George Rebane

Over-educated or mis-educated?  Hit to those who recognize that today’s description of the Left’s “over educated” young voters is fallacious.  The more accurate description is that most of these people have been mis-educated.  Their college education provided them no useful knowledge and/or valuable skillsets.  All employers immediately recognize a trash degree when they see one on a resume.  The only private sector work for them is a low-wage entry-level job (“Would you like fries with that?”), or in government, when available, where the only apparent acceptance criteria include spouting the correct ideology, belonging to a correct group, and fogging a mirror.

No nationalized healthcare system is sustainable.  By the strict metric of non-increasing GDP share, healthcare systems in all OECD countries have been expanding at an unsustainable rate. The fundamental unmet challenge for governments is to balance the rising demand for care (driven by aging populations and new technologies) with the need to restore public finances. The attempted path toward sustainability involves aggressive changes to service delivery: reducing reliance on expensive hospital infrastructure, heavily increasing investments in cost-effective primary and preventive care, and eliminating wasteful clinical practices.

Canada’s Healthcare is Failing.  Our leftwing readers continue promoting nationalized healthcare systems.  As pointed out above, no such systems are sustainable, all are costing more and delivering less.  In oft-celebrated Canada we have a clear real-world example of unmet global sustainability challenges and service delivery bottlenecks. Operating a predominantly publicly funded, decentralized system, Canada is currently grappling with the exact pressures outlined above.  An example of a failing system, Canada’s primary care bottleneck reports roughly 1 in 5 Canadian adults (over 5 million people) do not have a regular family doctor or primary care provider.  This is part of an overall service delivery failure, and because of this primary care gap, patients are frequently forced to seek basic medical attention in highly expensive hospital emergency departments. This creates a vicious cycle for all patients: it drives up immediate costs, causes severe hospital wait times, and actively undermines the goal of shifting care away from resource-intensive inpatient settings.

Personalized Pricing Debate.  Technology is taking shopping back to how it was in the good ol’ days in market places and bazaars across the world.  Back then no-one posted prices of goods.  When a customer walked in the merchant sized him up and quoted a price for the selected goods.  Then they haggled until agreement was reached on a price and the deal concluded.  Today sophisticated merchants are considering bringing back personalized pricing that would access customer databases to instantly come up with a price specific to that customer.  That could be the final price or with smart phones the customer could submit a counter offer and so on.  In other words haggling would return to the modern marketplace.  Our leftists consider this to be ‘unfair’ according to their addled sense of fairness, justice, and equity.