EDMONTON – The Wildrose party is calling on the province’s auditor general to investigate allegations that Alberta Health Services bought an estimated $10 million worth of computer equipment and left it in storage for 17 months before it was used by employees. The allegations, which were by AHS, are contained in separate letters sent to Health Minister Fred Horne and Premier Alison Redford by an unknown whistleblower. Source: The Edmonton Journal

Despite having a next-to-zero calorie intake of MSM news, it seems as if I’m inundated with stories of failures in the Canadian Healthcare service. Just a couple years ago, we had a homeless man die in the Emergency Room while waiting for attention – and nobody noticed the corpse for eight hours, or some such nonsense.

Any time you try and discuss this with Canadians there seems to be a disconnect in their brain. They’ve grown acclimatized to how terrible Healthcare is here, and they seem to be unable to envision how private medicine might actually work. The joke that was American Healthcare (before it became the Obamacare farce) only exacerbated this issue – as if that was a free market solution!

I suspect that a lot of this stems from our moral misunderstanding of money. We incorrectly associate our own moral failings with the agent of our moral failings – it’s no different from an ex-alcoholic hating alcohol. We see – or rather, we instinctively sense – how self-destructive consumerism is, and blame that on the dollars, praising charity and socialism, only to see those institutions fall prey to brand-new problems that anybody with forethought could have predicted.

The solution would be to start using money correctly, but that would require a Gene Roddenberry-esque “evolution” in our consciousness.

Just to clarify – I’m in no way opposed to shopping at malls or on Amazon (especially if you’re going there to Buy My Book!), it’s the attitude which it engenders which I find troublesome.