Sirota: Biden administration’s reported $10B deal with Amazon ‘shrouded in secrecy’

Caitlin McLean - Saturday
 Provided by The Hill



David Sirota, founder of The Lever news outlet, said he believes a reported $10 billion deal between the Biden administration and Amazon is hidden in “secrecy.”

In late April, the news outlet Nextgov reported that the National Security Agency had re-awarded Amazon a contract for cloud-computing services.

“NSA recently awarded a contract to Amazon Web Services that delivers cloud computing services to support the agency’s mission,” an NSA official told Nextgov.

Sirota expressed concerns with the reported contract.

“We don’t actually know the details of this contract. It’s shrouded in secrecy, there’s a national security exemption for the details of the contract, but we know it’s a cloud computing contract,” Sirota said while appearing on Hill.TV’s “Rising.”

“There is a privacy question about what the NSA needs with a $10 billion build out of cloud computing. The mind can run wild about what that’s all about in terms of surveillance and data collection,” he added.

Sirota said the size of the contract is “huge.”

“There’s very few details about what that contract is and I think that people need to understand how big the contract is. Federal contracts go out all the time in the millions of dollars even hundred of millions of dollars. A $10 billion federal contract, even at the federal government level, that is a huge contract,” Sirota said.

Sirota said the size of the contract can provide some answers to as why the Biden administration awarded it.

“Whatever they are actually building out with that, whatever the NSA is doing with it, you can rest assured that it is a big thing,” he added.

GUESS HE CAN'T USE THE BOYS BATHROOM

Métis youth swimmer becomes 1st transgender male to compete in Manitoba

Renée Lilley - 
cbc.ca

Kahnay Johnson is breaking barriers in the Manitoba swim world by being the first transgender male to compete in the province.


© Colleen Johnson

Kahnay Johnson became the first transgender male to compete at a Manitoba swim meet last week.

On May 7, the 15-year-old Métis swimmer and member of the St. James Seals Swim Club officially competed in the male category in the Bison Sprint Invitational Meet hosted by the University of Manitoba Bisons swim team in Winnipeg.

"It was really cool, it was a little scary, but I think everything's a little scary [the] first time around," he said.

Kahnay ended up with some career-best swim times in the 50-metre freestyle, backstroke and breaststroke categories. He said he's glad to be an example for others in the sport.

"I think being able to swim as my authentic self is really good, and I really appreciate the fact that I'm able to," he said.

Kahnay said Swim Manitoba contacted him to see if he was interested in switching to the male swim category. He then re-registered as male, after five years of competing as female. Though he wasn't able to keep his previous swim times, he said he's still grateful for the opportunity, and the chance to inspire others.

"I hope that it becomes a more easily accessible thing for people to do when they switch over, when they come out, so everyone can feel that sense of support," he said.

One of Kahnay's biggest supporters is his mom, Colleen Johnson.

She said since Kahnay came out as transgender last year, it's been a different journey, especially with sports being divided into two genders.


"That made it a real challenge while Kahnay was trying to figure himself out," said Colleen.

"It made it uncomfortable, especially when it came to change rooms, and where do you fit in."
Providing a 'middle lane'

She said that since a lot of facilities in the city don't have gender-neutral change rooms, that may deter LGBTQ youth from participating in sports.

"Hopefully what Kahnay has done is going to bring some more awareness, and perhaps they can look at enhancing that experience, especially for kids that are struggling," she said.

Colleen said she hopes sports can accommodate more mixed-gender co-ed teams. She said kids just want to fit in.

"It would be nice to give them that middle lane where they can figure it out, feel comfortable while they're figuring it out, until they decide where their authentic self is."

Colleen said she's "super proud" of Kahnay.

"He has been courageous through all of this," she said.

"Kahnay has taught me so much that I never really knew and understood, so he's been a great teacher. [It's] amazing for me to continue to grow through his eyes, so that's been awesome."

Josh Koldon, head coach of the St. James Seals, has been Kahnay's swim coach for a year, but knew him from the pool before his transition.

He said he hopes Kahnay continues to swim.

