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Ontario’s doctor deficit has left 2.2 million people without a primary care physician. The shortage, a consequence of for-profit models, worsens health issues, strains emergency departments, and fuels the vulture-like leveraging of profit-driven “solutions.”

According to a new study, nearly 2.2 million residents of Ontario, Canada, do not have a family doctor. (Felix Man / Picture Post / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

A new study from the Ontario College of Family Physicians has found that 2.2 million of the 14 million residents of Canada’s largest and wealthiest province have no family doctor. The finding is a major indictment of the for-profit or fee-for-service model that is now being promoted as the go-to model for Ontario’s surgeries by the province’s conservative government.

“The number of unattached patients is growing across the province and region,” says Steve Gray, chief executive officer of Medical Associates of Port Perry. “The wait list at Medical Associates has never been so high and it will only grow further as our family physicians retire.”

According to the Ontario College study, over forty thousand Torontonians, five thousand Mississauga residents, and many more across the province lack access to a regular physician. Those lacking a family physician typically delay necessary follow-ups on serious health problems, resulting in these problems becoming markedly worse. This, in turn, places further pressures on other areas of the provincial health care system — especially Ontario’s overwhelmed emergency departments.

It is a problem of a snake-eating-its-own-tail variety. The lack of family physicians leads to delayed follow-ups on health issues, which worsens health problems, putting additional strain on the already overwhelmed emergency departments. The entire scenario jeopardizes the province’s health care system, providing the perfect opportunity for for-profit merchants to double down on their “solutions.”

Causes, Effects, and New Causes

Part of the cause of the drop in coverage likely comes from an overall drop in the total number of family doctors throughout the pandemic. Ontario had 12,247 active family doctors in 2019 but only 11,862 between March and September 2020. As CBC News reported, Ontario’s lockdown policies — which directed family doctors to refrain from seeing patients unless it was absolutely necessary — resulted in visits dropping by nearly 30 percent. As most family doctors and walk-in clinics are private operators, billing the province under the fee-for-service model pushed many to close up shop.

“For fee-for-service doctors, it meant a huge drop in their income all of a sudden,” Dr Tara Kiran, a family doctor and researcher at St Michael’s Hospital, told CBC News. “At the same time, they needed to pay their staff, pay their rent like every other small business.”

Making matters worse, as the Toronto Sun observed, “Ontarians are increasingly denied medical services paid for by their taxes [because] provincial governments of all stripes, have been decreasing the number of services and drugs covered by OHIP [the Ontario Health Insurance Plan] to save money.”

This was especially true of family doctors in more remote areas and with fewer than five hundred patients. “Rural areas have lower numbers of doctors to begin with, so a few of them leaving had a greater effect on those communities,” Kiran told CBC News.

But the trend precedes the pandemic. As the same CBC News article notes, in March 2020, 1.8 million Ontarians already lacked access to a family physician. More than a decade earlier, in 2008, a Health Policy study estimated that 7.8 per cent of Ontarians — roughly 0.9 million of 12.88 million — were “unattached” or lacked a family doctor.

This deficit, the Health Policy study notes, hampered the system’s ability to provide earlier treatment for potentially difficult conditions, provide preventative care (such as blood pressure checks, mammograms, and Pap smears), and manage chronic diseases. Largely, those without access are younger, poorer, and typically members of immigrant communities. Overall, this population has poorer health outcomes than middle-class Canadians.

As the Health Policy study observed:

Those without a family doctor were more likely to be male, younger or recent immigrants. Their employment status was more likely to be employed or unemployed, and they were less likely to report chronic conditions. Ontarians with a family doctor were more likely to be retired, have two or more children or be established immigrants. They were more likely to report they have confidence in the healthcare system and also more likely to have multiple chronic conditions.

Part of this may be explained by the fact that rich people have better health than poor people do, often living longer and experiencing less disability. Wealthier people often have the ability to take time off to see a family doctor, whereas the poor must rely on paid sick leave policies.

