BC Health Coalition launches Friends of Medicare campaign
BC Health Coalition launches Friends of Medicare campaign, calls for positive, public solutions to health care challenges
This week, the BC Health Coalition, along with Canadian Doctors for Medicare, Oxfam and the Council of Canadians, will officially launch its Friends of Medicare campaign. Focused on strengthening universal medicare in B.C., the coalition will expand its work with citizens across the province to promote positive, public solutions to health care challenges.
The Friends of Medicare launch includes two major events in Vancouver: a news conference on Wednesday, May 16 at 9:30 a.m. in the Hyatt Regency Hotels Grouse Room, and a public forum Thursday, May 17 featuring Dr. Jacky Davis, a radiologist who works in Britains National Health Service (NHS) and B.C. political commentator Will McMartin. The public forum will begin at 7 p.m. at the Croatian Cultural Centre, 3250 Commercial Drive.
The B.C. governments plan to introduce a system of performance- or activity-based funding as it is known in Britain ... will be challenged by Dr. Jacky Davis. If implemented in Canada, this will force public hospitals to compete in a marketplace with each other and with private for profit corporations. In the U.K., this funding scheme has pushed several hospitals to the brink of bankruptcy.
Will McMartin will show how the provincial governments claim that our public health care system is financially unsustainable is false.
Leslie Dickout, the health coalitions medicare campaigner, says that support for positive, public solutions is wide-spread. -As more and more British Columbians join the Friends of Medicare campaign, they will become a powerful voice to convince the government to strengthen and enhance medicare with positive, public solutions, and not continue down the road of more costly private, for-profit schemes.
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Contact: Leslie Dickout, medicare campaigner, BC Health Coalition, 604-787-6560