April 17, 2001
Kamloops Daily News


As former Saskatchewan premier Romanow heads out across the
land to fix our health care system, he should look at the
big picture.  As head of the new national commission, he
needs to investigate the root causes of poor health as well
as rejuvenate our current system.

Romanow can start by learning from the United States.  If
money alone is the solution to health care, the U.S. should
have the heathiest people in the world.  One-half of the
world's health care dollars are spent on just 4 per cent of
the world's population in the U.S.  But Americans aren't
getting what they pay for.

American doctor Stephen Bezruchka rates his country's health
on what he calls the "health olympics".   By that, the
professor at the University of Washington means life
expectancy and infant mortality.  "When I began medical
school in 1970 we stood at 15th in the health olympics, ...
Twenty years later, we were about 20th, and in recent years
we have plunged further," says Bezruchka.

Bezruchka blames his country's poor showing in the health
olympics on the concentration wealth in the hands of a few. 
He has a simple way of determining  wealth disparity. 
Compare what a CEO makes relative to an entry-level worker
in the same company.  In the United States, CE0s make about
500 times more than a worker starting at the bottom.  In
Japan the gap between rich and poor is not as great: CEOs
make 20 times more.  In the U.S. the life expectancy about
76 years and in Japan it's  80.

Dr. Bezruchka's simple method seems to work in Canada. 
Here, CEOs make about 35 times workers in entry level
positions.  Our life expectancy is 79 years, somewhere
between the U.S. and Japan.  Poverty shows up in infant
mortality as well.  Japan has the lowest infant deaths at
4.0 per 1,000 births, followed by Canada at 5.5 and the U.S.
at 6.3

But there is more to good health than wealth.  Romanow
should also consider the shift in causes of disease.  It
used to be that infectious agents were the main cause of
deaths . Infectious diseases -- scarlet fever, measles,
diphtheria and small pox-- used to kill millions of people. 
These diseases  have faded from memory to the point where
some parents have the mistaken notion that their children
don't have to be immunized at all.

Now, chronic diseases such as cancer and heart disease are
more prevalent.  Chronic diseases in the industrial nations,
and increasingly in the majority nations, are becoming more
prevalent than infectious diseases.  Chronic diseases
include cancer and heart disease caused by exposure to
hazardous environments and toxic chemicals.

These chronic diseases sometimes take years to kill, but
their victims are just as dead as those who die from
infections. The Ontario Medical Association predicts that
deteriorating air quality in Ontario will cause an increase
in premature deaths from the current 1,200 per day to 2,500
in just twenty years.

In the southern Chilean town of Punta Arenas, citizens were
warned to stay indoors between 11 am and 3 pm due to an
expanding hole in the ozone layer.   The breakdown of the
ozone layer is caused by tonnes of chemicals released in the
past.  The sun's rays, unfiltered by the ozone layer,  are
responsible for increased skin cancer and eye damage. 

And where infectious diseases are still a big problem,
pharmaceutical companies are not interested in a solution. 
The world's poor don't have enough money to be of any
interest to pharmaceutical companies.  So, the poor are
getting tuberculosis at an alarming rate.   200 million
people now living will die from TB -- more than died from
the disease in the entire nineteenth century.

If anyone still wonders what governments can do better than
corporations, here's an easy one:  governments can provide
medical treatment to the poor where it's not profitable for
corporations to do so.  And if that doesn't seem important
now, it will.  Just wait until the antibiotic resistant
diseases that are incubating in the poor spread to the
general population.

Romanow has an easy job in one respect -- just tell the feds
restore funding to what it once was.  Convincing governments
and their corporate masters to reduce poverty and clean up
the environment will take a little more time.

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