Crusader of privatisation of health care : GP Dr Jacques Chaoulli
You went on a four week hunger strike to protest restrictions on private healthcare. What’s the first thing you ate when it was over? Orange juice and tomatoes I think.
You’ve publicly compared yourself to Mahatma Gandhi. Aside from a willingness to starve, what do the two of you have in common? When Gandhi was practising law in South Africa, he noticed the infringement on human rights against blacks. He felt that wasn’t fair and he wanted to defend them. Everyone thought he was crazy but he continued his fight alone. I wanted to fight for the human rights of my patients and, like Gandhi, everybody thought I was crazy and that I could never prevail over the government.
…….and then there is this, the actual cost of going to a Private emergency clinic.
In a scene that combined tragedy with Monty Python farce, a 77-year-old man in acute respiratory failure turned up at a private medical clinic in Montreal only to be told to wait his turn.
Jean-Jacques Sauvageau waited until his heart stopped and his dentures fell out onto the floor. Even then, the famous doctor who came to tend to him did a cursory exam and didn’t try to revive him, leaving him instead before the horrified eyes of fellow patients. The events were depicted in a report issued yesterday by Quebec coroner Catherine Rudel-Tessier. And the doctor taken to task for his failure to try to resuscitate the patient is private-care crusader Jacques Chaoulli.
That’s the same Jacques Chaoulli who “fights for human rights”. Here is a comparison of the care that the good doctor was providing against the care that the dreaded “public health system” wanted to provide
He (Jacques Chaoulli) left him sitting in the chair, and told the nurse to phone 911 to report the death. But the 911 operator pleaded with the nurse to try to revive Mr. Sauvageau. Dr. Chaoulli got on the phone and tried to argue the patient was dead; however, the 911 operator insisted. Meanwhile, the other patients grew increasingly alarmed, seeing the apparently dead man, his mouth and eyes wide open. Sarah Twain-Lagarde, in the clinic with her feverish toddler, called 911 herself and tried to resuscitate Mr. Sauvageau, but nurses told her to stop.
And this is the problem I have with the fucking idiots who insist we need more privatisation in the health system because public health system “infringes human rights”. If this fuckers would say right out “we want to make more money which is why we want privatisation”, I would hate them but at least I would respect their honesty. Instead, they cloak there greed in “human rights” and then go about ignoring the very rights that they have been championing.
I know I am making a mountain out of a molehill here. I mean this is just a one of case and it could have happened in a Public Health Care system (come to think of it, it has happened in a public hospital). But this guy is THE CHAMPION OF PRIVATE HEALTH CARE in Canada. He should have known better to act the way he did and yet he did not care about the patient.
Desi In Toronto 