Childhood obesity a taxing problem
By Tom Fletcher Black Press
Dec 07 2006
VICTORIA – A pre-Christmas buffet today, to begin the season of overeating. And what better place to start than the B.C. legislature’s health committee, which issued its report on what to do about the epidemic of obesity among young people.
B.C. isn’t as bad as some other provinces, but still has 20 per cent of its young people overweight and seven per cent obese.
The problem continues to grow, and experts agree it’s a result of riding in vehicles, staring at screens, and replacing family meals with unhealthy convenience foods.
The committee signals a further drift towards government intervention.
The committee heeded expert advice, and does not call for a specific “junk food tax” that would be a bureaucratic nightmare for restaurants and food producers.
But it belatedly discovered that potato chips, candy and soft drinks all benefit from the blanket exemption of food from the provincial sales tax. Seven other provinces already figured that out, so look for B.C. to start taxing those products soon.
Mandatory retirement
The Premier’s Council on Aging and Seniors’ Issues has called for mandatory retirement to be done away with, and Gordon Campbell says he’ll get on that in the spring legislative session.
As with sales tax on junk food, I wonder what took so long.
It’s been more than two decades since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms forbade discrimination due to age, but B.C.’s Human Rights Code exempts mandatory retirement, allowing employers to force people to retire at 65.
The irony here is that with our aging population and a skills shortage, this will come into effect just when hardly anyone will need it. A decade from now, according to projections, businesses won’t be trying to push any competent employee out the door. Instead they’ll be offering incentives to keep people on the job.
A private ER
It’s hard to imagine what the operators of False Creek Surgical Centre were thinking when they opened their Urgent Care Clinic last week, with a plan to charge patients directly for sewing up cuts and setting broken limbs.
I guess they were calling the B.C. government’s bluff.
Health Minister George Abbott has been dragging the puck for months over another private clinic, the Copeman Healthcare Centre, which started charging monthly fees for what amounts to high-grade family physician care.
Copeman put the emphasis on extras like nutrition and exercise programs, which can be billed for directly, making it harder to demonstrate that it’s extra-billing for medically necessary procedures.
The Urgent Care Centre was a direct challenge to the Canada Health Act, and it dropped the fees quickly when Abbott took rarely seen action.
Those private MRIs
You might recall the recent fuss over St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, which was using a health care broker to sell extra MRI scans after its budget for running the machines under the public plan was exhausted.
The machines would have otherwise sat idle, but B.C. and Canadian politics being what it is, the situation was presented as a scandal and now those machines are kept idle while people go to private facilities instead.
I suppose this is seen as a “win” by the NDP, which continues to make political points over “credit card medicine.” So what if people end up waiting longer for diagnosis or treatment, what really matters is the sacred memory of Tommy Douglas.
One irony of the St. Paul’s situation was overlooked. The brokered fees that went to St. Paul’s for use of its scanner would mainly have ended up in the pockets of unionized technicians who were in on overtime to do the extra work. NDP ideology didn’t help either unions or patients that time.
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Tom Fletcher is B.C. bureau reporter for Black Press newspapers.
Childhood Obesity a Taxing Problem]http://www.nanaimobulletin.com/portals-code/list.cgi?paper=51&cat=48&id=787563&more=]Childhood Obesity a Taxing Problem