There is no solution in health

During a chance meeting with an old friend, I ask him: Now that you have left the health network and are practicing your talents elsewhere, what can you say about the changes in your work? His answer: In the health network, there are no solutions to the problems! Here, yes! Left speechless, thoughtful, I wonder why this was not thought of before? One day, we decided to go into debt together to be cared for. We created a public system to pay people like the famous Dr. Grondin. He agreed, in this Quebec rich in poor and poor in rich, no other way out. This system was created to pay doctors, which is obvious, but was it created for the health of people? No! Only to treat them! Finally, people could be sick without worrying about paying, and doctors invented diseases. It was written in the newborn’s genes that it would never be enough. Proof in hand, the pandemic revealed its limited capacity for action. We would never make it. One certainty: everyone will always be well paid, no matter the waiting lists. No solutions to the problems! As they are posed, searching for magic recipes, playing with data, in a Tower of Babel where divergence is not accepted, where there is no self-questioning. We want to quantify and not understand. In fact, we think we will understand by quantifying. No, not everything can be measured so simply. There are infinite ways to interpret the meaning of a measure. If you cannot measure, do not say that it cannot be measured. Without a doubt, we can improve without giving a number. Patients do not add up. But what is the measure of reasonableness? A mystery for all currently. What are our references? Knowing that perfection is only a chimera. There is no possible solution with today’s methods. We must turn to visionaries here from UQAC who talk about sustainable health and taking control of one’s destiny. I think this dead-end situation suits many. It allows a destructive antagonism, a permanent state of crisis with more billing, more criticism for the visibility of union and employer pressure groups. Never satisfied, the groups are managed by catalogs of agreements. Our system is one that repairs, without doing enough for overall health. The sum of corporatist interests does not yield the expected results. In this case, the whole equals the sum, nothing more, no profit generated by the whole. 

— Jacques Gagnon, Eng. President and CEO of Imagem