no medication what so ever.
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