Establishing Rights
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– ESTABLISHING RIGHTS
Academics discrediting a simplistic testing tool used to take drivers’ licenses away from seniors and imposing an inhumane price in doing so, amounts to what critics say is a form of seniors’ abuse that is being tolerated by provincial authorities.
Yet nearly 10 years after the Simard MD has been scientifically condemned as junk science by science academics, the test is now also being promoted in various jurisdictions as a standard test, albeit deceptively, driver fitness.
In its presentation to Assistant Deputy Minister Lynn Varty and several of her department heads on January 11th, EAAS cited public health journal science about the concerns regarding the test from a scientific and therefore, a public policy standpoint as well. They also provided her with a lengthy report. We are still awaiting an indication from her how she plans to redress this problem.
Since that time, EAAS continues to learn of seniors whose families say they are unfairly losing their licenses to the same flawed test administered by private clinic practitioners who are in disregard of their duty to obtain informed consent.
It is being reported that seniors who have been subjected to the Simard MD test are then being blindsided by the requisite to complete a $498.75 private- for-profit DRIVERCHECK test (Impirica).
This development illustrates the risks associated with private-for-profit enterprise within the public health system when there is no possible justification for enshrining junk science into law.
“None of this was ever approved by government”, says Ruth Adria, executive director of EAAS. “In charging seniors almost $500 for the test, these requirements were never enshrined into law”.
While EAAS understands that the wheels of democracy must move deliberately and cautiously there should be an understanding that the loss of individual rights through the back door of revoking privileges facilitating access to life-maintaining services, especially in rural Alberta, is a carnivorous attack against people who built, and continue to build, this country. Nobody, regardless of age, is safe from this if it is allowed to continually erode the security of the individual through the tool of ignorance.
The provincial government, however seems content in maintaining its Schultz- like willful ignorance portrayed in the 1960s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. In its “I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know nothing” idiot Schultz prison guard mantra transmitted through the doctor’s office, tyranny is becoming a mesmerizing reflection in the eyes of our institutional leaders.
Darcy Grey
780 438 8314
Press secretary, Elder Advocates of Alberta Society