Health
Canada remains poor performer among countries with universal health care
From the Fraser Institute
By Mackenzie Moir and Bacchus Barua
Canada reported far fewer physicians (ranking 28th of 30) and hospital beds (23rd of 29) per 1,000 people in 2021. And ranked low for the availability of MRI machines (25th of 29) and CT scanners (26thof 30) per million people in 2019
Earlier this year, the Trudeau government announced it will increase health-care spending to provinces and territories by $196.1 billion over the next decade. But patients hoping for improved access will likely be disappointed. In reality, Canada’s health-care system already ranks as one of the most expensive systems in the world, but only has mediocre results to show for it. In other words, the problem isn’t the amount of money we spend, it’s the poor value we get for our health-care dollars.
A new study compared the spending and performance of Canada’s system with 29 other universal health-care systems worldwide. According to the study (after adjusting for population age in each country), Canada was the highest spender on health care as a share of the economy (at 12.6 per cent) and ninth-highest on a per person basis in 2021, the latest year of available data.
And yet, compared to other universal countries, Canada reported far fewer physicians (ranking 28th of 30) and hospital beds (23rd of 29) per 1,000 people in 2021. And ranked low for the availability of MRI machines (25th of 29) and CT scanners (26thof 30) per million people in 2019 (the latest year of available data).
Unsurprisingly, scarce health-care resources are accompanied by long wait times. Using data collected in 2020 by the Commonwealth Fund, the study found that only 38 per cent of Canadians reported waiting less than four weeks for a specialist appointment—a much smaller percentage than countries such as Switzerland (68 per cent) and Germany (67 per cent). On this indicator, Canada ranked 10th out of 10 countries. Canada also ranked dead last (10th) on timely access to elective surgery—with 62 per cent of Canadians reporting waiting less than four months—compared to 99 per cent of Germans and 94 per cent of Swiss.
While these results were disappointing, Canada reported mixed results in other areas of performance. For example, although Canada performed poorly on safety indicators such as obstetric trauma during birth (23rd of 23 countries), it performed above the OECD average on other indicators including heart attack survival rates (9th of 25 countries). But while the Canadian system has in some areas performed in line with its high spending levels, overall it’s struggled to meet many of its basic obligations—especially timely access to care.
With its latest increase in health-care spending, the Trudeau government again ignores the fact that Canada already has one of the most expensive universal health-care systems in the world. And although some of this new spending is predicated on provinces tracking progress and demonstrating improvement on certain indicators, international data reveal a simple truth—Canadians do not receive commensurate value for their health-care dollars. Without fundamental reform, it’s unlikely the new spending promised by the Trudeau government will produce improved performance for Canadian patients and their families.
Authors:
Health
RFK Jr. talks fluoride, vaccines with MSNBC the day after Trump’s victory
From LifeSiteNews
By Stephen Kokx
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised a shake-up of government agencies with the intention to make America healthier.
Medical freedom activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a revealing interview to MSNBC today about his plan to make America healthy again after Donald Trump’s landslide victory.
Kennedy was in West Palm Beach, Florida. He was asked a variety of questions near and dear to the hearts of pharmaceutical companies, including vaccines, fluoridated water, and whether various health agencies need to be eliminated altogether.
Some departments at the Food and Drug Administration “have to go,” Kennedy said. “The nutrition departments … they’re not protecting our kids.”
Kennedy was quick to note, however, that “to eliminate the agencies, as long as it requires Congressional approval, I wouldn’t be doing that … (but) I can get the corruption out of the agencies.”
On the subject of fluoridated water, Kennedy remarked that while he wouldn’t ban it outright, there is overwhelming evidence it lowers IQ in children and that he would provide “good information about the science” to cities that use it.
“I think fluoride is on the way out,” he said, pointing to a recent ruling by a federal judge calling on the FDA to more tightly regulate the compound.
Jamel Holley is an adviser to Kennedy. He posted on X this morning that at 1 p.m. EST today there was to be a teleconference meeting involving CEOs of some of the most powerful Big Pharma companies in the country. LifeSite has not been able to verify if the meeting occurred, though given that Kennedy’s agenda threatens to frustrate their plans, it would not be unrealistic they are coordinating for the future.
