Tag Archives: Socialism

News

New study: Angus Reid Institute analyzes Canada’s single payer healthcare system

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Price of healthcare per Canadian household (Source: Fraser Institute)
The cost of healthcare for average Canadian households

I found two interesting studies from Canada’s Angus Reid Institute describing single payer health care in Canada. I’m very interested in find out what things are like in countries that have true government-run health care. A typical Canadian family pays $13,000+ per year per household for healthcare, or about $585,000 over their working lives. What are they getting for all that money?

Here is the first Angus Reid article:

The study finds more than 2 million Canadians aged 55 and older face significant barriers when accessing the health care system in their province, such as being unable to find a family doctor or experiencing lengthy wait-times for surgery, diagnostic tests, or specialist visits.

Moreover, most Canadians in this age group have at least some difficulty getting the care they want or need in a timely manner.

The study focuses on the health care experiences of older Canadians, as well as their assessments of the quality of care they receive.

According to the article, 31% of respondents (aged 55 and older) rated access to the government’s healthcare system as “easy”. 48% had “moderate” problems with access, and 21% had “major” problems with access.

Remember: in the Canadian system, you pay your money up front in taxes, and then they decide how much healthcare you will get later – and how soon you will get it. If you worked from ages 20 to age 65, then your household will have paid 45 x $13,000 = $585,000 into the system, in order to get “moderate” problems with accessing healthcare after you’re aged 55.

And the Canadian system DOES NOT cover prescription drugs.

The second Angus Reid article explains:

This second part of the study finds one-in-six Canadians (17%) in the 55-plus age group – a figure that represents upwards of 1.8 million people – say that they or someone else in their household have taken prescription drugs in a way other than prescribed because of cost.

One-in-ten (10%) have decided to simply not fill a prescription because it was too expensive, and a similar number (9%) have decided not to renew one for the same reason. One-in-eight (12%) have taken steps to stretch their prescriptions, such as cutting pills or skipping doses.

Some 17 per cent of Canadians 55 and older have done at least one of these things, and that proportion rises among those who have greater difficulty accessing other aspects of the health care system.

In a previous blog post, I reported on how Canadians have to wait in order to see their GP doctor. If that doctor refers them to a specialist, then they have to wait to see the specialist. And if that specialist schedules surgery, then they have to wait for their surgery appointment. The delays can easily go from weeks to months and even years. The MEDIAN delay from GP referral to treatment is 19.5 weeks.

But remember – they paid into the system FIRST. The decisions about when and if they will be treated are made later, by experts in the government. This is what it means for a government monopoly to run health care. There are no free exchanges of money for service in a competitive free market. Costs are controlled by delaying and withholding treatment. And no one knows this better than elderly Canadians themselves. But by the time they realize how badly they’ve been swindled, it’s too late to get their money back out. You can’t pull your tax money out of government if you are disappointed with the service you receive. There are no refunds. There are no returns.

News

Judge: man must pay support to girlfriend despite living in separate homes

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A friend of mine was asking me last night whether I had any regrets about never marrying, especially since I had such awesome Christian female friends like her. I thought about it, and I thought that maybe it is better to not have married, especially when I read stories about how family courts trample over the rights of men to favor women, regardless of what the law says.

The story is from one of Canada’s national newspapers, the National Post:

A wealthy businessman will have to pay more than $50,000 a month in spousal support for 10 years to a woman with whom he had a long-term romantic relationship even though they kept separate homes and had no children together, Ontario’s top court has ruled.

Under Ontario law, an unmarried couple are considered common-law spouses if they have cohabited — lived together in a conjugal relationship — continuously for at least three years. But that doesn’t necessarily mean living in the same home, the court found.

[…]When their 14-year relationship finally broke down in May 2015, Climans asked the courts to recognize her as Latner’s spouse and order him to pay her support. He argued she had been a travel companion and girlfriend, nothing more. As such, he said, they were never legally spouses and he owed no support. An eight-day trial ensued.

In her decision in February 2019, Superior Court Justice Sharon Shore sided with Climans. She ruled they were in fact long-time spouses, finding that despite their separate home, they lived under one roof at Latner’s cottage for part of the summer, and during winter vacations in Florida. Shore ordered him to pay her $53,077 monthly indefinitely.

The judge ordered him to pay her $53,077 per moth, indefinitely. Elsewhere in the article, we learn that he had asked her to sign a pre-nuptial agreement many times, and each time she refused. (Those are not even enforced fairly by the way) She wanted his money, and the judge made sure she got it. Because the law doesn’t matter in a family court.

So, what I wanted to point out about this is the fact that a female judge decided to bend the law in order to favor a woman. And this sort of thing happens A LOT in Canada – where their female judges are notorious for progressive judicial activism, e.g. Beverley Mclachlin, Bertha Wilson, Claire L’Heureux-Dubé, etc. Ontario family courts are notoriously anti-male, and men know this.

But it’s not just Ontario. I have two Christian friends who married their Christian wives as virgins, and then their wives divorced them. I heard what happened to them in divorce court. Again, female lawyers and female judges disregarded the law in order to punish the man and favor the woman. And I think most men growing up today have a father or a brother or an uncle or someone who has been a victim of this.

When I talk to women about this, they all say things like this to me: “oh, you worry too much” or “you read too many books about divorce” or especially “when you meet the right girl, you’ll fall in love, and all this concern about atheistic feminist judges in the courts won’t stop you”. That last one is the most popular. And it’s always made me think that if this is how women see commitment – feelings-based – it’s no wonder that women initiate 70% of divorces.

