-- Download National Post's Medicare "Crisis" Editorial Ignores Tax Cut Trigger as PDF --

The National Post is consistent in its criticism of the “usual outrage” of people who still believe in public healthcare. In today’s editorial they normalize marketized solutions to the healthcare crisis. Then they blame universalists for wanting to create misery. There is one glaring problem with their editorial line, though:

Change will come. Governments can help facilitate it, or continue to enforce delays to everyone’s detriment.

via National Post editorial board: Finding ways to health-care innovation | Full Comment | National Post.

Why is there a funding crisis in healthcare?

Neoliberal governments have done more than facilitate it, they have caused it.

Thirty years of continental, national and provincial neoliberalism, particularly in tax cuts and privatization, have defunded governments’ ability to fund healthcare properly.

Then in proper Shock Doctrine style, the right wing media asserts the crisis, calls on the market to solve it, then criticizes people who think it’s a human right for all to have the best healthcare possible as stodgy.

Then they use rhetorical spin to make it sound like government policy is to perpetuate delays: “continue to enforce delays to everyone’s detriment.”

All the media has to do is neglect to mention the massive tax cuts, largely to the rich, that have created the problem in the first place.

It’s called the Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein wrote about it. Gordon Campbell worships it with his golden straightjacket fiscal knives, and even after he “resigned” he will steer that policy until the very last day he is in charge.

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Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun

Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.

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