A hands on approach to Health Care?

Perhaps the incoming Prime Minister is taking the health care issue seriously after all; Stephen Harper spent part of Thursday night at the Emergency ward of the Ottawa General Hospital. Harper was apparently suffering from a respiratory inflammation, something that sent the Ottawa media into a tizzy trying to describe the man’s malady. Harpers stay at the General gave the media corps time to let fly with all sorts of possibilities, from asthma attack, to bad chest cold to possible heart problems, the media took the story and ran with it for most of Friday.

The Prime Minister in waiting’s press people did him no favours with conflicting reports over his late night visit. Resulting in a situation that tended to stoke the fire of a story, which probably shouldn’t have been one at all. Now that he’s the big fish in the fish bowl, the media will want to have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Something that his handlers may wish to keep in mind so as not to create problems where no problem need be created.

Of course it’s a thin line this “need to know” versus “personal privacy”. Canadian leaders tend to get much more leeway with their health updates than does the President of the United States or even the Prime Minister of England or Australia. The Americans are quite fixated on the health of their presidents, we’ve learned of cancerous polyp removals, blood pressure readings and the latest Dick Cheney heart scan, all provided by an anxious press who send teams of reporters out there to get to the bottom of things.

In Canada, we’re lucky half the time to know if the Prime Minister has a cold or a cough. One wonders how much information we really do require, is it necessary to be in the loop for every health concern, or should we just be concerned about any major ones. Most Canadians treasure the privacy aspect of our health care, should a Prime Minister expect any less privacy? It may all be a moot point though, as that may be changing if Thursday night is any indication. Even the Conservative leader’s handlers now realize that perhaps they need to be a tad more informative early on, to avoid the kind of silly guessing games that went on all day Friday from Ottawa.

As for Harper, well he did say he wanted to get to work on the waiting time problem in Canadian Health care, one suspects he has a better handle on the issue today than he did two days ago. Though all in all, he probably would prefer to do his fact finding on paper and not first hand!