Stephen Skivington’s This May Hurt a Bit exposes Canada’s healthcare system as a bankrupt, one-tier illusion—projected to cost baby boomers $4,000 more in care than taxes paid, millennials $18,000 extra, and Gen Z $27,000 by 2030—while ignoring obesity, diabetes, and dementia "tsunamis." A former Sun TV advocate and doctor’s lobbyist, he debunks myths like Tommy Douglas’s legacy and the Canada Health Act’s fairness, proposing radical fixes: a federal super ministry, legalized medical tourism, and ending political lies. Despite 75% of Canadians wanting choice, unions and partisan groups block reform, wasting $30M in BC to crush private clinics while patients languish. His book blends humor with urgent calls for generational unity to force change before the system collapses. [Automatically generated summary]
You're listening to a free audio-only recording of my show, The Gun Show.
My guest tonight is Stephen Skivington.
He's the author of a new book called This May Hurt a Bit: Reinventing Canada's Healthcare System.
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Is an aging population and our bad lifestyle choices about to hit Canada's healthcare system like a tidal wave?
How do we get out in front of this mess and improve the quality of care that Canadians receive?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
In Canada, it is only politically acceptable to do one thing when addressing the problems within our healthcare system.
Throw money at it.
After decades and decades and really decades of shoveling Canadian tax dollars into the furnace of the healthcare system just to be burnt up, wait times are as long as they've ever been, and more and more Canadians are still traveling to the United States to get timely, efficient, quality health care despite paying for healthcare through their taxes here at home.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
And I would suggest how Canadians approach healthcare, at least politically speaking in this country, is absolutely insane.
I think it's time to try something different.
And so does my guest tonight.
Stephen Skivington knows about the problems within Canada's healthcare system firsthand.
He experienced them after a major health scare that left him near death.
After that wake-up call, he started examining the healthcare system to find solutions and innovations to problems he saw with his own eyes.
And then he wrote a book about it.
Author Stephen Skivington joins me tonight in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon.
So joining me now from Coburg, Ontario is Stephen Skivington.
He's the president of Polytrain, but he's also the author of a book that came out earlier this year, in February, I suppose.
The book is called This May Hurt a Bit: Reinventing Canada's Healthcare System.
Hey, Stephen, thanks for joining me.
I just read your book.
find it very, very fascinating because I think you're having a conversation that at least the people in power from all political parties, we're all guilty of this, they think we shouldn't be having.
But you wrote an entire book that not only details the problems with the Canadian healthcare system, but solutions as well.
But you also have an interesting story about why.
you wrote the book and what prompted writing the book.
Well, I've been doing this for probably 24 years.
And I think back when I appeared on the old Sun TV with Charles Adler in 2012 was probably what kicked this off.
In fact, we didn't even have a name for private parallel health.
We didn't call it hybrid healthcare back then.
And that video is still available up on YouTube.
Now, when I dropped dead about three or four years ago, and I'm in the back of the ambulance, and I said to myself, well, if I make it to the hospital and get through this, I'm going to finally write this book.
So that was sort of the genesis of how I came to put all these thoughts together.
But we also, I did three sessions with Dr. Minbasseter, with his excellent team and Simplexity thinking system.
And what's really great about this system is it helps you identify what the real problem is and then work out solutions.
What we're seeing, and we're seeing it right now in this run-up to the election campaign, we have all these different parties are coming up with the political solution to the political problem.
It's not the solution to the actual problem.
You know, whether it's pharmacare, whether it's hallway health care, in each case, they're doing exactly what Judge Justice Emmett Hall did back in the 60s.
He identified the wrong problem.
He worked on the problem of how do we keep people from losing their house and going bankrupt when they get sick.
And that's a very different problem than how do we create a healthcare system.
So what we've ended up with, of course, is an insurance scheme.
We don't have a healthcare system.
We have an insurance scheme.
And I just suggest it's a badly run insurance scheme.
