Peter Menzies: It’s Past Time Canada Got Off Its High Horse and Reformed Health Care

Yes, it’s 26 years old now, but its revelations regarding the number of things that Canadians believe about themselves that simply aren’t true still stand up.
The most prevalent and persistent of those myths has been that we have a superior health-care system because of the extent to which it minimizes—demonizes, even—private payment for and delivery of health care.
Almost half of us believe it’s harder to get medical care now than it was just a few years ago—little wonder when provinces like British Columbia are sending cancer patients across the border to get treatment.
The poll even shows that we are increasingly open to the private sector playing a greater role in the delivery of services which, considering that the overwhelming majority of doctors in the country operate private professional corporations, is a relief.
But still, we persist—overwhelmingly so—in our opposition to allowing anyone to buy medically necessary care (as opposed to cosmetic plastic surgery, for instance) because we believe it would allow the rich to be better served.
What is so bizarre about this belief—based on our misguided sense of superiority because we have universal health care and Americans don’t—is that we think that by not allowing people of means to “jump the queue” in Canada, we prevent them from jumping the queue. We don’t.
Others may interpret this differently, but it seems to me that while we persist in holding on to the myth of our public purity, moral superiority, and equity in delivery (we are only so in comparison to the USA, which ranks very poorly internationally for its health-care system), we are coming at last to accept the reality that our system as it stands cannot meet the needs of the citizens it is directed to serve.
That our ideology was getting in the way of our own health has been obvious for decades. Attempts at reform have been routinely punished by anti-private care activists shouting warnings of “American-style, for-profit health care” and “there won’t be enough doctors and nurses for public health care if we allow privates” that have too often gone unchallenged.
Practically every country in the world has a universally-accessible public health-care system that works in concert with a supplementary private system: Sweden, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia … the list goes on.
Politicians and others have been trying to figure out how to “fix” health care in Canada for decades. The pressures the system is feeling today have been forecast for just as long, but politics, ideological colloquialism, and fantasy have combined to prevent serious reform.
It’s far past time Canadians got off their high health care horse, took a long look at the world, and learned from it.