Our health-care system is in danger of sinking

Like the Titanic, we're racing toward disaster, Peter Friedrichsen writes.

A few days ago I heard on the radio that a four-year-old girl in Regina suffering from a brain tumour could not get a hospital bed for more than 20 hours. How is it that a hospital — in the provincial capital — isn't able to accommodate a little girl in the fight of her life?

The stark reality is: doctors, nurses and patients young and old have all been telling our provincial government that our health-care system is collapsing. Yet our government fails to acknowledge that our hospitals, clinics, labs — and all the people working in them — have been sending SOS signals for months, if not years.

I see our public health system as if it were the Titanic, and Saskatchewan people the passengers. Our state-of-theart, universal health care system was built 60 years ago.

But lately we've been dodging icebergs, and now we're on a collision course. Last year, we ran out of ventilators and taxpayers paid for 22 people to get care in Ontario. This spring, an ICU doctor left the province, and this fall a nurse was burnt out after only eight months of work. And now, they still refuse to use public resource revenue windfalls or federal COVID-19 funding and acquiesce to the Liberal-ndp “costly coalition” as hospitals swell, families cannot find doctors or children's medication and we plunge into flu season.

We must remember that the Titanic didn't simply break in two. It was the captain's and crew's decisions that led it to sink. We must recognize the problem isn't the system but the decisions being made by those who are in charge of it. The Saskatchewan Party government needs to immediately fund and restore our public health-care system — which includes shelters and harm reduction facilities. Our compromised health-care system is no longer able to respond to emergencies such as the Humboldt Broncos crash or massacre at James Smith Cree Nation.

We're taking on water, and people have already perished. Just like the boilermen and third-class passengers of the Titanic, those working on the front lines and most vulnerable are at the highest risk. Now the water has risen and even folks like me with good health and decent jobs are feeling stranded.

We cannot continue on a course toward outsourcing the public services and institutions we rely on for our safety and well-being.

A private health-care system offers false security, like the watertight compartments that inevitably fail with a large enough hole. A private health-care system benefits only the wealthy, at the expense of the disadvantaged and oppressed. A private health-care system is the first-class passengers on the first lifeboats out watching the flares like they're fireworks. People here are sinking — and literally freezing to death — and our elected leaders running our province fail to notice.

I dread that more fouryear-old kids are left without a warm safe bed in a hospital, or homeless folks dying alone in the cold. I'm bewildered that the doctors, nurses and other medical workers are rendered a “heroic” band, drowning as they continue working through burnout.

Bundle up and find your life-jackets, Saskatchewan. I hope there are enough lifeboats.