Search Results for: health

With a number of interventions by cabinet over the past year, we have seen Industry Minister Bernier taking steps to implement some of the recommendations of the Telecom Policy Review panel.

One of the easy to overlook recommendations of the report is the streamlining of the policy direction process, coupled with the removal of the cabinet appeal process. Recommendation 9-5 says:

The policy direction power should be transferred into a more effective policy-making instrument by … (c) repealing the Cabinet power to review individual CRTC telecommunications decisions.

An article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday said that the Communication and Technology sector was the leading spender of lobbyist dollars in the US in the first half of 2006, ahead of healthcare, finance and energy sectors. Telecom lobbying is obviously not just a Canadian phenomenon. Over the holidays, a Canadian Press article expresses concerns about the nature of backroom dealings associated with the appeals processes. It is worth reading.

Former CRTC commissioner Andrew Cardozo said:

If you do your job properly as CRTC chair or member, at some point or another you will have ticked off every member of the industry, and you will have ticked off the government too. You’ve just got to go in there and do what you believe is the right thing to do, and you want to keep clear of the lobbyists.

Ian Angus was quoted in the CP article:

I would wonder whose self-respect would be so low that they’d be willing to be CRTC chair?

Why would you want to be chair of an independent regulatory body when the government has made it clear it will override you when it disagrees.

Still, policy is an important component of an evolving regulatory framework. Shouldn’t policy be set by government? So, you need a CRTC chair who agrees at least with the direction that the government wants to take with communications. For telecom, the roadmap for change has been laid out with the report of the Telecom Policy Review panel. The world of broadcasting is less clear.

Is this what is delaying the appointment of a new CRTC Chair?

Andreas Bernhardt, a member of the Group Executive at Siemens spoke toward the end of day 2 of The Canadian Telecom Summit.

He spoke of Generation X, the post-boomers who roughly cover those born in the 70’s, comfortable and generally raised with computers and technology. But more significantly, he spoke of Generation @: kids with a presumptive knowledge and expectation of the impact and capabilities of information and communications.

Siemens, as an enormous global power, active in a wide array of sectors: healthcare, electronic and automation control, telecom, power, transportation. Among the kinds of things this level of diversity allows is active involvement in machine to machine communications. Understanding the implications of intelligent homes.

I found it interesting that a number of the international speakers, including Sebastiano Tevarotto of HP, and Andreas Bernhardt, spoke of radical simplicity: enabling users to access radically innovative services, without a hint of the enabling complexity facing the end user.

I want to return to my earlier metaphorical connection between the debate on Net Neutrality (aka “Save the Internet“) and Canada’s angst over private medical care. In part this is driven by the arrival of this week’s issue of Maclean’s magazine and its “Complete User’s Guide to Private Medical Care in Canada.”

Metaphors aren’t always appropriate; they often don’t fit. Still, there is no reason why we can’t look at other experiences in order to try to learn, develop best practices and improve the end result.

I think that looking at healthcare, as a cloud, can have a number of similarities with ‘the internet’. Like the internet, healthcare is a concept rather than a tangible entity. People are concerned about fair, high quality access to healthcare, and it is sometimes publicly funded, privately provided together with every permutation of these.

Similar to the internet, there is a populist view that a public healthcare system should deliver a uniform quality of care to all. In the view of some, for both healthcare and the internet, such a model just doesn’t work. Loads of experts can examine why this is so, but one can point to the failure of public funding to be able or willing to cope with appropriate levels of capacity planning, technological change and ongoing investment.

As a result, the delivery of healthcare is failing on many measures of satisfaction: it is hardly uniform quality (some regions of the country or province have longer or shorter waiting lists for similar procedures); it is not offering flexibility in solutions; and, public healthcare is not making sufficient use of advances in technology, due to lack of capital and ongoing operating funds.

As seen in the Maclean’s feature, private health clinics are a reality across Canada. To those who predict that this means the end of Canada’s democratized health care, I would argue that this may actually be the beginning of democratized premium health care.

The upper crust has always had access to preferred, private health care. They are happy to jet to US or other foreign clinics to access the best care money can buy. The arrival of private clinics in Canada means that more of us can get the same level of service, at a cost premium but within the reach of far more.

At the same time, there is no harm being done to the public system. If anything, there is a reduction in demand for public health care, so there is a net benefit to everyone.

How does this relate to Net Neutrality? Having premiums paid by content providers in order to gain preferred access to their customers is similar in many ways. Maclean’s talks about the way that health insurance companies have negotiated arrangements with hospitals and certain clinics. The concern is that there be degraded service to the rest of the public internet. If content providers are satisfied with the current level of service, then they can continue as today on a permissive basis, with no quality of service guarantees.

Don’t confuse tiered service with discrimination. As Dave Greenfield wrote last month, “Is it fair that Business Class customers get better treatment than Economy class? You bet.” That means you (or your content provider) may have to pay a premium, if you both want delivery with a premium grade of service.

That isn’t discrimination.