And the other problem, too, is it's really a sickness system.
It's not a healthcare system.
And so throughout the book, what I've tried to do is present the history of how we got into this mess, look at some of the various aspects of healthcare.
A little interlude section where I talk about doctors specifically and doctor bashing and all that stuff.
Then I look at the law of unintended consequences, five things that governments have done that really have backfired.
And then yes, in the big fix section, which is the biggest part of the book, that's where I come up with my 10 solutions.
And again, I'm using Min Basseter's Simplexity skeleton in which I say, you know, how might we, why would we want to, what's stopping us from for all 10.
And so it is a book that was meant to come out at this time.
The goal being I wanted to make healthcare the number one election issue in Canada as we ramp up to October 21st.
And, you know, I refer to it when I'm out on social media as I'm looking for people to read the book and join the revolution.
And of course, I famously said in an article about two years ago, we need a healthcare Arab Spring in Canada.
And I really do believe we knew we need a revolution because the system belongs to us, we the people.
It doesn't belong to the politicians or the civil servants or any of those people, but we've actually got to stand up and fight for this.
Now, that's a little bit difficult for you because I've been following your social media a little bit and you're being entirely shut out of these healthcare conferences.
You've written a book that carefully examines the history and the solutions of how we came to be in this healthcare mess where wait times are getting longer no matter how much money we throw at the problem.
And you've had a personal experience with the healthcare system, so you understand this from the inside, and yet you're not being invited to these conferences because you're offering a solution that is different than just keep throwing money at this.
Yeah, there's kind of a cottage industry of these people who are called upon not just to go to these conferences, but also to, you know, sit on committees and be part of royal commissions and all this.
And, you know, it's funny, I am, of course, a spin doctor, a political strategist, a campaigner.
And we always laugh that people only remember who fixes the problem.
They don't remember who caused it.
And even if the people that fix it are the same people that caused it.
So I find it amusing.
Two things I find amusing is how many of the people that caused trouble in the Peterson, Bob, Ray, and Harris years are still out there now being touted as the great, you know, the great gurus who are going to solve all this.
And then the other thing is I am laughing at, you know, I'm watching the Ford government here in Ontario, and I'll certainly watch closely with what happens with Jason Kenney.
But I almost wish it was mandatory that they read my book because they're doing the exact same things, making the exact same mistakes, stepping in the exact same cow paddies.
And, you know, it's frustrating for me because I lay out in the book what was done, what could have been done.
And, you know, one of the great problems that we have is that we have a massive math problem or an accounting problem or an actuarial problem.
And it's interesting that, you know, we had all this talk about climate emergency.
There may or may not be a climate emergency.
There's definitely a healthcare emergency.
And by 2030, we're going to be in huge, huge trouble.
And the math problem is this.
And it alarms me that the millennials and the iGens aren't paying attention because they figure out I'm healthy.
I don't need to care about healthcare.
One of the studies I talk about in my book, I'm a baby boomer, just turned 60.
I'm going to use $4,000 more health care than I pay for with my taxes in my lifetime.
The millennials will pay $18,000 more in taxes than healthcare received.
And the iGens will pay $27,000 more in taxes than healthcare received.
Like, I'm sorry, I don't care who you are.
That just, that math doesn't work.
And to pretend, you know, I'm watching the liberals and the NDP, and they're trying to outdo themselves with their election candy bribes, whether it's what we're going to do with pharmacare, what we're going to do with healthcare, we're going to cover this, that, and the other.
And I'm sorry, but McGuinty had that famous line about there'll come a day where we can only afford the Ministry of Health and we still won't be able to afford the Ministry of Health.
And that's exactly what's happening.
So unless you're okay with every road being a tow road, every school being a private school, being no money for infrastructure, no money for government programs, autism, whatever, that's what's going to happen because 80 to 90% of the budget by 2030 is going to be taken up by healthcare.
Those aren't my numbers.
That's just the reality.
So the number one solution I come up with, and I deliberately put it first, is stop lying to us.