A Major Indictment of Privatized Health Care

Given that Ontario’s successive right-wing governments have historically relied on family doctors and preventative care as a tool to offset their cuts to hospitals and nurses, the family doctor deficit is clearly troubling.

Last September, Ontario’s hospitals were overwhelmed by influxes of RSV and COVID-19 patients. Instead of reversing the government’s cut to health care wages, Ontario health minister Sylvia Jones worked to deflect attention from the government’s cuts — by insisting that family doctors would step up.

“We need to make sure that primary care practitioners are seeing their patients before they have to go to an emergency department or a hospital,” Jones said. “We have a robust system when all of the players are working together. And we need all those parts to be basically operating at 100 per cent.”

Elsewhere, others in the health care administration have promoted this same fee-for-service system, where doctors run effectively private but publicly insured facilities, as the model for how privatizing other services would supposedly improve access.

The most visible moment of the crisis thus far occurred earlier this year, when the government responded to soaring backlogs and wait times by pushing to move surgical procedures — chiefly cataract surgeries, MRIs, CT scans, and hip and knee replacements — from hospitals into mostly for-profit “Independent Health Facilities” (IHFs).

“Let’s get the cataract surgeries, get the backlog there. Let’s change people’s lives, and take care of the hip and knee replacement surgeries,” Ontario premier Doug Ford said. “You add ’em all up, what I understand is that’s 50 percent of the surgeries.” The privatization scheme has been punctuated by a massive spike in hospital emergency room closures — totaling over 184 days of lost service, across the province, from March 2022 to 2023.

Despite these sorts of catastrophic developments, free-market proponents remain undeterred. Andrew Pak of the Ontario Medical Association told the Globe and Mail, “Your family doctor’s office is a for-profit business. . . . It’s a private business within a publicly administered health care system.” Indeed, the call may be coming from inside the house. As the National Post observed, “The outpatient plan is supported by the Ontario Hospital Association, the Ontario Medical Association and multiple hospital CEOs. Don’t be surprised if it’s hospitals themselves that lead the way by establishing satellite surgery centers.”

For-Profit Entities Cannot Provide Universal Care

The battle with champions of private care is one that goes back to the earliest days of Canada’s Medicare program.

In the early 1960s, Saskatchewan’s Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) government expanded its provincial health insurance plan with the Saskatchewan Medical Care Insurance Bill. Immediately afterward, lobbying, threats, and walkouts by for-profit doctors worked to stop the government from employing physicians in public clinics like the one in Swift Current.

Advocating for the initial CCF position, spokesperson Dr Hugh MacLean said in a 1937 radio address:

In our present system of practice, preventive medicine is largely neglected because the members of the [medical] profession are almost wholly engaged in the curative end of practice, so that preventable deaths are not being prevented and correctable conditions are not being corrected because the people are not in a financial condition to have their condition discovered.

Instead, the right-wing Keep Our Doctors campaign famously led the fight to prevent a salaried system and defend their private facilities and payments. Warning of the dangers of “socialized medicine,” they firmly opposed calls for “an exclusively salaried service” and pushed instead for “state-aided health insurance on a fee-for-service basis.”

Eventually, the CCF government capitulated. The result was that family doctors and hospitals in Canada are not public institutions. They are private facilities that offer publicly insured services — and they often play the part to the hilt. Both the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) and Ontario Medical Association (OMA) have supported privatization efforts in the past. In the 1980s, the OMA’s federal counterpart, the Canadian Medical Association, was adamant, according to former health minister Monique Bégin’s account, that “all sources of private financing of health insurance should be permitted.” Since then, a good number of medical professional associations have been quick to champion privatization.

In the 1990s, then OHA CEO David MacKinnon declared that the drive to partner with the private sector was already “guiding our hospital system.” This was made easier, he noted at the time, by the fact that “many members of hospital boards and a disproportionate number of the board chairs are business people.”

