Heads should roll

Apparently, Jim Flaherty went to the Civic on an emergency basis a week ago today with a "cardiac incident".  And they sent him home.  Where he died of cardiac arrest yesterday.  That's Ontario health care for you.  How could that happen? 

Health care in Alberta is first-rate.  B and I know first-hand.  Had Flaherty gone to Foothills emergency -- the best acute-care facility in Canada and third-best in North America -- he would probably be alive today.  They don't fool around at Foothills.  When B's temperature soared last summer, blood tests showed he was gravely ill.  Arriving at emergency, the triage team merely had to consult a centralized blood-test data bank which meant he jumped to the head of the line and into a trauma room, where four nurses and two doctors dealt with him within minutes of our arrival.  Had this happened in Ottawa, from where we had just returned, he would be dead.  Thankfully, after very aggressive in-hospital treatment, he recovered.  But they didn't just discharge him and dump him onto the street.  He was connected to a home-treatment team which paid regular visits and showed me how to hook up the antibiotic IVs he had to use for quite a long time.   

In my case, with a weird heart beat, I have regular ECGs here -- something which did not happen in Ottawa.  Securing a doctor soon after our arrival, she sent me off for tests my Ottawa doctor hadn't ordered in years.  They also found my thyroid had shut down.  Oh, no wonder I was lethargic, couldn't lose a pound and had thinning hair!  One little daily pill has reversed all that.  In a year I lost 25 pounds, regained my energy and reverted to lovely hair.  The heart beat?  It's benign.

We may have "universal" health care in Canada, but I still wouldn't want to live in Ontario.