Are private clinics losing out in the funding stakes?
Alex Boutilier of Metro Ottawa highlights the malady of "Autism. Regional treatment providers oversee funding for private service"
Parents of autistic children do need help, and they shoud be able to get it either within the socialized medicine bureaucracy or, out side that bureaucracy in private-clinics. Anne Rahming has brawt a complaint about the way the financial allocations of the provincial government are divied up between the socialized medicine sector and the private-clinic sector. Now mind you the private-clinc sector of care for autistic kids is labour intensive (they need constant attention by care-givers in these situations); Rahming has been caring for her son Mica Janovic in the facility ever since he had been "diagnosed with severe autism spectrum disorder. During that time Rahming paid about $80,000 out-of-pocket expenses to keep Mica in intensive behavioural intervention, and therapy designed to teach him to interact with the world." The kid requires a team to give him 24/7 attention on rotating shifts. The facility is Portia Learning Centre at Kanata, Ontario.
Scandal: "After waiting more than a year," Rahming "was offered a spot at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario [Ottawa, Ontario]," something Rahming "didn't want, for fear Mica woud lose progress by starting from scratch in new surroundings. She says she was told it woud be a another year before she got funding to keep Mica at Portia." Every fool knows these days that you don't uproot an almost 5-year-old autistic person from his/her familiar surroundings and trusted care-givers.
Now the twists and turns of these bureaucratic-socialized medicine nightmares results in swift turnabouts. In this case, after Rahming threatened Ontario's Ministry of Children and Youth Services that she was going public, and then alerted the Autism Intervention Program of Eastern Ontario, which miraculum Dei, spun about the same day and offered her the direct funding option for Mica's care and training at Portia.
What's going on here? Politics ... internal medical divy-up-the-funds bureaucratic politics. You see the government has set up these regional facilities and tries to keep them going, fully-staffed, and the staff from the chief administrator on down to the care-givers on down to the clean-up staff (the lowest paid) but what if there are not enuff parents presenting their autistic kids to the government facilities like the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario — and it seems the demographics here trend to the increase of autism cases in our society (why is that?) — but parents at least in some regions shy away from the government medicine, and place their kids in private clinics. Private clinics are the beggars for funding from government: either you place your kid in one of them at your own expense or, as Rahming did, you apply for the Direct Funding Option so that you can pay Portia Learning Centre with your DFO support.
As to the juridical dimension of this bureaucratic-medicine driven system in Ontario: reporter Boutilier in a side bar tells us:
The provincial government is in the midst of creating an independent appeal board for complaints about intensive behavioural intervention (IDI), Ontario's Minister of Children and Youth Services says.
"Outside our regional offices and outside those facilities that offer autism services, there's going to be an independent mechanism that parents can go to if they're unhappy or if they disagree with a decision based on elgibiliity for for IBI or based on a discharge decision," Dr Eric Hoskins says.
He adds that the province [of Ontario] recently raised funding for applied behavioural analysis, the broader treatment umbrella under which IBI falls, by $25 million. The ministry expects that 8,000 children will benefit from that investment.
In Ontario, there's an option of an explicitly Christian kind of Cathollc inspiration, but strongly ecumenical. It's close to being that miraculum Dei place that most Catholics (and I know an aged Anglican couple with an adult child) woud want to consider. It's called L'Arche (here); it's also located headquarted in Ontario. Further, L' Arche co-operates with a Catholic university, St Francis Xavier University (here 2) in Antigonish in Nova Scotia province, Canada. Between them, L'Arche and St Francis Xavier U partner to offer a unique program of studies:
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Saint Francis Xavier U was founded by one of the Orders of Saint Francis with their own province of faith-&-morals oversight under the Roman Catholic Magisterium and its "Consistent Ethic of Life." With L'Arche, the foregoing is one of the reasons that I seek medical assistance, altho I'm a reformational Protestant with a different public philosophy than that of StThomas/Aristotle, in my communal relationship within a Catholic hospital's clinic in Toronto. Yet, Protestants have nothing nearly like these works of L'Arche and St Francis Xavier U, works of compassion for autistic and cognitively-challenged adults unique in all of Canada (that I know of). An exception of which I do have knowledge is the hospital/clinics of the United Church Health Services Society in Canada's British Columbia province which serves in 3 visually-spectacular remote communities of Bella Bella, Bella Coola, and Hazelton BC. I have the impression that the demographics of the people served are mostly from First Nations tribes in the region. Their hospitals, medical clinics, a dental clinic, pharmacies, pregnancy outreach programs, home care support, at all sites are affiliated with teaching programs of the University of British Columbia (hence, a direct tie-into secularistic philosophies of medical education that are religiously rooted in materialism and naturalisn, and individual professors sometimes who are resolutely atheist, I woud imagine (see reformational philosopher Alvin Plantinga on materialism and naturalism as public philosophies).
But returning to UCHSS medical practice, this wonderfully-wrawt historical achievement of Protestantism in Canada seems not to approach the integral program for autistics and adults with continuing cognitive disabilites such as those served by L'Arche and Saint Francis Xavier University the breadth of a continent away from the UCHSS medical facilities in British Columbia. Hopefully, United Church Health Services (annual report 2011 here 4) coud get out from under the Consistent Ethic of Life at L'Arche and St Francis Xavier U by linking to the Duke University joint program of Christian philosophy of medical practice in Duke's Divinity School and Medical School (where Dr Raymond Barfield ministers in oncological medicine, pediatrics, and Christian philosophy (here 5), and his new world-renown wonderful colleague Dr Allen Verhey (here 6) is involved; Verhey is a medical ethicist with a degree from the Free University in Amsterdam's in theological ethics (New Testament, and author of the modern classic in the field, The Great Reversal. Canadians of Protestant vintage, the UCHSS hospitals are in jeopardy financially. Please write to the Health Ministry in BC pleading for continued and increased support for these unique medical faciltiies, their Christian institutional religious freedom, and also ask your Church congregation to put these UHCSS medical facilties on the annual budget. Don't let them die! And ask them to throw in an extra buck to foster the UCHSS possible future partnership with Duke University's unique Protestant partnership between theology/spiritual life and medical science in an integral philosophical framework. Don't rely on the United Church of Canada's budgetary allocations either; they're already swamped with claims on their contributions and they are thus forced to weigh dispassionately the claims of all needy programs for the denomination's assistance. However, do recall the United Church of Canada's historic sin against Native Peoples in the residential schools, a brutul enforcement of the Canadian governent's program of assimilation of the peoples of the ancestral lands and tribes. United Church members individually give directly to UCHSS. May the Lord have mercy and, after our plea for foregivness thru our corporate involvement in past educational sins, bless us all medically and educationally. We were all sinners; we are all disabled. Full dislosure: I may be on the membershp roll of Bloor Street United Church, Toronto. At present, because of my anchorite monasticism and my alientaiton ecclesiastically, I often times call myself "Non-Church." My first choice for church membership woud be the Christian Reformed Church in North America, it's Canadian wing. But they are too homophobic, due to their adherence to a Reformed version of Scholastic philosophy and its resultant Consistent Ethic of Life. But there are more reformational philosophy-interested laity and clergy in the CRCNA than in the United Church of Canada which is not homophobic but constructs other obstacles to reformational thawt, Christian medical theology and practice, and renewal.
Look for further blog-entries on this blog unpacking ideas circulated here today.
— Albert Gedraitis
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