The principle of universal health care dictates that those who are sickest are most in need of care. That requires accessible health care, free at the point of use. Leaving this aim to small businesses, which operate with famously tight margins, and a network of private fiefdoms may be one of the worst ways to achieve this end.

Private health care providers are beholden first and foremost to the drive for profit. Their unequal provision frequently reflects social inequalities. Such inequalities are the very thing that a universal health system — especially one that purports to provide preventative care — aims to prevent. A properly universal program is a public program. Public health care, with full ownership and provision of services, can execute its directives independently. It is free from the capricious needs and irregularities of the market. It is the only sane and efficient answer to the crisis of Ontario’s family doctor deficit.

In the imbroglio over Picasso’s misogyny and many personal flaws, the memory of his unabashed leftist politics has been lost — and with it our ability to fully consider his place in history.

Little of the renewed discussion on painter Pablo Picasso focuses on his anti-fascist and communist politics. (RALPH GATTI / AFP via Getty Images)

Has the Brooklyn Museum reached peak girlboss self-parody? Comedian Hannah Gadsby has a small exhibition criticizing the iconic Pablo Picasso called It’s Pablo-matic. It is sponsored by the Sacklers, one of America’s most brutally destructive capitalist families.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Picasso’s death, many are discussing his artistic career and personal life, especially his sexism. In addition to the Sackler-sponsored exhibit in Brooklyn, Claire Dederer’s recently released book, Monsters, also explores this terrain. (The best headline on this belongs to a review by Julie Phillips in 4Columns, taking off from the famous Modern Lovers song: “Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole, but Claire Dederer thinks it’s not too late to start.”)

The Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler-sponsored approach — e.g., simply refusing to take his work seriously — has plenty of critics, including in the New York Times. Picasso needs no defense from Jacobin — he surely was sexist and, in any case, he has long received plenty of global recognition, appreciative as well as moralistic, including exhibitions dedicated to his work at New York’s Guggenheim and Museum of Modern Art, in Paris at Musée de l’Homme and Musée Picasso, and at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía.

But relatively little of the renewed Picasso discussion focuses on his politics. He was a committed anti-fascist and a communist. Those facts do not excuse Picasso for being a jerk, but they are worth noting. That they are so absent from discourse about an artist our elites can’t stop talking about seems a symptom of the ruling class’s capture of the cultural sphere.

In a time when the most visible art we consume is sponsored by horrific profiteers like the Sackler family, whose greed has fueled an opioid epidemic that has killed more than six hundred thousand Americans, Picasso’s communism should not be forgotten. To obscure his communism shortchanges the serious politics of much twentieth-century art, and also occludes feminist history, reducing it to personal grievances and rendering radical women artists and their movements invisible. 

It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby at the Brooklyn Museum has received criticism in the art world and across the political spectrum. (ED JONES / AFP via Getty Images)

Picasso’s anti-fascist sympathies informed his first political work. He drew a series of satirical illustrations called The Dream and Lie of Franco, which were sold as postcards at the 1937 World’s Fair in order to raise money for the Spanish Republican cause. Art historian Patricia Failing told PBS that doing work for a political cause pushed Picasso in new directions creatively; in this world, he experiments with burlesque, caricature, and “obviousness,” elements “you don’t find in his other work.”

He also painted the much better known Guernica, a mesmerizing antiwar and anti-fascist painting, and an explosively angry response to Francisco Franco’s brutal bombing of the Basque village, for the same World’s Fair.

In 1944, Picasso told L’Humanité,

I have wished, by drawing and by colour, since those are my weapons, to reach ever further into an understanding of the world and of men, in order that this understanding might bring us each day an increase in liberation. . . . Yes, I am aware of having always struggled by means of my painting, like a genuine revolutionary. But I have come to understand, now, that that alone is not enough; these years of terrible oppression have shown me that I must fight not only through my art, but with all of myself. And so, I have come to the Communist Party without the least hesitation, since in reality I was with it all along.

