(Part One of many I am sure)
The Province of Alberta is introducing legislation that will allow people to pay for and receive health services outside of the public health system. Gasp. Astonishment.
I see no problem with allowing private health care. First of all, it's already allowed. Anyone fighting to preserve the public health system as it is is fighting to keep a haphazard, badly administered mix of public and private services, both publicly and privately funded. Private money already buys people better health care. In fact, most people see private money as essential to the system. If that wasn't the case, Liberty Health would not be in business. Private insurance buys you better health care. Private insurance is allowed, recommended and even demanded by employees who can get their employer to pay for part of the cost. There is no difference between a person paying extra for better service or a large corporation paying it on their behalf. It is still private money buying better service in a public system. So why no cries of outrage over this?
If I want to pay to have a surgery done quicker, I can do that. I have always been able to do that. What I haven't been able to do is to do that in Canada. For major surgery, I have to go to Detroit or Europe or South America if I'm feeling brave about the whole thing.
It seems a little silly to protect an inefficient, overcrowded public system by trying to keep everybody in it. The solution to an overcrowded highway is not to ban the use of any other road.
There are only two potential problems with a private system alongside the public system. The first is that all the doctors would go to the private system which people believe will pay doctors better. The other is that people using private care will demand tax breaks because they did not use the public system and therefore shouldn't have to pay for it.
The solution to this is to simply not allow a tax credit for private service by choice. That is, if you pay for a procedure you could have gotten for free in the public system, you can' t claim it on your taxes. It was a choice, not a necessity. What happens is that the public system has the same amount of money, but a few less people in line. Now, it would be hoped that the health authorities would use the extra cash to hire more people and thus open more beds than to pay existing staff more.
More people will use a private system if they get a tax credit. This is because the end cost is less if they get a break on their taxes at year-end. Without a tax credit, less people will be willing to pay the full cost. If less people use the private system, less doctors will work in it because there won't be enough work to keep them all busy. And that kind of takes care of both problems at once.
It is also interesting that governments talk about the devilry of private health care, when in fact they all support the idea one way or another. The federal government likes the idea of enforcing national standards and the public system as it is, but doesn't want to pay to make it work. They tell the provinces they have to do it the fed's way, but won't get the cash to do it.
Provinces, when facing a cash crunch, like to de-list services. This means that procedures which used to be covered now are not covered and people have to pay for them themselves. That means that they have created an expanding private health care system.
The Ontario College of Optometrists is now fighting to try to ensure private health care has to be paid for. Ontario delisted eye exams unless referred by a physician. Essentially, diseases of the eye will be covered, but eye tests measuring the health of your vision will not. Great Glasses and other companies offer free eye tests to their customers. The Ontario College of Optemetrists is against this notion entirely. They feel it is wrong for people to get a health service for free when they can have one of their members do it for pay.
Now, I wouldn't trust a store selling glasses to screen me for diseases of the eye, but I would trust them to get me the right strength of lenses. Unless someone can tell me that the same machine works better in an optometrist's office than it does in any other location.
So, what Ontario says to its residents is that only the government can provide health care...right up until the time it decides it doesn't want to anymore. It seems curious that as health-care costs increase, quantity and quality of services decrease.
Most people say that they don't like the American health-care system. Ours is better. I agree. But being better than the Americans doesn't mean that the system is the best we can get. Or godd, for that matter. Or even adequate.
I suspect what governments are afraid of is this. If private hospitals are allowed, (and would be using doctors and nurses of the same calibre as the public system because they will have been trained in the same places) and one of those hospitals provides better service than the public hospital down the street, people will start asking the government why they couldn't do that. When people then demand better from the public system, government will have to take off the blinders and retire the lie that our system is the best in the world. Clearly, it isn't. If it was, nobody would want even a hint of a private option. Then they might ask why the government spent so much time and money trying to keep other options at bay while letting the public system crumble piece by piece.
