Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Twenty-seven thousand in Los Angeles. More than 25,000 in progressive Portland. Eight thousand in conservative Dallas. Sanders, a 74-year-old "democratic socialist" with little regard for traditional campaign requirements such as smiling, has drawn the biggest crowds of any candidate from either party. Calling for a "political revolution," Sanders has overtaken favourite Hillary Clinton in the first two voting states, Iowa and New Hampshire. Last week, he announced the feat that finally got America's money-talks political class to take him seriously: he raised $26 million (U.S.) over the past three months, just shy of Clinton's $28 million and better than Barack Obama over the comparable period in 2007.

He collected that cash while refusing to hold swanky fundraisers - or many fundraisers at all - and while railing against the corporate titans whom candidates usually ask to write cheques. The haul came largely from grassroots donors who contributed online. The average donation, his campaign said, was $30. Brad Cooley, a 19-year-old computer science student at Arizona State University, had never heard of Sanders until he came across his name this spring on Reddit, where Sanders has amassed a zealous following. Cooley now gives Sanders $5 every month. When he has some spare cash, he chips in another $10 or $15.

"He's the only politician that's ever made me excited for politics or for being part of the political activity in this country," Cooley said. Every Democratic primary produces a liberal alternative to the establishment choice. None - not Bill Bradley, not Howard Dean - has offered a platform nearly so ambitious. Sanders, a two-term Vermont senator elected both times as an Independent, is pushing the kind of unabashed big-government agenda that Canada's NDP might deliver if it set up shop in the United States and evicted all its centrists. And he is doing it with unrestrained anger. Though he is a career politician, he radiates an anti-establishment rage that resonates in the era of stagnant middle-class wages, growing income inequality and billionaire-backed Super PACs.

His crusty sincerity is especially appealing to voters who believe the cautious Clinton is inauthentic in her professed concern for "everyday Americans." In substance and in style, he is exposing Clinton's weaknesses. "Bernie is talking to the middle-and-below guy that is just screwed, and nobody else is really addressing what's happening to them," said Peter von Sneidern, 70, a retired motorcycle shop owner and the former party chair in the New Hampshire town of Temple. Sanders calls income inequality "the great moral issue of our time." He says he would pursue a Scandinavia-style universal health care system, make public universities free, double the federal minimum wage to $15, spend $1 trillion over five years to repair infrastructure, break up big banks and change the Constitution to curb the campaign clout of "the billionaire class."

Like conservative critics of Donald Trump, Clinton supporters say Sanders would get eaten alive by opposition operatives in a general election. "I know that the (Republican) Karl Rove team has one goal in mind, and that's to get Bernie the nomination. Because he's their dream candidate to run against," said Bert Weiss, the Democratic chair in the New Hampshire town of Chatham. The drama-hungry media can make Sanders' chances sound better than they are. Among the non-white voters particularly important in the South, Clinton leads 76 per cent to 16 per cent, according to a recent NBC poll. And Clinton's overall lead, while shrinking, is still large: Clinton is ahead of Sanders 65 to 35 per cent, a recent YouGov poll found.

Dan Payne, a Boston-based Democratic analyst, said the upcoming debates are a "big, big hurdle" for a candidate he describes as "rude."Nelson believes Sanders is unlikely to do much better than his current 30-odd per cent of the national vote. "But he's already had an impact. He'll have a major speaking role at the convention, and he's already pushed the agenda." Sanders's fervent fans - the Reddit soldiers and the New Hampshire retirees alike - are convinced he can win. Cooley cites Obama, who trailed Clinton by a similar margin at this time in 2007. Von Sneidern cites Jesus Christ.

"Somewhere," von Sneidern said, "I saw something that said, 'Somebody thought that a socialist Jew couldn't get anywhere? Well, you celebrate his birthday every December.'"

Bernie Sanders, who considers himself a "democratic socialist," has passed Hillary Clinton in the first two voting states, Iowa and New Hampshire.

But CUPE Local 7800, which represents the HHS kitchen workers, has argued the hospital is moving away from freshly-prepared food in favour of less-healthy, prepackaged meals. The union commissioned a telephone poll of 564 residents in the Hamilton region that showed most respondents support the idea of food being sourced from local farms, cooked from scratch in hospital kitchens.

The poll, conducted by Vector Research between June 11 and 16, asked respondents whether they agreed that farm-sourced, in-house food production would improve patient meals. Fifty-four per cent of respondents strongly agreed, 32 per cent somewhat agreed. "Hamilton residents and local farmers have a clear preference when it comes to hospital patient food and that's keeping it local and cooking from scratch," CUPE 7800 president Dave Murphy said in a media release.

"The hospital is completely out of step with where the community is at, which is to support local community initiatives, business and farmers." CUPE members will make a presentation to the HHS board at 3 p.m. Thursday. ereilly@thespec.com

HealthCareCan has reason to believe Canadians feel the same way. The organization also partnered with Ipsos Reid to survey 1,230 Canadians about their feelings on health care. The poll found that 77 per cent worry that the government is under-investing in hospitals, compared with roads and bridges.

he new McGill University Health Centre replaced four facilities, yet has fewer beds with the intention to be more efficient than the aging buildings it supplanted, Tholl said. Not only is the design better, but the building includes more medical services (such as equipment and testing) so that patients can access what they need faster. The Montreal example is one that could be replicated in other communities, he said.

