The Canadian Cancer Society wants to bring palliative care to the forefront in the provincial election. They say that standards, training and funding are all lacking, and people are not receiving adequate end of life care in the province. As a result, with a provincial election looming, they’re pushing hard to get the political parties in the province to consider palliative care for their platforms.
They’re going to face a challenge, because it’s not an issue that engages voters. It can be argued that it’s an issue that should engage voters, but things like palliative care, assisted living facilities and senior care are always more difficult to get funding for and get people to care about. It’s not that we do not think they are important, in an abstract way, it’s that voters tend to be in denial that these are services they might want or need to use.
There is a certain fantasy that we will live to 103 with a minimal amount of medical attention, before getting shot by a jealous lover. Sure, we might need diagnostic equipment in a hospital – which will prove we are totally fine and have no diseases – or perhaps need additional staffing and doctors in our regions – who will cure us quickly and with a minimum of fuss – but the idea of actual end of life care is one that people like to avoid thinking about. It’s necessary, and many of us will have to use it down the road, but people don’t like thinking about their own mortality, so it shuffles to the bottom of the priority list as people deliberately try to forget about it. The people who need it most aren’t going to be long-term political supporters, and everyone else wants to fund things they will admit that they will use in the future.
Voters are more inclined to support projects where they can see some kind of benefit to themselves personally. It’s selfish, but it’s a natural inclination for most people. This is not a bad thing, and I don’t want to say it is. Keeping it within healthcare, a new piece of diagnostic equipment is something we can see benefitting us, but it’s going to benefit everyone else too, and it’s going to help in the detection and cure of many diseases people have within the area. It can also be argued that such equipment will make the palliative care funding less urgent, as catching diseases like cancer early make them easier to treat. Make no mistake, the programs we might fund in a selfish manner are still good programs, still necessary and are stuff that we are going to need.
The problem is that when you have a program which people will need but don’t want to admit they will need, it starts to fall by the wayside. While we can see the personal benefit of most healthcare projects, when it comes to palliative care we do not want to see the personal benefit. Palliative care is for people who are dying, and we aren’t dying, and somewhere in our minds believe will never be dying. Even if we are dying, it’s going to be decades upon decades into the future, so we can put off funding until it’s actually a problem for us. It will also never be a problem for us, because we’re not going to be dying, as already mentioned.
The result of this is that when something needs to get cut, or a program needs to be pushed to the edge in order to fund something else, it’s going to be palliative care. It’s the program that can be ignored in the face of other, more appealing programs that people will admit they want to use. That’s why it gets under-funded, and why the Canadian Cancer Society is trying to make it an election issue and get more visibility to the programs themselves. One can hardly blame the governments of the day for going with the programs that their support base prefer, and people want to think about their lives being saved, not ending.
The end result is that palliative care is being under-funded, since it’s always the program that voters want to think about the least. This isn’t to say that other programs are not valuable, because they definitely are, or that other programs didn’t deserve funding, because they definitely did. It might be selfish to always go for the feel-good programs, but given that those programs do benefit us and other people in the community, our selfishness does have benefits not only for us but for everyone else as well. Instead, it’s to say that we should also see a personal benefit in palliative care, and try to avoid pushing it to the sidelines because we don’t want another reminder of our own mortality. Yes, we are all going to live to 103, active and happy until that jealous lover grabs their shotgun. But if we’re wrong about that, we are going to want quality end of life care, and we are going to see the importance of that not only in our own lives but in those of people who surround us. After decades if pushing it into the corner, it might be time to consider making funding palliative care a priority, rather than pretending it doesn’t apply to us.
