Will NDP fight against making our health-care system work?

Doctors and B.C. citizens are only too aware of the severe deficiencies of our health-care system.

Examples include the inability to find a family physician, long waits in emergency departments (and with many scheduled for admission lying in gurneys in corridors for up to days), long waits while in pain that often prevents work for definitive investigations, then a long wait to see a surgeon and another wait for nonurgent-but-curative surgery.

The reason given to justify this pathetic situation by successive federal and provincial governments is that health care is exorbitantly expensive, costs rise continually and — without actually stating it outrightly and truthfully — is unaffordable.

This is what faced many other, mainly European, countries similar to Canada. They have evolved parallel private health-care systems funded mainly by insurance that have been remarkably successful in fulfilling a patient’s constitutional right to expeditious health care. Quebec has proved that this can be legally done in Canada.

In B.C., the lone wolf howling courageously regarding this issue is Dr. Brian Day. Along with patients who have suffered in our inadequate system, he has taken the B.C. government to court to advocate for change as above. The former Liberal provincial government’s response was to employ an array of lawyers, at vast public expense, to try to outwit Day’s small team and to bankrupt it. This is akin to the extremely damaging tactics the Liberals took toward the teachers and public education.

Is the new provincial government planning to continue such nefarious tactics, or cure the cancer that has spread its tentacles throughout our inadequate health-care system?

Dr. John Stewart, West Vancouver