"Sports tend to get named as a boys club or a girls club … it's really important to show that inclusiveness and make people comfortable in their own skin and allow them to compete however they wish," said Koldon.

"Watching him come back after the pandemic and post-transition, he's definitely been a lot happier. He enjoys the water a lot more."

2,000 attend new Tunisia opposition alliance demo


AFP - 

A crowd estimated at more than 2,000, lower than expected, took part Sunday in the first demonstration of a new alliance to oppose a power grab by President Kais Saied.

"We shall overcome," and "We are united, not divided," read banners of the National Salvation Front protesters gathered in front of the municipal theatre on Bourguiba Avenue, a traditional hub of demonstrations in central Tunis.


© FETHI BELAIDDemonstrators said they were disappointed by the numbers who turned out to the first public show of support for the National Salvation Front

"The people want... respect for the constitution and a return to democracy," they chanted.

Veteran opposition figure Ahmed Nejib Chebbi announced the formation of the new alliance on April 26 to "save" Tunisia from deep crisis following Saied's power grab last year.

Chebbi, 78, was a prominent opponent of dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali's rule.

Demonstrators said they were disappointed by the numbers that turned out for the first public show of support for the alliance.

"A larger crowd" was expected, said Salah Tzaoui, a 57-year-old teacher, especially by those who had lived under Ben Ali who was ousted in a 2011 popular uprising that sparked the Arab Spring revolts around the region.

Saied -- a former law professor elected in 2019 amid public anger against the political class -- on July 25 sacked the government, suspended parliament and seized wide-ranging powers.

He later gave himself powers to rule and legislate by decree, and seized control over the judiciary.

"He wants to govern alone. It's not possible. I'm here for my children and grandchildren," Tzaoui told AFP.

Khaled Benabdelkarim, a 60-year-old fellow teacher who voted for Saied three years ago, said the president had "betrayed the people and stolen democracy. He has no political project, no economic project."

The National Salvation Front comprises five political parties including Saied's nemesis the Islamist-inspired Ennahdha party, along with five civil society groups involving independent political figures.

Saied's initial power grab was welcomed by many Tunisians sick of the often-stalemated post-revolution political system.

But an increasing array of critics say he has moved the country down a dangerous path back towards autocracy in what was the only democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring.

Saied has argued that the North African country's 2014 constitution allowed him to take "exceptional measures".

fka/hc/it

New Goldman Sachs policy gives bosses unlimited days off - The Telegraph

IMAGINE THE HUE & CRY IF UNIONS ASKED FOR THAT

(Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc will allow its partners and managing directors to take as much time off as they want under a new "flexible vacation" scheme to promote "rest and recharge," The Telegraph reported on Saturday, citing an internal memo.

The Wall Street bank memo said that, as of May 1, there will be no cap on paid leave and senior staff can "take time off when needed without a fixed vacation day entitlement," the newspaper added.

All employees are expected to take at least 15 days' leave per year from next January, with at least one week of consecutive time off, the report cited the memo as saying.

Goldman Sachs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This change is significant for Wall Street banks, whose employees work extremely long hours. It comes about two months after a group of first-year Goldman Sachs analysts complained in March of being overworked and threatened to quit within six months unless conditions improved.

(Reporting by Rachna Dhanrajani in Bengaluru; Editing by Richard Chang)

Moderate doses of zinc could help treat, prevent cancers - Israeli study



By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH - Monday
The Jerusalem Post
© (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)


Zinc is a trace mineral, meaning that the body only needs small amounts, and yet it is necessary for almost 300 enzymes to carry out vital chemical reactions. A major factor in the creation of DNA, growth of cells, building proteins, healing damaged tissue and supporting a healthy immune system, zinc is also important to wound healing and maintaining one’s sense of taste and smell.

The 24th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, it is found in chicken, red meat, fortified breakfast cereals, beans, nuts, almonds, avocados, blackberries, pomegranates, raspberries, guavas, cantaloupes, apricots, peaches, kiwifruit and blueberries. The concentration of zinc in such foods depends upon its level in the soil. With a varied diet, your body usually gets enough zinc.