You know, my campaign is to get the politicians and the civil servants and the doctors for Medicare and this group and that group and the coalition of whatever, whatever, tell the truth.
Stop lying.
We're never going to have this adult conversation that we need to have right now in the run-up to the election if we're just going to run around and lie, make believe and pretend and unicorns and rainbows.
We have a serious problem.
And that doesn't even include the three healthcare tsunamis I talk about in the book, obesity, diabetes, and dementia.
Any one of those three, which could wipe out the treasury.
We aren't even having that discussion yet.
So, I mean, it's just utter madness to run around and pretend that we have the best healthcare system in the world.
We absolutely do not.
Well, and, you know, you speak to the dishonesty.
And that's one of the things that really irks me about the conversations Canadians have around healthcare.
The NDP here in Alberta, they threw more money at healthcare and wait times got worse.
And then they fearmonger that Jason Kenney is going to come into power and burn down all the hospitals, lay off all the nurses, fire all the doctors, when I suspect he's probably going to do more of the same because it is a political hot potato to address innovating within the system.
And it sort of seems like evidence be damned.
All you have to do is look right next door at Saskatchewan where they have some private innovations happening in their healthcare system and they're seeing real tangible results in their wait times, but that's just not a conversation most provinces can have.
And why do you think that is?
Well, politicians are motivated by fear.
I wrote about this recently.
And, you know, we had this discussion about touching the third rail and embracing a parallel private healthcare system, the hybrid solution, would be touching the third rail and that would be suicide for any politician.
Well, I argue that in order for the trains to run at peak efficiency, you have to touch the third rail.
And I would argue that in order for our healthcare system to operate at peak efficiency, we have to touch the third rail and embrace the hybrid solution.
And so the irony is that all the polling I've seen shows that three quarters, 75% of Canadians want choice.
They want the hybrid solution.
They don't want what is being offered.
And yet, and I think in many ways it's because a lot of this is being driven by unions.
A lot of these groups are being backed by unions, backed by NDP types.
So I find this really obscene.
In British Columbia, where Dr. Brian Day is having his charter challenge, the British Columbia government spent $20 million on 20 lawyers in the first six months of that trial.
And Brian Day was able to mortgage his CAM surgery and raise some money through private Canadians giving money, raised $2 million for two lawyers.
They have since, I understand the number is now $30 million.
And by the way, this is not NDP money.
This is not money out of somebody's pocket.
This is taxpayer dollars being used to keep people sick and in pain and dying on wait lists.
And the even better part is they tried to pass a law that no one would know what the number was.
So of course I went on social media and told what the number was.
Why Quality Matters in Healthcare00:15:22
I don't care if they want to put me in jail, go for it.
But this is a kind of sick, absurd business.
And you know what's really funny?
People will say one of two things.
You want to get rid of the public system and replace it with a private.
Well, no one, Brian Day, myself, we've never said anything of the sort.
And of course, the other classic is you want a U.S. style two-tier.
You know, we're number 30 in the U.S. is number 36.
Why would we want to embrace their system?
And then the final one is people say, well, this is just for the rich.
This is so the rich can have a second tier.
Well, the rich already have a second tier.
It's called America.
You know, the rich don't need this.
The middle class, the baby boomers, and frankly, we are the ones that are going to end up driving this.
There's no doubt because baby boomers aren't going to be waiting these crazy amounts of time for hips and eyes and knees and all this stuff.
They will want choice and they will force it.
But the irony is, and I've been waiting to see if maybe Mad Max was going to be the guy, if a politician, a leader, a party would come out and say, we're embracing this.
We're going to tell you the truth.
We're going to have that adult conversation.
And here's reality.
And here's why we have to do this.
I think they'd win a landslide, frankly.
And so it's, you know, you look at pharmacare.
You know, pharmacare is another good, I'm anti-pharmacare.
I pay $500 a month out of my own pocket for medicines because of my bad lifestyle choices.