After Guernica, he was asked to design an image of peace. His resulting 1949 painting, Dove of Peace, became the logo for the First International Peace Conference in Paris that year and was then adopted as an international communist symbol. The Soviet government recognized him with its national peace prize twice, in 1950 and 1962.

Picasso’s communist and antiwar commitments led him to oppose the US intervention in the Korean War and inspired his 1951 painting Massacre in Korea, which shows women (including pregnant women) and children facing men with guns.

Some of Picasso’s contemporaries doubted his politics. Salvador Dalí once said, “Pablo Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.” For his part, Joseph Stalin took a dim view of the lack of realism in Picasso’s cubist art. (While the Soviets held and cared for a vast collection of Picasso’s works, for years they did not display them to the public.)

His fellow communists didn’t grasp even his most political works. The French Communist Party found Massacre in Korea too ambiguous in assigning blame for the violence, and the Soviets reacted similarly to Guernica.

Pablo Picasso, Massacre in Korea (1951). (Wikimedia Commons)

But Western authorities took Picasso’s communism seriously. Many in the United States considered Massacre in Korea a work of communist, anti-American propaganda, and the artist was intensively surveilled by the FBI. He was also spied upon by European governments; France refused his application for citizenship in 1940 because the secret police worried about his “extremist ideas evolving toward communism.” Due to similar anti-communist sentiment, Massacre in Korea was not shown in South Korea (despite some museums’ attempts for decades) until 2021.

The disappearance of Picasso’s communist, antiwar, and anti-fascist politics from our public discussions of him means that we aren’t fully considering his place in history. But Picasso isn’t the only artist who gets lost in this righteous hubbub. Women do too.

The New York Times review of Gadsby’s show argues that the focus on Picasso as “problematic” shortchanges the women artists in his orbit. The Times reviewer, although he does not point out Picasso’s politics, intriguingly notes in passing Picasso’s influence on Soviet women artists who “put Picasso’s breakdown of forms in the service of political revolution.” These Soviet avant-garde women were the subject of a Guggenheim exhibit called Amazons of the Avant-Garde in 2000. One of the most political of these artists was Varvara Stepanova, who explored materialism during the Bolshevik Revolution through a new art movement called constructivism (which under Stalin was supplanted by socialist realism).

This isn’t a matter of elevating “the political” over “the personal.” An insight of second-wave feminism is that the two are intertwined. Picasso’s personal life is of interest. But communism is part of that life and was deeply personal to him, as it was to most mid-century party members. As he explained to L’Humanité in 1944,

Is it not the Communist Party which works the hardest to know and to construct the world, to render the men of today and tomorrow clearer-headed, freer, happier? Is it not the Communists who have been the most courageous in France as in the USSR or in my own Spain? How could I have hesitated? For fear of committing myself? But on the contrary I have never felt freer, more complete!

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“Why is my husband forbidden from staying in the ward but a pair of homosexual men can even though nothing has happened in their bodies?”

By World Israel News Staff

In a groundbreaking policy shift, Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva will admit gay couples and single men whose infants are born via surrogate into its maternity ward, Israel Hayom reported on Monday.

Under the new policy, one of the partners in a gay couple or the single father will be admitted into the maternity ward following the birth of their baby via surrogacy. The other partner, in the case of couples, will assume the role of the escort. The surrogate mother, on the other hand, will be admitted into the women’s gynecological ward.

“We’ve been waiting for a long time for a process that will allow couples to bring children into the world through surrogacy,” Dr. Rony Chen, head of Beilinson’s maternity wards, told Israel Hayom.

“As a member of the LGBT community, I understand the depth of the adaptations we need to make. The hospital is a home for all new families, for all the gay couples and single fathers. They will receive the treatment and the special support we’ve created for them, which is adapted to the needs of the growing family.”