Including zinc in your diet every day is safe if it’s within the recommended daily allowance, which is eight or nine milligrams for women and 11 mg. for adult men. Consumption of an excess amount can cause health problems. Exceeding 40 mg. per day of elemental zinc can cause flu-like symptoms such as fever, coughing, headache and fatigue.

Besides being involved in the production of enzymes, can it fight cancer?

IMAJ, the Israel Medical Association Journal, carries a five-page analysis by Dr. Amos Gelbard of the Zefat [Safed] Academic College that shows zinc as having the potential to treat malignancies. Gelbard has written widely on a variety of medical issues, looked at many studies and updated a preliminary study of the subject that he wrote for Harefuah, the Hebrew-language journal of the association in 2017.


© Provided by The Jerusalem PostDividing cancer cell (credit: INGIMAGE)

His analysis of 40 studies around the world shows deficiency of zinc in cancer patients, who tend to have more and faster disease progression and lower rates of survival. Studies began on healthy and cancerous tissue in the lab and continued on mice and rats. Promising results were confirmed in two studies on human cancer patients.

The Indian Journal of Medical Research published a study titled “Zinc: A promising agent in dietary chemoprevention of cancer.”

A large body of evidence suggests that a significant percentage of deaths resulting from cancer could be avoided through greater attention to proper and adequate nutrition. Although many dietary compounds have been suggested to contribute in the prevention of cancer, there is strong evidence to support the fact that zinc may be of particular importance in host defense against the initiation and progression of cancer, according to the authors of this study.

“Remarkably, 10% of the US population consumes less than half the recommended dietary allowance for zinc and is at increased risk for zinc deficiency.... Dietary deficiencies in the intake of zinc can contribute to single and double-strand DNA breaks and oxidative modifications to DNA that increase risk for cancer development.”

Zinc deficiency in humans is also associated with an increased risk of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, according to the study.

“Zinc might prevent cancer through its effect on angiogenesis and tumor progression. Zinc may also play an important role in the maintenance of DNA integrity in normal prostate epithelial cells by modulating DNA repair and damage response proteins.... In addition, findings support the role of zinc transporters as tumor suppressors in the prostate... restoration of high zinc levels in malignant cells could be efficacious in the treatment and prevention of cancer.

“Based on the accumulated data shown in this review,” concluded Gelbard, “one may conclude that zinc supplementation not only fixes the zinc deficiency found in cancer patients but also treats cancer as a whole.”

While more clinical studies are needed to prove its efficacy to oncologists, “it is therefore recommended that zinc become a part of cancer treatment protocol, sooner rather than later.”

Medical societies and health-care companies may be too close for comfort

Joel Lexchin, Professor Emeritus of Health Policy and Management, York University, Canada - Thursday
The Conversation

There are three different types of organizations for doctors in Canada: ones that license doctors to be able to practise and ensure that they are competent; ones that develop programs to train family doctors and specialists; and medical societies.

Medical societies are voluntary membership organizations primarily for doctors who share a common expertise in either a medical specialty (e.g., cardiology) or a common interest in a particular area of practice (e.g., rural medicine).

Societies serve important purposes: they provide continuing professional education to their members, they advocate to government and others on behalf of their members and the patients that they treat and they promote continual improvement in their area of knowledge.

Because of the nature of their work, medical societies are more likely than the other types of organizations to have interactions with companies that make drugs, medical devices or that develop medical technology. And they often receive money from these health-care companies.

Relationships with industry

There have been reports that recommendations from societies have been influenced by financial conflicts-of-interest and calls for societies to transform their modes of operation to prevent the appearance or reality of undue industry influence on their actions.

In an article that I recently published, I looked into the relationship between Canadian medical societies and health-care companies. There are 65 specialty societies listed on the website of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. Twenty-three of these societies get sponsorships from companies for their general activities and 25 get money for their annual conferences. None of the societies say how much money they get from individual companies and only two make public the total amount that they get through donations.