And I don't think it's fair that Canadians should have to fund my bad lifestyle choices for all the pills I'm on.
But pharmacare is interesting because instead of stopping and saying, why are people on all these medications?
Like instead of actually figuring out what's the real problem here, it's like, again, how do we keep people from going bankrupt?
How do we keep people from having to choose between filling their prescription and eating?
So we're coming up with solutions that are the wrong solutions that will bankrupt us.
We've already seen people, frankly, people are on way too many meds as it is.
And we've seen the opioid crisis.
But again, it's election candy.
Oh, I'm getting free pharmacare.
Well, no, you're not.
You're going to be paying.
I mean, it's just absurd.
It's obscene.
And this is what they get away with.
And you know, one of the great reasons politicians get away with is because our wonderful doctors and nurses and other healthcare providers, unlike normal people, have been sticking their fingers in the hole in the dike for the last 20 years, trying to keep the whole thing from collapsing.
A normal person would let it collapse 20 years ago.
And we could have had this debate 20 years ago.
Now we're really up against it because we've only, as I say, got 10 or 11 years before the whole thing goes in the tank.
And had our healthcare professionals not tried to keep the politicians from sinking, keep the boat from sinking.
And so the politicians say, hey, it's great.
It's working.
Nothing to see here.
And so this is why we end up with what we end up with, throwing money at the political problem instead of the real problem.
And hallway healthcare is a classic because you hear a lot about this in Ontario.
I'm sure you'll hear this everywhere.
So we've seen this for years, but the latest one is Doug Ford's government is going to throw a lot of money at hospitals to open more rooms in the hospitals.
Well, that's solving the political problem.
That's not solving the problem.
They did a great study.
They referred to it as bedblockers.
I hate that term.
It's actually alternative level of care patients is what we're talking.
9% of the so-called bed blockers were causing 40% of the bed blocking because they were suffering from dementia, obesity, and other problems.
So our homes, our nursing homes, et cetera, are not set up to deal with dementia.
They are not set up to deal.
They don't have the machinery for dealing with obese patients.
And of course, the personal support workers blow out their backs and knees.
That's the problem you need to solve.
And we should be increasing our long-term care facilities, building more of those, building more of those rooms.
The problem is do not open more hospital rooms and then take the people out of the hallway and shove them in there.
That's just solving the political problem.
So again, my book goes in great detail with all of this.
And what's fascinating is that people that work in the healthcare system or have had encounters or their families had encounters read the book and say, wow, you really nailed it.
People who had no encounters with their healthcare system, who think we have the best system in the world, I think it was Christine Blatchford said, people who've never used our system say it's the best in the world.
They read it and they go, wow, I had no idea about any of this stuff.
Wow, I thought it was actually, it would be there for me when I need it.
And now I see it's not going to be.
And those are basically the two main reactions I get.
Yeah, you know, your book does quite a bit of myth-busting, those kind of common myths that we hear about the Canadian healthcare system that are just sort of floating around the ethos of the American media.
And in particular, the American left-wing media.
I wrote some of them down because I think a lot of Canadians are confused by this too.
The idea that the Canadian system has to be publicly funded under the Canada Healthcare or the Canada Health Act isn't true.
It just needs to be publicly administered, right?
Correct.
Oh, there are there are lots of, you know, it's funny, even I who've been doing this for 24 years, learned things in researching.
I had no idea the Canada Health Act was a finance bill.
It's got nothing to do with healthcare.
They slapped in, Tommy Douglas actually had in his version eight principles and they chose to use five of them.
They left off responsible, effective, and I believe efficient were the other three.
And of course, my big bugaboo is they left off quality.
And so what I say is, how can you not have quality is one of the five.
If I had died on the waiting list with my heart trouble, that would have been just as good as if I had a successful solution.
In fact, actually, one of the docs said, actually, it would have been better if you had died because then you would have ended up costing the system even less money trying to keep you alive.
I liken it to this.