Viyulan Karasik, head nurse at the maternity ward, emphasized the goal of strengthening the initial bond between the newborns and their new parents.

“The natural connection created during pregnancy between the parents and the embryo takes place differently during surrogacy. In order to ease the process of connection between the fathers and the baby, we need to think creatively. We are guiding and accompanying the parents in their new families,” Karasik said.

The hospital encourages prospective homosexual couples to familiarize themselves with its services and facilities. A hospitalization period of at least 48 hours after the birth is common in most Israeli hospitals, and includes close guidance on initial care for the baby.

“After the Surrogacy Law was approved in Israel for gay couples and single parents, it was clear to me that we needed to lead the issue,” said Professor Asnat Walfisch, head of Beilinson’s Helen Schneider Hospital for Women. “I am proud to be a partner in the innovative model which we have built here.”

Eliraz Fine, a digital creator and spokesperson for “Fathers for Justice,” raised concerns about the policy. “Why is my husband, who is also an emotional new father, not allowed to come in and stay at my side during the hospitalization after the birth, other than during visiting hours, and certainly not overnight – but a pair of homosexual men can stay on the other side of my curtain even though nothing has happened in their bodies?!”

Fine’s objections also touched on issues of privacy, modesty and religious observance, particularly for religiously observant Jewish and Arab women. Her post, tagged “don’t give birth in Beilinson,” argued that if the hospital feels the need to provide these services to homosexual men, it should open a dedicated ward for them.

The post ‘Don’t give birth in Beilinson:’ Israeli hospital to admit gay men in maternity ward appeared first on World Israel News.

Records show Siemens agreed to boycott of Israeli goods to secure $360 million deal with Turkey.

By Alana Goodman, Washington Free Beacon

Germany-based conglomerate Siemens agreed to boycott Israeli products to secure a $360 million deal to provide Turkey with high-speed trains, according to copy of the contract obtained by a pro-Israel watchdog group that contradicts months of public denials from the company.

The agreement, which includes a signature and seal from Siemens, has a provision that “providers of goods and works, and their associates and subcontractors, shall be in strict compliance with the Boycott Regulations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the League of Arab States, and the Organization of the African Union.” The Organization of the Islamic Conference enforces a boycott of Israel.

The news could raise legal issues for Siemens in the United States, where multiple states have instituted financial penalties for companies that participate in anti-Israel boycotts. The Zachor Legal Institute, the watchdog group that obtained a copy of the contract, said it has added Siemens to its list of scrutinized companies.

“Although modern-day Siemens has expressed regret for their use of forced labor during the Nazi regime, this new evidence of boycotting Israel indicates that this company is still willing to prioritize profits by engaging in economic warfare, this time against the Jewish State of Israel,” said Ron Machol of the Zachor Legal Institute.

New York and Arizona officials told the Washington Free Beacon they are looking into the allegations to see if any action is necessary under the states’ anti-boycott laws.

Siemens has for months denied a report by German media outlet Südwestrundfunk that the company signed on to the anti-Israel provision as part of the $360 million Turkish railway deal in 2018.

“Neither Siemens AG nor Siemens Turkey signed a boycott declaration in 2018 in connection with the tender for high-speed trains,” said Florian Martini, a spokesman for Siemens, in February.

Siemens spokesman Wolfram Trost sent the Free Beacon an identical statement when asked this week about the contract. He declined to comment when asked if Siemens agreed to comply with the boycott regulations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, as stated in the contract.

The Zachor Legal Institute said it has raised the matter with several state law enforcement bodies. At least 36 states have laws or orders opposing the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Some of these laws limit government-related business with companies that boycott Israel, such as public pension fund investments or contracting work.

Arizona has been one of the most active states on this issue and has blacklisted 19 companies, including Unilever, Danske Bank, and SNS Bank. State treasurer Kimberly Yee (R.) told the Free Beacon that the state doesn’t have any investments with Siemens but that her staff will “monitor the allegations raised on this issue to see what actions, if any, are necessary.”

