by Klaus Rohrich
November 8 2004
Public healthcare, THE defining Canadian value, is in the last stages of a terminal struggle against its own obesity. Our politicians believe they can revive and cure the patient by prescribing more of the same treatment that brought it to this state in the first place: "take $41 billion and avoid private care". You’d think that our so-called leaders would finally get it- Healthcare in Canada is on its deathbed!
Last week Nadeem Esmail, senior health policy analyst at the Fraser Institute, wrote an op-ed piece in the National Post that supported what I have been professing for the last decade, namely that healthcare in Canada in its current state is a total failure.
Mr. Esmail cites comparative analyses made between Canada and a number of other countries, including austria, Belgium, France, Japan and Switzerland, to name a few. His "startling" revelations establish four things: first, none of these countries spend as much per capita on healthcare as does Canada. Second, there are few or no waiting times for medical treatment in any of these countries. Third, they all have a publicly funded healthcare system from either public or private healthcare providers, and fourth, in all these countries patients make a token payment for treatment.
Canadian politicians are so lacking in imagination that all they can do is mouth the same stale platitudes decade on decade about the sanctity of keeping healthcare in public (i.e. government controlled and union-executed) hands. Just how effective are those hands? Here are some examples of current average waiting times in Canada for receiving medical care:
Time between seeing a GP and specialist- 81/2 weeks
Time between seeing a GP and receiving treatment from a specialist- 18 weeks
Time spent waiting for orthopedic surgery- 38 weeks (!)
Time spent waiting for cardiac surgery- 11 weeks
Time Europeans and Japanese spend waiting for treatment- 0 weeks
While Canada spends more on healthcare per capita than any other nation on earth and manages to provide mediocre care after long waits is unpardonable. The fact that the only ideas for fixing the problem involve doing more of the same is criminal. Clearly, the shibboleth of "socialized healthcare provided through public (i.e. non-profit) institutions" is only beneficial to one group, unions.
Ontario’s Minister of Health, George Smitherman, was musing on the possibility of allowing competitive submissions from private contractors for janitorial services in Ontario’s hospitals. The unions went nuts! Sid Ryan, the perennial point man for Public Service in Ontario, of course threatened a strike unless Smitherman immediately ceased and desisted this contemplation. Ryan’s reasons why this was such a bad idea were many and varied, but suffice it to say they covered the full gamut of the usual protectionist union guff, including that companies that make a profit cleaning hospitals will do a lousy job.
Maybe Ryan can tell that to the 600+ corpses in Quebec who died last year by contracting C. difficile, a germ usually acquired in hospitals where the hygiene is less than stellar. Mark Steyn put it most bluntly when he wrote "…if say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in diarrhea and then died." He ascribes the problem to unionized workers that can’t be fired for not cleaning properly, something that could be done with a private contractor. (are you listening, Sid Ryan?)
I wrote in these pages last May that the only way healthcare in Canada can be resuscitated is to radically change or scrap the Canada Health act. My opinion remains the same, only more so. We need to seriously entertain the idea of allowing the private sector to compete with the public sector in providing healthcare. We need to initiate user fees for healthcare services, so that those using the system understand that it isn’t really free. We also need to allow private clinics to open (as they already do in Quebec!) for those who can afford it, which will take some of the current pressure off the system, as those getting private treatment will shorten the waiting lists. Finally, we need to stop throwing good money after bad. What we’ve done to healthcare in Canada is akin to running headlong into a brick wall and then doing it again several times. as long as we continue to do this healthcare will continue to be a headache.