Monday, October 15, 2007

Sicko Refuted (part 1)... &, "Oh Canada"

Michael Moore is Sicko!

John Stossel on 20/20 speaks to Michael Moore about his assertion about Cuba, Canada, and Britain. I will post the entire show that followed this weeks show in an above blog.




The Canadian Conundrum - Birth

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A number of pregnant women from Alberta are being sent to other cities to deliver their babies because of a lack of neonatal beds in Calgary.

At least five Alberta women with high-risk pregnancies have been transferred in recent days. Mandy Martin of Lethbridge, Alta., who is expecting triplets, was flown alone to Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre on Feb. 5. Her husband Devin Martin, and her father flew in to be at her side Sunday.

The 23-year-old mother of two, who is in her 25th week of pregnancy, was transferred to the Ontario city so that doctors could closely monitor the developing fetuses when the Calgary Health Region couldn't find a vacant local neonatal bed.

Four other Alberta women were flown to Montana. Caroline Lupypciw, 20, gave birth to a girl in Great Falls, Mont., on Thursday. She and her baby flew home to Alberta on Saturday when a neonatal bed opened up for the newborn at Calgary's Rockyview General Hospital.

Alberta's booming economy has resulted in a population boom that has caught officials off guard. To make things worse, Calgary Health Region said there are no neonatal beds available in Western Canada.

"I wouldn't say I'm angry about everything, just disappointed in the system," Martin said.

CBC Story

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Kaiser Network

Ontario hospitals have been forced to send some high-risk pregnant women and infants to a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital because of a lack of available facilities, the Toronto Globe & Mail reports. At least seven pregnant women and three infants have been transferred to the Children's Hospital of Buffalo in the past two weeks, according to Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care spokesperson John Letherby. An increase in the number of multiple births, a nursing shortage and an outbreak of a contagious, flu-like virus called the Norwalk virus have "stretched" the capacity of Ontario hospitals, according to doctors. The Norwalk virus outbreak at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto took "out of service" 54 beds that are usually used for high-risk infants, Letherby said. According to Jon Barrett, maternal fetal-medicine specialist at Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Center, "There's just no slack in the system." He added, "If you get a bad week or something like the Norwalk virus, the system just crashes." Officials could not estimate how much the transferred patients were costing Canada. The Globe and Mail reports that care for high-risk infants and pregnant women can be "exorbitantly expensive because of its high-tech nature and around-the-clock nursing care" (Priest, Toronto Globe & Mail, 2/19).

What will happen if the Canadian government doesn’t leave this failed socialist experiment behind them is that instead of allowing competition and hence enough “beds” for women to give birth in, they will instead make a law curbing the amount of births people can have. Or, alternatively, you must get licensed to have a kid -- in a sense asking permission of the government to have a kid… by law.

I haven’t heard this yet spoken of elsewhere, so this may be an original thought to me, but someone out there has probably come to that logical conclusion of socialist dictates.

Another good resource for the skeptic, besides my Blog entitled “Conversations from the Break Room – Part I”, is an article the Heritage Foundation did followed by another interesting public policy paper:




Oh Canada!!!