When societies get money from companies, they usually feature the companies’ logos on their websites and doctors can also hyperlink to the websites of those companies.

Alarmingly, only 10 societies have public policies about how to deal with their interactions with companies. The absence of a policy about sponsorships is consistent with previous research about other aspects of the interactions between Canadian medical societies and health-care companies. Adrienne Shnier, a lawyer and adjunct professor at York University’s School of Health Policy & Management, and I found that these societies’ policies on industry involvement in continuing medical education were generally weak or non-existent.

Canadian medical societies are no different from those in other countries. Out of 131 Italian medical societies, 29 per cent had manufacturers’ logos on their web page, 4.6 per cent had an ethical code covering relationships with industry, 6.1 per cent published an annual financial report and 64.9 per cent received sponsorships for their last conference.

Industry influence

Does any of this really matter? Should we care about these relationships? There is good evidence that we should. When doctors hyperlink to company websites, they are directly exposed to information generated by those companies about their products.

A comprehensive review, of which I was one of the authors, examined the relationship between exposure to information from pharmaceutical companies and the quality, quantity and cost of physicians’ prescribing. In studies that found an association between pharma company information and prescribing, the result was either higher prescribing frequency, higher costs or lower prescribing quality. Some studies found no association, and no studies found an improvement in prescribing behaviour.

For medical societies, receiving money from companies is associated with taking actions that are favourable to the interests of those companies. Contraception guidelines released in 2011 by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC) that endorsed the use of two oral contraceptives Yaz and Yasmin, were an almost identical copy of a consensus statement from a workshop sponsored by Bayer, the maker of these pills. The SOGC received funding from Bayer and its executive vice-president defended the guidelines.

In guidelines for prescribing opioids for chronic non-cancer pain, those produced by four organizations with conflicts of interest with opioid manufacturers had multiple “red flags,” meaning items known to introduce potential bias.

In 2009, the American Society of Hypertension partnered with its then largest donor, pharma company Daiichi Sankyo, to create a training program for the company’s sales representatives who visit doctors’ offices.

Disclosure and transparency

Medical societies need to demonstrate to their membership and to the patients they serve that their actions are not influenced by who gives them money. There are some simple measures they can undertake to help achieve that objective.

All societies should have detailed policies about interactions with commercial entities. They should publish the amounts they get from individual companies so that everyone can see what percent of their budget comes from sponsorships. Acknowledging sponsors is appropriate, but hyperlinking to their websites is not and should be stopped.

Medical societies perform valuable work, but if there are doubts about who that work benefits, that’s not good for anyone.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

Read more:

Why Big Pharma must disclose payments to patient groups

How Big Pharma’s free samples encourage your doctor to prescribe more expensive drugs

In 2019-2021, Joel Lexchin received payments for writing a brief on the role of promotion in generating prescriptions for Goodmans LLP and from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for presenting at a workshop on conflict-of-interest in clinical practice guidelines. He is a member of the Foundation Board of Health Action International and the Board of Canadian Doctors for Medicare. He receives royalties from University of Toronto Press and James Lorimer & Co. Ltd. for books he has written.

Canada's premiers are missing a real chance to fix our ailing health-care system

Tom McIntosh, Professor, Politics and International Studies, University of Regina 

THE CONVERSATION


When Canada’s premiers doubled down earlier this year on their demand for a $28 billion unconditional increase in the Canada Health Transfer (CHT), they missed an opportunity to finally achieve the kind of health-care reform our underperforming system has been told it needs over and over again.

The rationale for this demand is that the system is chronically underfunded (itself a debatable contention), and this is supposedly because, as Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe is fond of tweeting: “Ottawa used to fund 50 per cent of health care costs and now only funds 22 per cent of those costs.”

The premiers are also suggesting they’re being modest in their demands. They’re not asking for a return of the 50/50 deal struck in the 1960s, but only that Ottawa up its share to 35 per cent.

As I’ve argued previously, the premiers’ demand fundamentally misrepresents the history of health-care financing in Canada.

