On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Yes, the same guy who wrote On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom.

This booklet - as near as I can tell - is an argument for taking what the UK's been doing with the NHS and Canada with Medicare and running with it as far and as fast as possible, from the position that such a course would maximise the freedom of most, if not all, citizens.

I hope to have more to say after I finish reading it.

Related note, discovered via Mastodon: Finnish insurance companies seem to have a pattern of making trouble for people dealing with ADHD. I wonder how much along similar lines is happening in Canada. Also, remembering one of the plotlines of Robert J. Sawyer's novel Frameshift...

1. Mel Hurtig is dead. We owe him a debt of joyous gratitude that the Canadian Encyclopedia exists in any format today.

2. Randall Denley used his column in today's hardcopy edition of the Ottawa Citizen to call for the dismantling of medicare in Canada.

These are not things anyone sane should have to process on the way to work.

Linda McQuaig argues that medicare in Canada has been successfully "killed"...and that Canadians haven't yet noticed. I'd argue that we've noticed his attempts to do so. The opposition to that effort has never stopped, and plans to repair and rebuild the system - and expand it - are being revised in anticipation of this year's federal election having any of several possible good outcomes. My thinking may be naive, but it's shared by a lot of people in Canada.

Where health care's concerned, the private marketplace has its usages, but it will never be allowed to run the show without restraint again. Not in Canada.

A bunch of little things:

The Hallmark/Davis Agency store at Place d'Orléans Mall is shutting down after this week. Purged via rent hike, apparently. Not the first store I've liked doing business with to suffer such a fate this year either. Nicholas Hoare Books, Collected Works Bookstore and Mayfair Theatre Orléans both got nailed over rent issues of one sort or another. No conspiracy theory involved, but it's just plain annoying.

Lost a glove today. Probably en route to the day job. Recent and expected weather being as it is, this may not be much of an inconvenience, but again: just plain annoying.

Two of my friendlisters are down with ailments of one kind or another. Long-term continuing issues in both cases, let's call it. Hoping for better days for both of them. Soon, please?

Speaking of medical stuff: had you heard? Ontario's delisting the annual checkup from the list of medicare-covered services. Retroactive to New Year's Day 2013. What the Frak?

Cell phones: trying to check my account's status on the cell service provider's website is a bit of a pain. Long story, not sharing as it's too close to sleep time.

More as it comes to mind...

Has anyone else been looking at the coverage in the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star specifically this past half-week on the subject of what the upper leadership of the Canadian Medical Association has been saying and trying to persuade us and our political leadership to believe on the subject of medicare?

Just wondering.

Well, this was a fine start. A lung infection completely derailing what I'd hoped to be a long weekend, so that I could get some illustration projects moving again. Some of which I did, but not in an active sense of the phrase, despite the lung trouble.

That lung trouble's been diagnosed, prescribed for, and half the meds paid for so far. The rest will be dealt with tomorrow. But the whole matter of that prescription's left me convinced of the arguments for a national "pharmacare" plan, to help fill one of the major gaps that's been left in the medicare system over the decades. Convinced like a religious fanatic, but without the doctrine of any organized religion. Because I've got a personal stake in it, same as all of the rest of us: The stake of not wanting to die too damn soon for the wrong reasons.

Anyway: going to see if I can handle a return to the day-job tomorrow after two sick days and a personal day that had to double as a "see the doctor while you're sick" day. Wish me luck with that.

Hoping to get back on track on artistic, medical, financial, and other fronts as the next few months go by. More on that to come.