Just posting in a "spaghetti on the wall" style of "what if I had absolute authority to do stuff."
- Restructure Canadian health care in the style of the UK's NHS. One national system, not several provincial systems blowing billions of dollars luring a dwindling amount of doctors and nurses back and forth.
- Eliminate bureaucracies like the redundant licensing bodies and numerous colleges of highly specialized BS (we seriously have a CHIROPRACTOR COLLEGE? What the frak? DEFUND)
- Strip university government funding from Business Schools (we do not need more CEOs and tech bros, people) and other over-employed and under-productive professions and re-allocate to medical schools to offer reduced or free tuition for skill shortage professions, including health and trades (why not tackle the skilled mariner, electrician, and numerous other hands-on jobs while we're at it)
- Like above, radically re-tool immigration to a points system like New Zealand or similar, where skilled trades shortages are prioritized and minimum points scores must be achieved in order to receive Work Visas and pathways to citizenship (before anyone points out Express Entry's existence to me, I mean that EE needs to be re-tooled. We process statistically insignificant numbers of skilled workers compared to unskilled workers and refugees, and of those skilled workers, FAR too many come from "tech" and "software" fields, which, bluntly, we do not need more of. Only in June 2023 did we finally add health care professions to EE.)
- Under the nationalized system, salary scale should be matched to geographic shortages - i.e., where doctors and nurses are numerically lacking, higher salaries are offered
- With provincial health transfers eliminated, institute national single-payer healthcare and mandatory enrolment, along with income-scaled health premiums that are exempted for the lowest income bracket
- De-fund the "charitable" structure of poverty (it's absolutely nuts that we fund health care through things like charity lotteries; charitable organizations suck up funding by paying their own employees, managers, and CEOs, not to mention sucking up resources on advertising, fundraising, and office spaces)
- No more political fetishizing of building facilities - politicians effing love ribbon-cutting BS, but at the end of the day, an empty hospital is a useless hospital. Upgrade and maintain existing facilities, don't demolish and rebuild (looking at you, King Ralph Klein) and only build where there is obvious response shortage (like rural ambulance response times or accessibility to clinics out of cities).
I'm mainly just venting, but I'm posting this also because I'd rather not just be another "man, health care sucks" guy and actually try to talk solutions (preferably ones that don't involve "let poor people die and rich people pay for front-of-the-line access").
I guess I'm hoping this could be a productive launchpoint for actionable policy. And maybe by some fluke it translates into getting a cohesive, informed set of ideas for government to pursue. I DUNNO. (I'm mostly venting)