I always thought it was a curse that I grew up poor and could not afford to show off my wealth in order to attract attention from women. Now I see that God actually gave me a great blessing. In order for a man to get married, it takes a lot more than finding the right girl. He needs to live in the right culture – a culture that tries to equip women to be content in committed relationships and treat men fairly.

I don’t think even women who claim to be pro-male and/or pro-marriage know or care how stories like this affect men. I’m very wealthy. I certainly do look at what is likely to happen if a woman goes to the courts expecting me to give her money. In fact, whenever I post stories on my wall about how the judges legislate from the bench to transfer money from men to women, there’s just silence or sometimes deflection by attacking men (except for my friend Dina who agrees with me). No one dares to speak up for men, it’s just expected that we be robbed by the government in order to make women happy. Because “marriage is for women”.

And as long as the message keeps being sent by judicial activists in the family courts, men will keep adjusting how they treat women. Women appear very unsafe to us, and nothing that’s going on in the courts is changing the trend towards avoidance. Men are very good at calculating risks vs rewards.

News

Trump will cut funding of schools that teach 1619 Project fantasy as history

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She's saying that her decision to be a whale is your fault, and you must pay her money
The results of her decisions are your fault, so pay her reparations

American schools often teach secular leftist fantasy to young children, in order to undermine their parents’ values. You may remember when teachers presented the oscillating model of the universe to children through atheist Carl Sagan, to get around the need for a Creator. The model was later disproved theoretically and experimentally. Now the schools are trying again with the 1619 Project.

The 1619 Project is a fantasy work, authored by Nicole Hannah-Jones, a person with no training or demonstrated ability in any discipline connected to the real world.

Who says so? The author says so, in this tweet, reported by Red State:

I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 27, 2020

This article from the centrist National Review lists some of most fantastical parts of her work.

Here’s an excerpt:

The most dramatic and controversial assertion in Hannah-Jones’s essay was that, in 1776, “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Her essay cited nothing to support this, nor did it show even the slightest awareness of how radical a claim this is. She continued:

By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South . . . we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not . . . believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.

So, she’s claiming that the Britain ended slavery at some point prior to 1776, and that this ending of slavery applied to the colonies in America, and that the American Revolution was a response to this ending of slavery being pushed to the colonies. Is that true?

The first real strike against slavery was the 1772 Somerset judicial decision in Britain, which declared that slavery was alien to the English common law and thus could not exist within Britain without a positive act of Parliament. As Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz has noted, however, the reaction to the Somerset case, which did not apply to British colonies, was relatively muted even in the southern colonies; it provoked nothing even vaguely resembling the furious responses to the Tea Act the following year.

Early anti-slavery movements before 1776 had no effect on the “British colonies”, e.g. – America. But more importantly there was no UK ban on slavery until way after the American Revolution:

Organized, popular movements against slavery, and laws restricting or abolishing slavery and the slave trade, were considerably more advanced in the American colonies in the 1770s than in Britain, where Parliament would not ban slavery in Jamaica and other British colonies until 1833, after many years of failures by William Wilberforce and other anti-slavery leaders. The world’s first organized anti-slavery society was formed in Pennsylvania in 1774, and the first legal ban on slavery anywhere in the world was in Vermont in 1777. Five of the original 13 states followed suit either during or immediately after the Revolution, passing bans on slavery between 1780 and 1784. The first federal ban on slavery, in the Northwest Territory, was drafted in 1784 by Thomas Jefferson and passed by the Confederation Congress in 1787. Its language would later be adopted directly into the 13th Amendment.

If slavery was not banned in the UK and pushed on the colonies prior to the Revolution, then the Revolution cannot have been a reaction to slavery being made illegal. In fact, America was far ahead of the UK at banning slavery. And far, far ahead of the rest of the world.

I just want to emphasize this – this is the problem with so many on the secular left:

[…]Hannah-Jones openly scoffs that there is “no such thing” as objective history…

This is the person the secular left believes and celebrates. A writer of anti-American fantasy. A liar.

Should we teach BLM rioter fantasies in our schools?

Well, I’m not very impressed with her work, and fortunately for us we have a Republican president who won’t bender over backwards to appease shoddy scholarship.

Fox News reports:

President Trump said Sunday that the Department of Education is examining the use of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project in schools, and warned that institutions that teach this alternative narrative of American history could lose federal funding.

The project is based on the premise that American history began in 1619 — cited as the date African slaves arrived in Virginia — and that everything following this should be viewed through that lens.

[…]Trump responded to a tweet stating that California would be using it.

“Department of Education is looking at this,” Trump said. “If so, they will not be funded!”

Trump’s tweet echoes the sentiment of a bill Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., introduced in July. That bill proposed denying funds to any school that uses the 1619 Project in its curriculum. At the time, schools in areas including Chicago and Washington, D.C., had already amended their history curricula to reflect the project’s messages.

This will be the policy for the next 2 months. If Biden wins, that will almost certainly be changed. How would you like to see Nikole Hannah-Jones as Secretary of Education?

What’s really going on here?

Although Hannah-Jones’ work is filled with errors, it’s very appealing to the secular left. It tells them things that they want to hear. Specifically, it makes them feel superior to others, and it excuses their own poor decision-making by shifting the blame to other people. The 1619 Project is similar to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in that it affirms poorly-educated underachievers who blame their own failures on people of a different race. This is a very attractive message to socialists on the secular left, as it was in 1930s Germany. We should be careful about allowing racist rhetoric into our public schools to influence our children. It’s bad for them, and it’s bad for our nation.