A lot of people with influence use it to jump the queue for healthcare in Ontario and they now can be seen to include celebrity journalists.
This can mean ordinary people with no special pull wait longer.
The way journalists can use clout has emerged because two of the most prominent in Toronto wrote about their involvement with the healthcare system.
Margaret Wente, a columnist with The Globe and Mail, described how she was helped to obtain a hip replacement quicker partly by ?pulling strings.?
She said her doctor told her she needed a hip replacement and the first surgeon she consulted was very grim and told her his waiting list was a year long.
The columnist decided to obtain another opinion and called ?a well-placed acquaintance,? who contacted another surgeon, who squeezed her in for an appointment within two days.
?At first, I felt uncomfortable pulling strings, but I got over it,? she wrote. ?After all, I would pull them for my mother.
?I found shortcuts. I asked for favours. At first, I felt guilty, but I was in pain and the pain was destroying my life.?
Through these and other means she found another specialist, who told her she would have to wait six months for the surgery, but she cried and he took pity and cut the waiting period in half.
She added her ?spiffy? new hip probably cost taxpayers around $4,000.
Christie Blatchford, now also a columnist with the Globe and Mail, actually did pull strings for her mother earlier, when she was writing columns for the National Post and used one to help her obtain a bed in the nursing home of their choice.
Blatchford wrote her mother was 83 and suffered from serious lung ailments including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and emphysema.
Her condition was deteriorating rapidly and she had been shuffled between several different nursing homes.
She wound up in a home in Toronto, which she liked and felt comfortable in, and one that had five empty beds.
She asked for one of the empty beds and the home was willing to give her one, but a community care access centre allocated beds throughout the area and prevented it.
It said there was a waiting list of about 8,800 for beds in Toronto and her mother was on that list and the journalist presumably would not want someone to jump ahead of her.
It offered the mother a bed in a far-flung suburb, but Blatchford looked at the empty beds and could not see the logic in her mother having to go elsewhere.
The columnist wrote about this and charged the system was mismanaging beds and was able to report in another column a few days later it was allowing her mother to stay in one of the home?s empty beds.
?It turned out that health ministry staff read the piece and worked all day to find a better solution,? she concluded.
The Ontario health minister of the day, Progressive Conservative Tony Clement, also phoned to check everything had turned out to her liking, not a service anyone can get.
The outcome turned out well for the columnist and her mother, who was in circumstances that deserve sympathy, but while there should be no empty beds, it also can take some time to transfer in the appropriate patients.
Those who have jumped healthcare queues include Mike Harris, then Conservative premier, and he got some flak for it.
Many doctors also allow family members, friends, friends of friends, other doctors, nurses, medical secretaries, laboratory technicians and
government officials, among others, to jump their queues.
One argued recently this is no different than knowing who to call to obtain a table in a crowded restaurant or tickets to a sold-out concert.
But there is a difference, because healthcare is an essential service and there should not be better access to it for a privileged few - even if they
include such highly valued members of society as newspaper columnists.