Read more: The disingenuous demands of Canada's premiers for $28 billion in health-care funding

They have forgotten that the 50/50 deal ended in 1977 with the full consent of the provincial governments. Since then, the size of the federal cash transfer for health has been subject to both intense federal-provincial diplomacy and federal unilateralism.

Their misleading take on history aside, the premiers seem determined that any increase in health funding from Ottawa pertains to the more or less unconditional general CHT, set at $45 billion to the provinces in 2022-23 — and not part of an agreement that might specify priorities for action and reform on their part.
Health accords didn’t bring about change

It’s clear that national accords, like those in 2000, 2003 and 2004, did little to effect real change in the system, although the 2004 Health Accord did provide stable and predictable increases in the CHT.

When the 2004 accord expired in 2017, neither the federal nor the provincial governments were in the mood for another grand bargain. Instead, Ottawa took a very different tack. It agreed to a 3.5 per cent annual increase in the CHT (up from a three per cent from 2014 to 2017) and to provide an additional $11.5 billion in targeted funding for improvements to community and mental health care.

In order to receive the cash, provinces had to sign bilateral agreements that set out, in varying degrees of detail, where and how the money would be spent.

As a colleague and I have argued elsewhere, these bilateral agreements, though still imperfect, are a markedly improved way of increasing transparency about where health-care dollars go.

They could also serve as an accountability tool for measuring progress focused not just on fixing but actually improving Canada’s publicly administered health-care system.

In all likelihood, Ottawa will want to continue what it started in 2017 and tie any significant funding increase to a new set of bilateral agreements based on priorities chosen by the provinces. It’s just as likely that this is what the premiers are really trying to avoid.

The impact of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic presents us with a unique opportunity to rethink and reform public health care in Canada.

There is no doubt that the system was hit hard — its capacity was stretched, its workforce took a still uncalculated toll and all manner of service delivery was interrupted. Most notably, surgical wait times (already a serious problem in Canada’s system) were made worse, with one report indicating Ontario alone had a backlog of a million surgical procedures.

Read more: How to solve Canada's wait time problem

Furthermore, the pandemic exposed profound problems in long-term care and community and mental health-care systems.

It’s precisely because of so many simultaneous challenges that we should be thinking not just of rebuilding Canadian health care, but undertaking the necessary and long demanded changes that would create a 21st-century publicly funded and administered health-care system.

There are two likely scenarios.

In the first, Ottawa agrees to a significant increase in the CHT and the provinces simply take the money without making any of the necessary changes to how and what services are delivered (much as the Senate concluded happened with the $40 billion provided by the 2004 Health Accord). At best, that means we return to a pre-pandemic status quo in which the provincial systems continue to lose ground.

In the second, new agreements target the funding to remake the health-care workforce, make better progress on primary health-care reform, reconfigure long-term care, build real community-based mental health care or reconfigure the continuum of care to manage wait times on an ongoing basis.
Co-operation from premiers needed

The second will not happen without some form of conditionality, transparency and accountability from the premiers themselves. Unfortunately, the 2017 bilateral agreements contain no obligation on the provinces’ part to report on achievements relative to their commitments.

Asking provinces to report to the federal government on how they manage their constitutional responsibilities for health care could be taken as a violation of provincial sovereignty. But they should not refuse to report to their own residents.

It’s hardly inappropriate for Ottawa to insist that provinces report to their residents on any targeted funding aimed at priorities the provinces themselves commit to tackling.

So, unless and until the premiers agree to set out — perhaps in a new set of bilateral agreements — how they intend to spend and report on the 62 per cent increase in transfers they are demanding to actually bring about real change in their respective health systems, Ottawa should refuse. And Canadians themselves should just say no.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

Read more:
Ontario public health cuts will endanger the public

The disingenuous demands of Canada’s premiers for billion in health-care funding

Tom McIntosh received funding through the University of Calgary for a study of the 2017 bilateral health care accords.

Over 40,000 have died from COVID-19 in Canada, but hospitalizations are falling again

Sean Boynton - Friday
 Global News

At least 40,000 people across Canada have died after contracting COVID-19 since the pandemic began more than two years ago, according to provincial data, and more than 70 people are still dying per day.