HealthCareCan is advocating that the federal government invest in hospitals to take the pressure of provincial budgets.

Polls show Canadians overwhelmingly support these conditions. Medicare's key limitation, however, is that it applies only to services offered by doctors and hospitals. It does not apply to home care. Increasingly, provincial governments are trying to save money by encouraging acute-care hospitals to discharge patients as quickly as possible. In most provinces, these patients find themselves reliant on badly underfunded home-care services. Unlike hospital care, such services are usually neither comprehensive nor universal. As an Alberta oil worker with incurable cancer found when he tried unsuccessfully to come home to Ontario to die near his family, they are not even portable. Ontario pays $3 billion on home care each year. But Queen's Park saves more than that in foregone hospital and nursing home costs. In that sense, home care is a revenue tool. It allows provincial governments to evade the spirit, if not the letter, of the Canada Health Act. In Ontario, as my Star colleague Bob Hepburn has pointed out, the results are sometimes absurd. When the provincial Liberal government boosted wages for badly paid home-care workers earlier this year, some cost-conscious agencies responded by cutting services. In the weird world of Canadian health care, it was the logical thing to do. But there is a way to fix the home-care anomaly. Roy Romanow's royal commission on health care pointed to it 14 years ago.

Romanow argued it made no sense to exclude home care from medicare. He recommended home care services for the mentally ill, for patients just released from acute care hospitals and for those needing palliative care be written into the Canada Health Act immediately. By 2020, he said, all home care services should be covered by medicare. Interestingly, federal Health Minister Jane Philpott is also focusing on home care, mental health and palliative care. How would she get the provinces onside? Many assume a final deal over medicare spending can be hammered out only by the first ministers meeting in a marathon bargaining session - as happened in 2004. In that session, the premiers ran roughshod over then Prime Minister Paul Martin. Quebec demanded and received the principle of asymmetric federalism - that it could do whatever it wished with the massive health transfers Martin was offering. Alberta then demanded and received the principle of provincial equality - which meant any province could mimic Quebec. As a result, no real conditions applied to any of the money Ottawa agreed to hand over.

This is one way of doing things. The other is for Ottawa to ignore provincial objections. That's what Lester Pearson's Liberal government did in 1966 when, in concert with the New Democrats and over the strident objections of Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and the federal Conservatives, it passed Canada's first national medicare act. The Canada Health Act is the successor to that 1966 law. It is a federal statute that can be amended unilaterally by Parliament. In 2016, it makes sense that it be amended to include home care as a core medicare service. Some provinces may disagree. If so, they won't have to take any extra money that Ottawa puts on offer. Thomas Walkom's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

At the top of their wish list: a national seniors’ health strategy, which 84% of Canadians ranked as very or somewhat important. Seventy-four percent supported additional federal payments to provinces and territories with older populations.

Canada ranks lowest for number of hospital beds, with Mexico and Chile

Only Mexico and Chile have fewer hospital beds per resident in the developed world.

oronto – From across Ontario representatives from dozens of communities facing devastating cuts to their community hospitals carted thousands of ballots to the Ontario Legislature. The votes – 93,840 of them as of last night – were cast in a province-wide voluntary “referendum” on Saturday May 28 and in lead-in advance polls held in the last two weeks. Since last night the coalition has received hundreds more votes, putting the total over 94,000. Hundreds of votes continue to be sent in to the coalition every few hours. To put the size of the vote in perspective, a very large petition presented to the Legislature might have 20,000 signatures at most.

Some critics view income testing as a threat to the universal nature of health-care funding in Canada. There is also debate over how income or means testing should be measured. For instance, nursing-home fees in New Brunswick are based on net annual income. The seniors advocacy group CARP campaigned strongly against a 2015 provincial budget change that added savings and investments into the calculations.

Natasha Mistry, CARP’s director of stakeholder relations, said internal polling of members found a solid majority oppose income testing of health-care benefits.

Patients care not a whit who delivers their care; they care about quality, accessibility and affordability. So too should governments.

We need to stop vilifying everyone – and politicians in particular – who states the obvious: that private care has a place in our health system. At the same time, we need to dispense with the tiresome stereotypes, good and bad, about private delivery of care.

There is nothing wrong with contracting out work.

Part of the Wildrose platform is the Alberta Patient Wait Time Guarantee, an initiative to reduce waits for 10 common surgical procedures. Ms. Smith said if guaranteed waiting times could not be met within the province, patients could seek the procedures from private clinics in Alberta or in other jurisdictions (Canadian or U.S.) and the province would pay.

we need to get beyond the knee-jerk “all private care is evil” rhetoric

What should be of much greater concern to citizens, in Alberta and other provinces, is what Wildrose (or the Progressive Conservatives, if they are re-elected) would do with the public administration side of the system.

we need to fix our fundamental approach to delivering care – to put the emphasis on managing chronic disease and caring for people in the community and take it away from the outmoded approach of providing all acute care in institutions.