And maybe, you know, and again, I'm not a policy wonk.
I'm not a professor.
You know, I'm just like one of you.
If one of you had been dropped in the jungle and then came back 25 years later and reported on what they saw, like a war correspondent, that's how I see myself.
And so if you have a severe problem, a heart or whatever it is, or a car accident, it's like being at the Indy 500 and pulling into the pit.
And this wonderful crew works on you and saves your life and does whatever has to be done.
That's our healthcare system at its best.
But if you don't have a life-threatening problem, if you need like a knee or a hip or whatever it might be, then it's like when you're in a big city and it snows, big blizzard, right?
And they plow the main streets, but if you happen to live on a side street, you don't see a plow for three or four days.
That's what our healthcare system is.
And so until you get in there and encounter it, and I have all these people who say, well, I had a heart attack and they saved my life.
And absolutely.
But how about the waiting list?
And some of these waiting lists are absurd.
A waiting list, four and a half years to see a neurologist to determine what is causing your headaches.
Well, what is causing your headaches could be a tumor.
And so, you know, Bernie Sanders, that's what you want to imitate.
You know, I get Dr. Daniel Martin going down there and pushing, no, we love the Canada system.
It's the best.
You should imitate it for your Medicare for All Act.
And when Bernie came to Canada in the book, I likened it to going around door to door with Dr. Martin and Kathleen Wynne at Halloween.
It wasn't your Halloween, getting little candies.
They had everything set up.
So, oh, look at this.
This works perfectly.
No waiting lists and all this stuff.
So, you know, my great concern is that the lies have now become so entrenched and people have so wrapped themselves in the flag, the patriotic flag of the Canada Health Act.
You know, people, you're wrapping yourself in a finance bill that was meant to ban extra billing and co-payments and that sort of thing.
That was the only reason that was brought out.
And to somehow think that, you know, 30 plus years later, 35 years later, it's not time to do something about that.
even in the case of the Medicare Act from 1968, you know, 50 years later.
How can you possibly think that things haven't dramatically changed in that time and that those two pieces of legislation are still relevant?
Yeah, I mean, again, you go back to the lies that just become repeated so often that they become truth.
One of them that I wrote down again is that Tommy Douglas was the father of modern health care.
That's really not the case, but it's become so entrenched in the Canadian psyche that he was voted the greatest Canadian ever based on a half-truth about his past.
And then the other one that you had in your book was that the Canada Health Act ensures one tier of health care for everybody.
That's not true.
You suggest that there's probably 10 or 15 tiers of health care.
Oh, yeah, there's the workers' compensation tier.
There's the RCMP tier, the Friends of Friends tier, the Friends of Doctors tier, the athletes tier.
And what's most irksome is the prisoners tier.
Dr. Day has pointed this out in his charter challenge.
Can Canadians possibly think it's a good idea that prisoners get better health care and quicker access and drugs paid for and so on and so forth in a way that we don't?
Like that is total absurdity.
You know, I could make the argument that, okay, it's all right to have a workers' compensation tier because you want to get them back to work as fast as possible.
And then you're not paying government money taxpayer dollars.
But even that, you know, this game of pretend, this let's pretend, you know, this absolutely has to stop.
One of the things, and you know, you go back to your earlier point about the other side is definitely trying to muzzle me.
There's no doubt about it.
And I fully expected that.
They're doing the same with Dr. Day and others.
But one of the ways we get around that is I'm trying to create an institute of healthcare reform and innovation.
And I don't see it as a bricks and mortar thing.
I'm seeing it as at the moment be a virtual thing.
So I'm trying to find investors and other people and ordinary Canadians to put about, I'm trying to, I need about $10,000 a month to do this because I want to go around giving speeches and making appearances.
Obviously, I'm doing that on whatever level I can in kind of the southern Ontario at the moment.
And I absolutely want to get into the States and do this, certainly in the run-up to next year's election, as we see with both Bernie Sanders and the Medicare for All Act, all that kind of stuff.