Yet hospitalizations and confirmed cases have fallen over the past two weeks, suggesting the sixth wave may be coming to an end.

As of Friday, 40,217 fatalities have been confirmed by provinces and territories to date.

Read more:
Canada’s COVID-19 death toll could be thousands higher than official count: report

Experts have previously said the true death toll could be thousands higher than the official count due to gaps in data collection, suggesting around two-thirds of all COVID-19-related deaths may have been missed.

Most provinces have shifted to reporting COVID-19 data weekly, a majority of which report on Thursdays. The official death toll surpassed 40,000 on May 12, while Ontario and Quebec — which still report daily — added another 48 deaths combined on Friday.

The seven-day average of new deaths has hovered around 70 for the past two weeks, plateauing from the near-record of 165 seen during the fifth wave early this year.

The dozens of new deaths per day comes despite signs the sixth wave is waning.

As of Friday, the seven-day average of daily lab-confirmed cases sits just above 4,630, down nearly 50 per cent from the rate seen a month ago.

The number of people in hospital currently sits at 5,664, according to the latest data, down more than 10 per cent from two weeks ago.

That includes 363 people being treated in intensive care units, a number that has also ticked downward after rising throughout April.

Canada's chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam said on May 6 that cases appear to have plateaued in some provinces and are falling in others, though the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 remains high in some parts of the country.

Tam had warned nearly a month before that Canada was in the midst of a sixth wave, driven by the BA.2 subvariant of the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

The BA.2 subvariant is believed to be even more infectious than Omicron and is also leading to some reinfections of previous cases, according to Tam and other public health officials and experts.

Read more:
COVID-19 symptoms linger for many 2 years after infection, study shows

Tam and her provincial counterparts have said the number of confirmed cases being reported are likely an undercount of the true number of cases, which could be up to 10 times higher. Many parts of the country no longer provide laboratory tests for a majority of people after capacity was overwhelmed by the spread of Omicron in late 2021.

At the same time, those officials have moved away from widespread mandates toward allowing Canadians to make decisions on how to protect themselves from the latest wave based on their own personal health, as well as the setting they are in and the amount of transmission in their community.

Most provinces and territories have loosened all or nearly all of the public health restrictions they had imposed to combat previous waves of the pandemic.

Tam warned on April 1 that the country is in a period of pandemic transition that might see further waves of COVID-19 cases this year.

"We anticipate that progress will not be linear, and there will likely be more bumps along the way, including resurgence in cases this spring, and likely also in the fall and winter," she told a news briefing that day.

She said Canadians should keep wearing face coverings and ensure vaccinations are up to date amid rising case counts and reduced public health measures.

"I think the bottom line is everybody right now should still wear that mask and keep those layers of measures, no matter where you are in this country," she said.

Health officials are continuing to remind Canadians that vaccinations, including boosters, are the only way through the pandemic.

Although 90 per cent of the eligible population aged five and over have received at least one vaccine dose, and 86 per cent are considered fully vaccinated with two doses, less than half of all Canadians have received a third dose.

Boosters are considered critical to help prevent serious illness from Omicron, which has been proven to be more resilient to existing vaccines.

Vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer and Moderna are developing a new generation of shots that will be designed to target more transmissible strains like Omicron.

— with files from the Canadian Press

Frank Stronach: Bringing health care to the factory floor
National Post - Tuesday

I’m a great believer that the number 1 priority in life — the one that stands above all others — is to stay healthy. When we become sick and weakened by illness, most of us would give everything we own for the chance to be healthy again.

© Provided by National PostFrank Stronach: Bringing health care to the factory floor

And when it comes to health care, I think we can all agree: in a civilized society, no individual should be denied medical treatment because he or she is unable to afford it.

However, the dilemma every country faces is figuring out the best way to deliver quality care. As a way to deliver better health-care services at a lower cost, one solution I’ve strongly advocated over the years is pushing medical care into the workplace.