Several social media users joked about what pharma executives are likely thinking now that Kennedy will be overseeing their companies.
During Kennedy’s interview, his slammed the government’s handling of COVID-19 when he was pressed on how he would have managed the pandemic differently.
“(The American people) should not have confidence in the people who are managing our pandemic. We have the worst record of any country in the world. We have 16% of COVID deaths in the United States of America. We only have 4.2% of the globe’s population. So whatever we were doing in this country was the worst of every country in the world,” he forcefully replied.
Kennedy was also pressed on the subject of vaccines, which he has often warned about on the campaign trail.
“I’m not gonna take away anybody’s vaccines,” he said. “If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not gonna take them away. People ought to have a choice and that choice ought to be informed by the best information. So I’m gonna make sure the scientific safety studies and efficacies are out there and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is gonna be good for them.”
Last weekend, Trump told NBC News that Kennedy’s desire to remove fluoride from public water supplies “sounds okay to me.” Trump has told attendees at his political rallies that he wants to allow Kennedy to “go wild” on health, food, and medicine.
The Washington Post reported that Kennedy is urging Trump to pick Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo as his nominee for the Health and Human Services Department. Ladapo notably refused to push many of the mainstream media’s talking points surrounding COVID-19. He also questioned and even expressed opposition to the shot itself, calling it at one point the “antichrist of all products.”
Health
How the Trump-RFK Jr. coalition could realign US politics against Big Pharma and Big Food
From LifeSiteNews
By Jay Richards
If the unlikely coalition of Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. outlives the 2024 presidential election, it could reorder our political categories and leave to our children and grandchildren a quite different future.
When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. endorsed Donald Trump on Aug. 23, the corporate press and conventional Washington, D.C., analysts mostly missed the real story: It was the moment that a disparate, diverse, and potentially disruptive throng of average Americans became a coalition.
Although RFK, Jr. is famous – or infamous, depending on your view – for his criticisms of vaccines, that wasn’t the theme of his lengthy speech. He spoke instead about an unholy alliance – a cartel – of industries, corporate media, government regulatory agencies, and even nonprofit “charities” that is making us fat and sick. This problem doesn’t fit the simple taxonomy of “public” and “private” or “left” and “right” that served us well during the Cold War.
Kennedy has been a voice in the wilderness warning about this cartel for years. Most Americans first became aware of it during the 2020 pandemic. Here’s the basic story: COVID-19 itself was likely the product of dangerous gain-of-function research conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. That’s bad enough. But Communist China didn’t act alone. This work was funded, at least in part, by the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health and laundered through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.
Once the virus was out, the absurd and counterproductive lockdowns and hygiene theater were pushed by global entities such as the World Health Organization. Domestically, Francis Collins, then-head of the NIH, and Anthony Fauci, then-head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, worked to undermine independent experts who criticized the federal bureaucrats’ favored policies.
Collins and Fauci even orchestrated the publication of a deceptive article in Nature that claimed the virus had a natural origin. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal entities, including the Biden White House, pressured social media platforms to censor even the best-credentialed dissenters.
Attentive Americans soon learned that public health, as a field, focuses on nudging whole populations, rather than seeking the health of individual patients.
Certain pharmaceutical companies – which pay royalties to many NIH staff, including Collins and Fauci – enjoyed a suspiciously fast and less than rigorous approval process for their mRNA “vaccines.” Vaccine mandates then created a massive artificial market for the drugs. And drug companies’ immunity from legal liability allowed them to enjoy the financial benefits of these policies without facing the downside risks from any long-term harm to those who took the vaccines.
Then, during the lockdowns, the growing awareness of the “gender-industrial complex” – media, medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies, politicians, and others who push ghoulish “gender-affirming” interventions on people distressed about their sexed bodies – further reinforced the lack of credibility of private and public health authorities.
