I can just see, a few years ago, several politicians wiping their brows and exclaiming how happy they were that the constitution had been translated onto these new-fangled VCR tapes so that it would be more modern and accessible in the new age. Perhaps I should explain how I got here.
The news lately has been tittering to itself that the Alberta health care code of diagnostics apparently regards the state of homosexuality (Next to Arizona) as a mental disorder. It's true in the hay-day of the American diagnostic manual homosexuality was regarded as a paraphilia, right up there with bestiality, but since I had learned about it's removal as such back when I was doing my Psychology degree, and textbooks are notoriously slow to adapt (2000-computers are added to economics manuals) I had assumed it was a non- issue.
The Provincial government's response has been largely red-faced stammering about how it's a slow process to keep the manual updated and such, implying that the whole thing is a mere oversight, whoops, but it appears that Doctors have been billing provincial health care as recently as 2004, which is pretty darn recent by my standards. What this means is that it was in use, not a simple red-tape error. It also does not imply that there have not been any more recently, just that we did not have access to that data (If they are using it in 2004, they are using it in 2010, I bet you a dollar).
My first reaction was to just wonder why the hell they didn't just make one big push to transfer legislation online to a huge archive making it more accessible, but I suppose they want to wait and see if this "Internet" thing is going to stick around. But the larger problem revealed is that we have Doctors in the system treating patients for their "disease" of homosexuality and no one in the higher system is bothering to let us all know about it.
2 comments:
As much as I would like to write this down in the column of the shameful embarrassment of our beloved province's unenlightened sea of mouthbreathers, I will bet money that prejudice was merely a twit cheering from the sidelines while our remarkably (un)trustworthy understaffed legion of second-rate physicians were giggling towards the bank.
This is not to say ALL our physicians are second rate and corrupt, but the minority of first-rate doctors practicing in this province wouldn't dream of such a thing.
We've got some great doctors here, I've dealt with quite a few over the years, but we have a lot more OTHER doctors. The problem isn't ethnicity or nation of origin, experience tells me that we get about the same percentage of money-grubbing-twits generated locally....
Solid point. It is usually superfluous to assume that there is some higher meaning and bigotry at stake when it could be more simply explained by money. Assume greed before malevolence.
However, considering the firestorm they very narrowly avoided by leaving it on the books, and the financial liability they could have incurred by having it (one person already filed a human rights complaint) it seems a case of the lower-tier people taking advantage of something the higher-tier policymakers are doing.
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