The sad case of the 91 year old Surrey woman who was mistakenly taken to the morgue provides a fitting image of the Campbell government's approach to health care. That image may inspire the government's propaganda agency, the Public Affairs Bureau, to direct bureaucrats to measure hospital corridors and to count spaces in every morgue. Those spaces, combined with a count of one for every seven feet of uninterrupted wall space, could soon be added to the official bed count as the Campbell government struggles with its broken promise to build 5,000 long term care beds.

It's often been said that the surest way to lower health care costs is to directly connect the admitting room and the morgue while eliminating what lies in between, but doing that while a foot is still kicking is a little extreme even for this bunch. The driver for the private funeral home has taken the fall for the Surrey Hospital and Fraser Health Authority. The elderly woman's family is having none of it; according to the Vancouver Province a family spokesperson blames the Campbell cutbacks for the troubles that plague the hospital. The family may find that once set in motion the insensitivity of the health bureaucracy knows no bounds. The elderly patient slept through her ride in the hearse before she was returned to the extended-care facility in an ambulance.

The Campbell government recently contracted out collection services for such things as unpaid ambulance bills. Those who have the misfortune of requiring ambulance service know that a bill arrives three or four months after the ambulance call. You'd think that a government that is willing to turn its accounts receivable over to a U.S. collection agency would at least try to send its bills out promptly. Insult will be added to injury if the elderly Surrey woman receives an ambulance bill sometime in July for her March return trip from the morgue.