An American epidemic of chronic diseases
For some, much of this may now seem obvious. What may be less obvious is that blame for the massive spike in many chronic “diseases of civilization” should go to the same cartel. It involves Big Government, Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Media that rely on pharmaceutical industry ad dollars, and medical lobbying outfits such as the American Academy of Pediatrics pretending to be sound science crusaders.
In his speech, Kennedy devoted many paragraphs to the “chronic disease epidemic” – including ever higher rates, even among children, of Type II diabetes and obesity, and of Alzheimer’s, which some now refer to as “Type III diabetes.” He spoke of “the insidious corruption at the FDA and the NIH, the HHS and the USDA that has caused the epidemic,” referring to the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with the NIH.
But he didn’t stop there. He spoke of “an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid,” including:
ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s Syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Asperger’s, autism. In the year 2000, the Autism rate was one in 1500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36, according to CDC; nationally, nobody’s talking about this.
He also spoke of the massive spikes in the use of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. Of course, first ladies and surgeons general have launched “healthy lifestyle” campaigns, but these always parrot the conventional wisdom of the cartel. In contrast, Kennedy blamed the cartel itself, not a gluttonous public, for the chronic disease crisis. It was this cartel that gave us the war on healthy dietary fats and the ridiculous food pyramid – heavy on unhealthy ultrarefined carbohydrates and light on fat – which helped make Americans far fatter and sicker than we were before.
His speech hit a nerve, especially among parents who recognize this problem but lack a credible and effective way to fight it. They may engage in private acts of defiance – refusing the COVID-19 or Hepatitis B vaccines for their young children, or disregarding USDA warnings about the consumption of animal fat. So far, however, neither political party has taken up this topic. The Left has tended to give the administrative state the benefit of the doubt. The Right has tended to do the same for corporations.
Trump has promised that Kennedy will have a leading role in fighting America’s health crisis. That will mean taking on the cartel. But the devil is in the details. A sustained effort to “make America healthy again,” or MAHA – to complement MAGA – must be free of government interests on the one hand and industry funding and lobbyists on the other.
Maybe that’s impossible, but Kennedy as MAHA czar could mean a serious exploration of the role the cartel has played in the following:
- Restricting medical freedom
- The origin of the COVID-19 virus
- The effects of the pandemic lockdowns
- The lack of safety and effectiveness of mRNA vaccines
- The rise in childhood and adult obesity
- The rise in childhood and adult Type II diabetes
- The rise in Alzheimer’s
- The rise in allergies, food sensitivities, and asthma
- Rising rates of depression and anxiety disorders
- Rising rates of neurological disorders such as autism
- The explosion of cases of childhood gender dysphoria
- The collusion between the World Professional Association of Transgender Health and HHS officials such as transgender activist and Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine
- The political agenda of transnational public health bureaucracies such as the World Health Organization
- The medicalization of the treatment for gender dysphoria with “gender-affirming care” (rather than taking a mental health approach)
- The capitulation of NIH, CDC, FDA, and HHS to gender ideology over sound science
- The lack of value and safety of the ever-growing childhood vaccine schedule
- The medical focus on symptoms rather than underlying causes and cures of diseases
- The artificial restriction of medical and therapeutic credentialing of professionals to control supply and competition
- The decline in average testosterone in males
- The rise in infertility
- The rise in opioid addiction and overdose deaths
- Unethical research sponsored by the NIH
- The incompetence of the USDA in dispensing nutrition advice
- The effect of agricultural subsidies on our health
- Environmentalist dogmas masquerading as health and nutrition advice
If Trump appoints Kennedy as the MAHA czar, it would be akin to his COVID-19 Operation Warp Speed during his first administration but without the industry taint.
Of course, that appointment could come to nothing – except that there is already a coalition forming of millions of parents across, and even orthogonal to, the political spectrum, who – as Kennedy has put it – love their children more than they hate each other. It would take both the political will in Washington and a popular constituency of average Americans to fight the biomedical security state and the cartel that fuels it.
We’re getting a glimpse of this motley resistance in the unlikely unity ticket of Trump and Kennedy and the many strange bedfellows supporting them. If this coalition outlives the 2024 presidential election, it could reorder our political categories and leave to our children and grandchildren a quite different future.
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