“The ability of Saskatchewan families to afford the health and pain management services provided by the professional chiropractors in our province is being ripped away by the Wall government due to its financial incompetence,” Junor said. “The cancellation of this negotiated, ratified, and signed contract removes the government support for these services and passes the full amount of treatment onto the patient requiring care.”
Junor said that while the explanation from the Wall government to the CAS was that reneging on the signed agreement will save the government money, the opposite is in fact true. She said in the short term, patients will be paying out of their pocket for necessary treatment while in the long term, those unable to pay because of the removal of the co-pay agreement will rely more heavily on emergency rooms, General Physicians, and surgery to combat their pain.
“By ripping up this contract, the Wall government is giving a double blow to Saskatchewan patients and taxpayers,” Junor said. “Many people cannot afford to access treatment without the government’s help and they will have nowhere to turn except our already strained and underfunded health care facilities. Eliminating chiropractic care is unfair, short-sighted, and in the end, will cost our health system more.”
Junor noted that the agreement between the Wall government and the CAS had progressed so far that a draft news release was written by the Ministry of Health in January with Health Minister Don McMorris quoted as saying he was, “pleased that we have reached a deal with the Chiropractors’ Association of Saskatchewan” and that it would allow the government, “to exercise some fiscal responsibility through the treatment cap and the copayments.” Junor wondered what changed in the intervening period.
“I am asking Minister why he is no longer pleased with the agreement,” Junor said. “What changed? Exactly what kind of financial disaster are we looking at here when in one month the Minister went from being ‘pleased’ with the contract he was to sign to ripping it up at the expense of Saskatchewan chiropractors and their patients? It’s not acceptable.”
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Under the Wall government we went from having $2.3 billion in the bank to a $1.05 billion deficit in less than 2 years
"They’re looking at, for lack of a better word, some surgical tourism. People coming up to British Columbia, spending some time in British Columbia, being able to get the procedure."
- Minister of Health, Don McMorris
Sask. Environmental Society opposes Wall Gov't plan to sell off wildlife habitat land...
May 17, 2010
"Our society has a strong preference for retaining as Crown land the 3.5 million acres currently under protection. We do not support the provincial government's plan to sell off hundreds of thousands of acres of this land to private individuals. We believe the bill now before the Assembly will lead to further habitat loss and habitat fragmentation, thus adding stress on wildlife populations, such as grassland bird species, several of which are already in sharp decline." -Allyson Brady, Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Environmental Society
