Mr. Zeliotis might just be reading my mind. I’ve long said that the only way to fix Canada’s ridiculous, socialist healthcare system was to let private enterprise (we, the people) have at it, and let them/us fix it.
The Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal roasts Canada’s decrepit system today in light of the Supreme Court ruling last week, and sends a snicker to Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton and other such blind leftists who reside down thatta way, in “Unsocialized Medicine – A landmark ruling exposes Canada’s health-care inequity”.
Let’s hope Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy were sitting down when they heard the news of the latest bombshell Supreme Court ruling. From the Supreme Court of Canada, that is. That high court issued an opinion last Thursday saying, in effect, that Canada’s vaunted public health-care system produces intolerable inequality.
Call it the hip that changed health-care history. When George Zeliotis of Quebec was told in 1997 that he would have to wait a year for a replacement for his painful, arthritic hip, he did what every Canadian who’s been put on a waiting list does: He got mad. He got even madder when he learned it was against the law to pay for a replacement privately. But instead of heading south to a hospital in Boston or Cleveland, as many Canadians already do, he teamed up to file a lawsuit with Jacques Chaoulli, a Montreal doctor. The duo lost in two provincial courts before their win last week.
And the OpinionJournal editors are nothing if not sensible, as they rattle off unCanadian-like common sense such as this:
The larger lesson here is that health care isn’t immune from the laws of economics. Politicians can’t wave a wand and provide equal coverage for all merely by declaring medical care to be a “right,” in the word that is currently popular on the American left.
There are only two ways to allocate any good or service: through prices, as is done in a market economy, or lines dictated by government, as in Canada’s system. The socialist claim is that a single-payer system is more equal than one based on prices, but last week’s court decision reveals that as an illusion. Or, to put it another way, Canadian health care is equal only in its shared scarcity.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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