by Hal Newman<\/p>\n
I have a strange relationship with the Government of Quebec’s Health \tInsurance Agency. Every couple of years they declare me dead.<\/p>\n
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They don’t actually check to see if I have pulse. No one comes over to \tverify whether I’m breathing – or not. They don’t even send an Sp-3 form \tover to the house for any physician friends of ours to complete.<\/p>\n
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They just notify the Director General of Elections for Quebec that I no \tlonger require a Quebec Medicare card because I’ve ceased to exist. And then \tthe Director General of Elections of Quebec sends a note to tell me that my \tname has been stricken from the electoral list.<\/p>\n
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Then I call the Elections folks and assure them I am very much alive, still \tpaying my property, income and corporate taxes, still hold a Canadian \tpassport and have recently renewed all kinds of forms for other Quebec \tgovernment agencies including my driver’s permit and our vehicle \tregistration.<\/p>\n
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And then we talk about how strange a situation this is.<\/p>\n
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And I tell them about the last time the Health Insurance folks declared me \tto be null and void and no longer in need of a Quebec Medicare card. July 7, \t2007 was the last time this happened. Actually, it happens every couple of \tyears on randomly selected dates.<\/p>\n
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The Elections folks have a theory that some bureaucrat is jerking my chain \tbecause of the randomness of the dates. They say that if the notification to \tthem that I am pushing up the daisies was at least tied to the date my \tdriver’s permit expired, they could write this off as some kind of bizarre \tone-in-nearly-eight-million IT system error.<\/p>\n
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The apparent randomness of them receiving notification of my sudden \tdeparture from this address and this plane of consciousness leads them to \tbelieve that someone is deliberately tampering with my supposed-to-be-sacrosaint-data \tin their allegedly-secure database.<\/p>\n
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This does not give me the warm and fuzzies when I consider the future of \telectronic health records. You have to wonder how it’s possible for one \tcitizen’s records to be altered on an ongoing basis. And while the deletion \tfrom the ranks of the living strikes me as a very serious concern, the \tElections folks are aghast that someone could have their right to cast a \tvote eliminated in this manner.<\/p>\n
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They weren’t going to let this slide. They framed a strategy. They said I \tneeded to reach out to my local elected provincial representative and let he \tand his staff know what had happened. And if that doesn’t work they \tsuggested dropping a line to the Premier’s office. No one has the right to \tmess with your right to vote. Not in this Province. Not on their watch.<\/p>\n
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The good news is that I have been restored to the electoral list and can \tvote in the upcoming municipal elections. The bad news is that there is some \tconcern that I’ll be having the same conversation with the folks at the \tElections office in two years, give or take a month, when news of my death \tis greatly exaggerated once again.<\/p>\n
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Be well. Practice big medicine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Hal Newman I have a strange relationship with the Government of Quebec’s Health Insurance Agency. Every couple of years they declare me dead. They don’t actually check to see if I have pulse. No one comes over to verify whether I’m breathing – or not. They don’t even send an Sp-3 form over to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[26,23,24,22,25],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}