“The Arizona Treasury diligently follows our state’s anti-BDS law,” said Yee. “When credible evidence exists that a company is in violation of Arizona law, our staff investigates the issue and then takes appropriate steps.”

New York, which holds investments in Siemens through its state pension fund, said it is also looking into the issue. Matthew Sweeney, a spokesman for New York comptroller Thomas DiNapoli (D.), told the Free Beacon that the office is “aware of the published reports and will be looking into the matter according to our regular review process.”

DiNapoli previously warned companies that “there will be consequences if their anti-Israel activities expose our investments to financial harm.”

The post Germany’s Siemens facing scrutiny in U.S. for agreeing to Turkish demands to boycott Israel appeared first on World Israel News.

The Biden administration continues to believe that a diplomatic solution would be the best way to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

By Andrew Bernard, Algemeiner

In an address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Monday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the United states would use all means to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

“There is no danger that Israel faces that is greater than the one posed by the Iranian regime,” Blinken said. “That regime routinely threatens to wipe Israel off the map. It continues to provide weapons to terrorists and proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas, who reject Israel’s right to exist.”

Blinken said, however, that the Biden administration continues to believe that a diplomatic solution would be the best way to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, but said that if Iran rejects the path of diplomacy that “all options are on the table.” Blinken added that the administration’s “three-pronged approach” of diplomacy, economic pressure, and military deterrence has bipartisan support, and that this year the US and Israel will hold more joint military exercises than ever before.

Current and former Israeli officials on Thursday reacted negatively to news reports that the United States is considering a new diplomatic push to return to some form of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video saying that Israel would do “whatever it needs to” to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, while former Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said a return to the deal would be “a historic mistake and a disaster for generations to come.”

“It is not possible or logical to sign an agreement with a murderous terrorist state whose aim is to destroy Israel and the US,” Danon wrote on Twitter. “Iran’s dangerous nuclear project can only be shut down with crippling sanctions and a credible military threat.”

In his address to AIPAC Monday, Blinken also described efforts to build on the Trump administration’s efforts to achieve peace between Israel and other Arab and Muslim states that culminated in the 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states.

“The United States has a real national security interest in promoting normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia,” Blinken said. “We believe that we can and indeed we must play an integral role in advancing it. Now, there are no illusions that this can be done quickly or easily. But we remain committed to working toward that outcome, including on the trip I’m about to take this week to Jeddah and Riyadh for engagements with our Saudi and Gulf counterparts.”

Blinken said, however, that normalization between Israel and neighboring Arab states should also further efforts to achieve a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians, and that in order to preserve the “horizon of hope” for such a solution, both sides would need to reject violence and unilateral actions.

“Settlement expansion clearly presents an obstacle to the horizon of hope that we seek,” he said. “Likewise, any move toward annexation of the West Bank de facto or de jure, disruption of the historic status quo at the holy sites, the continuing demolitions of homes and the evictions of families that have lived in those homes for generations damage the prospects for two states.”

The post Blinken to AIPAC: Israel faces ‘no greater danger’ than Iran but diplomacy is the way to go appeared first on World Israel News.

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The tycoon told Netanyahu that governments should understand both the opportunities and the dangers posed by artificial intelligence.

The post WATCH – Elon Musk to Netanyahu: Israel can be ‘significant’ player in future of AI appeared first on World Israel News.

Folk fairy tales are populated with violent sadists, monstrous figures who take their hatred out on those closest to them: there is the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” who fattens the young boy up to make him more appetizing; the stepmother in “The Juniper Tree” who kills her stepson and feeds him to his own […]

This summer could see 350,000 UPS workers walk off the job in the United States’ largest strike in decades. The Teamsters are getting ready. Here’s a look at how.

A driver sits at the wheel of a ubiquitous UPS delivery truck in San Francisco, California, January 31, 2023. More
than a quarter million of these drivers are represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

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