Saturday, December 17, 2005

I Just Fired Ujjal Dosanjh!!!

This afternoon Ujjal Dosanjh, Canada's Health Care Minister, was on CKNW's David Berner program. In the 4 - 5pm hour he stated that it's impossible for anyone in the public health care system to determine what the costs of a given medical procedure are. Let me repeat that: The man responsible for the health of all Canadians has absolutely no idea what ANY medical procedures cost and furthermore, said that he'd never be able to determine them.

I waited about 45 minutes to get on air, but shortly after 5pm I was able to talk with Dosanjh. I pointed out to him that the #1 priority of getting a handle on reducing the exhorbitant waiting lists is to figure out where efficiencies exist and where they can be improved. In order to do this, one needs to understand what the costs are. This is taught to first year business students and project managers on the first day of their education!

I pointed out that Vancouver's Dr. Brian Day and Paul Martin's private doctor, Dr. Sheldon Elman, who runs several private clinics in Quebec, could provide such costs in a millisecond.

I finished with the following: "Mr. Dosanjh, if you were running one of my two software companies and told me that you had no idea what the breakdown of costs were and/or blamed your project managers for not giving this information to you then sir, in my best Donald Trump voice, I would say, 'Ujjal, you're fired!" And I'm confident that most Canadians would agree with me wholeheartedly.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

LIB:37 | CON:29 | NDP:16 | BQ:13 | GREEN:5 | UNDECIDED:19

Dec 20, 2005: SES Research for CPAC, three-day rolling tracking poll conducted Dec. 17-19; margin of error plus or minus 2.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.