Everybody agrees health care matters and that we're in the middle of a crisis. Why then don't people care enough to protest about it?
About three dozen angry protesters converged on the Ministry of Health office on Blanshard Street in Victoria, under the banner of BC Health Care Matters, to demand more family doctors and better access to health care. About half of them first gathered at Centennial Square at around 1PM and marched to the office chanting slogans admonishing our government for its shameful mismanagement of our health care system, and the shouting only doubled in intensity once they arrived on site.
The protest was spurred by Premier John Horgan’s offensively stupid comment on a couple reaching out with a newspaper ad in a desperate attempt at getting a family doctor to prescribe lifesaving medication.
I’ve already commented on the difficulty of drawing crowds at protests such as these in a previous article, and I was similarly disappointed today that a cause of such magnitude fails to inspire more people to protest systemic government incompetence and callousness.
And there is indeed cause for outrage. The protesters put forward a conservative estimate that 1500 people may die this year as a result of lack of access to health care (which rivals the number of people dying of drug overdoses). They are likewise unconvinced by our Premier’s shameless attempt to convince us that more money is needed to solve the problem, and I’m not convinced either: it looks like a shameless and brazen attempt at sucking up federal government money using people as pawns in a political game. They also claim the ratio of bureaucrats to doctors is absurdly high in BC compared to other provinces, which is highly symptomatic of a necrotising bureaucracy.
So what is it going to take for the government or the public to mobilise themselves and fix the issue at the source? Either way, I would say the core issue is public apathy. While people overwhelmingly support BC Health Care Matters’ agenda, the threshold to get the masses to vote with their feet is shockingly high, and as long as the public doesn’t care enough to do so, neither shall the government. In the end, I dare say British Columbians get the health care system they deserve, and I throw the issue at their feet.
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