You know, I'm doing what I can to try and get Americans to click on the link and read the book.
But I need people that believe in what I'm saying and who really want to have this choice.
The slogan, I say fund it or free it.
And that's really, you know, they can't fund it, they won't fund it, so they really should free it.
And we should have this choice.
So if there's anyone out there who can get in touch with me who wants to get behind this, I'm absolutely looking for like-minded people because we need to find a platform, whether it's a better website, whether it's, you know, I sort of look at Jordan Peterson as the model for this.
He started kind of slowly too, and then started broadcasting and making public appearances and the whole thing just exploded.
I view this as the same thing because it's one of those topics where, you know, it's easy for politicians, you know, right now we've got politicians, you're talking about the economy, your tax cuts, or the environment, or this, that, and the other.
And nobody is talking about healthcare.
And they're sort of being dragged now.
Okay, so the Liberals say, well, here's our pharmacare plan.
You'll see it in eight years.
And then the NDP says, well, we've got a pharmacare plan that we're putting out now and we're going to cover boom, boom, boom, and boom.
And, you know, somebody else is going to come out with something else.
Andrew Scheer at least is being sensible enough to not say, here's our candy.
You know, he's trying to be reasonable.
And of course, the voters, if the voters don't want to still get lied to all the time, stop eating the candy.
You know, it's bad for you.
It makes your tummy hurt and it rots your teeth.
Stop taking these bribes of election goodies and stand up.
You know, what I really wanted to do is to get as many Canadians as possible to read my book.
So when the candidates come to the door and they say, well, I'm for Medicare, I'm for one-tier.
You know, if you're saying you're for the status quo, then what you're really saying is you're in favor of U.S.-style two-tier healthcare, because that's what the status quo will lead to.
If you want to make sure that we don't end up there, then look at my 10 solutions, all of which are very doable, and embrace.
And by the way, I'm really excited about this.
I was invited by Concordia University on September 27th, and anybody can sign up for this, by the way.
It's a one-day course.
We're going to do a workshop on my Big Fix 10 solutions.
And the people who come are going to be able to work on one or two of those solutions all day and figure out, for example, how would you take Canada's 14 health ministries and roll them into one super ministry at the federal level?
How would you set it up so that we could have medical tourism where people come here instead of Canadians going elsewhere?
And so on and so forth.
So that's going to be quite an event.
And you can find it on the web quite easily.
Just Concordia University, you know, Stephen Skivmington, this may have heard of it, whatever.
It's September 27th.
Do show up for that if you can make it, because I think that's going to be a very exciting day.
We're going to invite the media, make sure.
And the beauty of that is it's either just before or just after the writs dropped.
So that may be my best chance to make this a big election issue.
I'm hoping so.
Before I let you go, I want to ask you two questions.
The second one is easy.
Maybe the first one is easy too.
What does your ideal Canadian healthcare system look like?
Well, first of all, I don't think we should just imitate some other country system.
I mentioned before we're 30, the Americans are 36.
We shouldn't go and imitate number one or two, whether it's France or Germany or Switzerland or Sweden.
I think we have enough brains to build a made-in-Canada healthcare system and that we should do that.
We should certainly look at what other people have done.
But our situation is somewhat unique here.
And I talk about as you go and read the history of how we got to where we are.
I think that our healthcare system, you know, I make 10 suggestions.
I would ideally like to see all 10 of those things happen.
I think quality, as I said, should be a part of the Canada Health Act if we're going to actually keep the Canada Health Act.
10 Suggestions for Healthcare Reform00:04:53
But again, using Dr. Minbassador's Simplexity system, if we identify the real problem and then work towards solving the real problem, we can do this.
You know, we could have done this 50 years ago, but we keep identifying the wrong problem.
And it's not the political problem that we want to solve.
It's the actual, how do you fix this?
How do you create a healthcare system that isn't just an insurance scheme?
That's our challenge.
