Well, it's happened! Hospital insurance is now obligatory in New Brunswick. It will cost each family $4 a month plus $2 for each member over 19 years of age. This assessment will be withheld from wages and salaries. Employers, of course, will be the tax gatherers for the government, and they must register with the government before December 20, 1958.
He would be very naive who would believe that hospital insurance is anything other than more taxes, more regimentation, more extra accounting for employers, more government interference, more inspectors, more investigations, more sanctions, fines and imprisonments.
For that is what is wrapped up with hospital insurance.
Lucien Fortin, provincial member from Madawaska, declared over the radio that the people want hospital insurance. Mr. Fortin is slightly muddled in his use of terms. What the people want is the assurance that they will be able to go to the hospital when they are sick. But what do they get? Taxes and a wide variety of petty persecutions. What the people want is the means whereby they can look after themselves. What health insurance offers them is regimentation with the obligation of paying to maintain this servitude.
This is not health insurance. This is socialism. Our brilliant representatives in Ottawa fell into the trap in voting for health insurance. And the provinces, of course, in order not to lose their grants, are only too eager to empty the taxpayers' pockets for the central government,
In truth, the times are ripe for a change!
Families have not the means, today, of caring for their medical needs. That we'll grant you, But you certainly don't help them by snatching $4 a month from each of them. If you take $4 a month from New Brunswick families most of them will have to retrench on nourishment. Then you would need more hospitals; you would have to work out plans to turn homes into hospitals, for nothing breeds disease and sickness like malnutrition!
Instead of dreaming up all sorts of plans to take the money out of our pockets before rendering us services which frequently never materialize, and, when they do, are granted most grudgingly and sparingly, let the government put money into our pockets. Enough money to balance the amount of productivity of which this country is capable — including the productivity of our hospitals and medical men. Let families have money so that they themselves may pay for the care they need. Money, liberty! Here are the two great bessings which the government ought to assure to the people. This is the insurance the people want, Mr. Fortin! If we want any other kind of insurance we'll take it from private companies as we choose to. But we don't want to be forced to insure ourselves. Insurance is a private personal matter. The government which forces its citizens to take insurance fails to respect the liberty of the individual. Such a government is a socialist government.
Because the government fails in its first duty of ensuring the proper functioning of the financial system, it devises all sorts of yokes to fit about our necks; and always under the pious pretext that they are for our own good. Yet the truth is, we are getting fewer and fewer services and more and more taxes.
With the advent of hospital insurance the employer again assumes his familiar role of faithful beast to an unfaithful government. He is fitted with the yoke of tax collector. Why, in the name of justice, do employers put up with it? By what right must they submit to becoming police dogs of the government, lackies of the financiers who stand behind the shoulder of our government? Why do not employers protest en masse against these unjustified impositions of the government?
The employer, in strictest justice, has no right to withhold any part of his employee's pay. And if the civil, man-made law commands it, the natural law forbids it. The worker's recompense is a good which may not be wrested from him. No government should force anyone to despoil the worker of that good. Any government which does so, is as bad as, or worse than, the Russian tyranny against whose methods we are fighting.
How many representatives from New Brunswick stood up and protested against this iniquitous law and the injustices it entails? They never fail to make full use of radio and television when they want to persuade the people to vote for them. Then let them use these same media to cry out against obligatory, socialistic health insurance!
We haven't seen in the newspapers a single word from any M.P. against this measure. All we read are eulogies of the law by McInerny and his supporters, vaunting the blessings of this great, humanitarian (?) law. Little do they care about the terrible burden that the loss of $48 a year, or more, will place upon innumerable poor families.
When, oh when! will these grand men of State think of approaching the Bank of Canada, to the end that all Canadian families may have the means to profit from the great progress being made in our country — and especially, in this case, in the field of medicine and hospitalization?
Instead of devising health insurance schemes which only lead to the cancer of socialism, let them devise a plan whereby the Bank will properly finance Canadians.
As one writer put it: The Bank is a very worthy institution which should fertilize the economy of our country as the farmer fertilizes his fields. It should not be the country which works to make the bank prosper and grow fat.
Today, practically every measure devised by the government has as its goal the enriching of the bank at the expense of our families. But then this is not surprising, since all of these measures take their origin in the heads of the dictators of finance and the socialists (for in the final analysis, the two are but one).
And our men of government go down on all fours before these powers, lacking the courage to stand up and fight for the people.
Poor people! constantly mislead and cheated by your leaders! It would seem that you are going to have to save yourselves by your own efforts, your own good common sense, by your spirit of charity towards one another, and by facing up staunchly to anyone who attempts to usurp the powers and rights which are yours by every law, human and divine!
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