Bringing doctors and other health-care providers directly into the workplace would have a dual benefit: it would deliver medical diagnosis and treatment in a timelier and more convenient manner, and it would be more cost-effective by reducing the health-care costs paid annually by employers and their employees, as well as the costs paid by government.

Under such a system, corporate-managed health services would be made available to employees and their immediate families, and would be carried out with the consent of employees, who would remain free to seek medical care elsewhere if they wished.

As part of the program, employees would be required to take part in paid preventive health education programs in the workplace that stress the benefits of adopting healthy lifestyle choices. Employees would also be involved in overseeing the management of the program, as members of a workplace advisory board.

All of the stakeholders involved — the health-care providers, the company and its employees — would get a cut of the savings associated with the health-care efficiencies. Employees would share a portion of the savings in the form of a cash rebate, while the company would divide almost half of the savings amongst the remaining stakeholders.

A portion would go to the doctors and medical staff in the form of an efficiency bonus to reward the more efficient delivery of health-care services, and about 10 per cent would go into a medical emergency account, which would essentially act as a rainy-day fund.

I believe this health-care model is a win-win-win proposition for all of the stakeholders involved. Doctors would be relieved of administrative expenses, would be guaranteed a built-in clientele and would be eligible for bonuses strictly tied to efficiency gains.

The company would have a healthier workforce and less absenteeism due to medical appointments. And employees would receive more convenient service and the ability to earn health-care rebates. Society would also benefit by delivering better health care at a much lower cost through a model that could be replicated by companies across the country.

We need to become more innovative and flexible in how we approach the delivery of health care. Unfortunately, in Canada and the United States, the debate about health care is far too often framed as an either/or proposition: either private care or public care.

But neither of these two systems on their own is ideal: in a completely private system, the poor cannot afford quality health care, and in a completely public system, people do not have timely access to medical attention as a result of governments rationing health-care dollars and a limited number of health-care providers.

I believe the best solution would be a hybrid of the two systems, or a system in which public and private health care co-exist and work in unison. A number of European countries have adopted a public-private model, including France, Denmark and Austria, and their health systems are rated among the best in the world. I see no reason why a hybrid system couldn’t work here in Canada.

We’ve thrown a lot of money at health care over the years, and it hasn’t made much of a dent in terms of reducing so-called “hallway health care” in our emergency rooms, or in terms of reducing wait times for medical specialists and badly needed diagnostic tools such as MRIs.

It’s high time we stopped being so rigid in our thinking and started adopting the best elements of health-care systems that are delivering better care at a better price.

National Post

FRANK STRONACH OWNS MAGNA INTERNATIONAL THE AUTO PARTS COMPANY

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2005/11/socialized-medicine-began-in-alberta.html

Filmmaker: Officials arrest Iran movie industry workers



DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — An award-wining Iranian filmmaker said authorities raided the offices and homes of several filmmakers and other industry professionals and arrested some of them.

Mohammad Rasoulof said in a statement signed by dozens of movie industry professionals on his Instagram account late Saturday that security forces made some arrests and confiscated film production equipment during raids conducted in recent days. The statement condemned the actions and called them “illegal.”

In a separate Instagram post, Rasoulof identified two of the detained filmmakers as Firouzeh Khosravani and Mina Keshavarz. Rasoulof was not targeted in the recent raids.

Iranian media and authorities have not commented on the raids and no additional details were immediately available. Authorities in Iran occasionally arrest activists in cultural fields over alleged security violations.

Rasoulof won the Berlin Film Festival’s top prize in 2020 for his film “There Is No Evil.” It tells four stories loosely connected to the themes of the death penalty in Iran and personal freedoms under tyranny.

Shortly after receiving the award he was sentenced to a year in prison for three films he made that authorities found to be “propaganda against the system.” His lawyer appealed the sentence. He was also banned from making films and traveling abroad.

Iran’s conservative authorities, many with religious sensibilities, control all the levers of power in Iran. They have long viewed many cultural activities as part of a “soft war” by the West against the Islamic Republic. They say Westernization is attempting to tarnish the country’s Islamic beliefs.

The Associated Press