And my second question for you is: how do people find the book?
How do they get in contact with you?
If they want to support your efforts going forward, how do we impart some more of this valuable information to the rest of the Canadian public?
It's in libraries, actually around the world.
I'm quite surprised at where this book has ended up.
Every Indigo chapters across Canada has a minimum of three copies.
I am starting in Southern Ontario doing book signings and events.
We've got actually a big event coming up on the 24th of June at the Toronto Metro Toronto Library, the big research library downtown.
I believe it's 6 o'clock Monday, June 24th.
You can go to Amazon.
It's been the number one bestseller in several categories on Amazon.
It's available as a trade paperback and as a Kindle e-book.
I laughingly call myself the Don Cherry of healthcare, and I thought it would have been fun to have Don Cherry do the actual audiobook if there was going to be one.
And as far as getting in touch with me, s skivington at bell.net is my email.
So it's S S K Y V I N G T O N at B E L L dot N E T. I'm on Twitter at s skivington.
I'm on Facebook.
I think that's Stephen Skivvington.
Believe me, if you go to Google, there's all kinds of, I'm everywhere, media that I've done or people attacking me, which is always my favorite.
It's not hard to find me.
And of course, every Saturday, I'm on News Talk 1010 in Toronto from 1 to 1.30 on Ted Wallison's show, in which I talk about sort of the political events of the day.
And that's, you know, just Google in News Talk 1010, you'll find me there.
So that's always, that's sort of my version of Coach's Corner.
And it's like, people keep saying, oh, I want more Skivington.
I said, no, trust me, my wife will say 17 minutes a week.
A week is more than enough Skivington.
She's got me 24 hours a day.
That's more than anybody should have to put up with.
Well, I should introduce your wife to my husband.
He feels the same way.
Well, Stephen, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show.
Hopefully we can have you back on maybe after the summer, after, or in the lead up to the election, even, as more of the candy announcements are made.
And yeah, I want to thank you for being bold and brave enough to have these tough conversations about healthcare because a lot of people are not.
Well, I always laugh that I wish someone would hire me to teach journalism because everyone thinks I'm so cool because I break all the rules and they don't realize I don't know what I'm doing, which is why I gave me all the rules.
But, you know, just two things.
With all the articles I published, they were always like little short stories.
And this book is like a novel.
People, when they read this, and I always love those novels where a guy comes into a bar and starts telling his life story to a stranger.
So in this case, we're not coming into a bar.
We're doing the most Canadian thing, going for a walk in the woods.
And on that journey, I tell basically the story of Medicare and all of the things that people probably don't know.
But it's actually a very funny book.
It's full of war stories.
I've, of course, been the doctor's lobbyist for many, many years.
And there's all kinds of things in there that will make you laugh.
And that, you know, I talk about what it's like to be on following a piece of legislation on a committee tour and so on and so forth.
So I think people will actually find it very enjoyable and funny.
But it makes a lot of serious points.
And I hope people will read it.
I read my copy.
I read it again in the lead up to this interview.
And yeah, it's, I don't want to say easy read because it's pretty informative, lots of information, but you're imparting information to people in a way that you don't even realize how smart you're getting till you're done.
So that was great.
Steve, I want to thank you so much for, sorry, Stephen.
I shouldn't shorten your name on you.
I want to thank you so much for coming on this show.
And I want to thank you for being so generous with your time for me today.
Finding Way for Healthcare Transformation00:01:09
And again, I hope we can have you back on.
Oh, I'd love to.
It'd be my pleasure.
Thank you.
Along the way, the people who are going to be using our health care system more than anybody else, the boomers, need to find a way to convince the younger people and millennials to help them transform the health care system.
The users and then the people who are paying for it all have to find a way to come together and put pressure on their politicians to try something new and innovative.
These two demographics are not known for working together on common causes, but they are going to have to be the ones to create the so-called parade for healthcare change so that some politician can jump in front of it and claim to lead it all.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
As always, I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.