Dr. Robert Cushman not the man to lead Ottawa area health care system

An article on the front page of today's Ottawa Citizen blew me away this morning. Dr. Robert Cushman, the man who runs the Champlain Local Health Integration Network (the new arm of the Ontario government that plans and carries out the delivery of health care in the greater Ottawa area) stated in an interview yesterday that it's "time to balance fight for life with ballooning health costs" and that "we have too much of an emphasis on the cure when the returns on the cure can be very low".

So seniors are too old to be bothered with? A cost/benefit analysis of treating what ails them cannot be justified because dollars would be better invested in curing someone who still has a future?

I remember watching Dinosaurs - some sort of animatronic live action cartoon for children. When dinosaurs got to a certain age, they would get up and wander off to the tar pits to die. If they didn't do it on their own accord, their family members would have to see to it that they did what was expected of them. That's just how it was done. Is that how we should now deal with the elders of our society?

Given that I'm in my early thirties, I should be impressed that Dr. Cushman is standing up for me and making sure that the health system is ready to meet my every need instead of wasting countless millions on people who would soon die anyway. What a waste it would be, right?

I don't think so.

If this "doctor" thinks that this is a debate we should be having, he's not the man to be overseeing the delivery of health care in this district. These "old people" or the "frail elderly" built and helped modernize our country... and this "doctor" tells us we need to balance the fight for their lives against the costs of delivering health care to the population as a whole?

How would your father feel about that? What would your grandmother think? We should be demanding this man's resignation - clearly, he's not up to the job.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/2332dz