Another National Post editorial to talk about today. This one is about fixing Canada’s health care system.
But of course we know that the solution is private enterprise, and the liberal-left in this country refuse to allow it to be fixed because it would therefore expose them as frauds and render them as useless. They’ve staked their whole mystique on this sick puppy.
So they just keep telling us the system is perfect—it just needs BILLION upon BILLION upon BILLION more taxpayer dollars to fit it. It’s perfect, yet it needs billions to fit it. Classic liberal politics.
Twenty eight countries in the world have universal-access health care systems just like Canada does (liberals hate it when I mention that fact!). Canada’s is the most wasteful and expensive on the face of the earth according to the most thorough study I’ve ever read about it. And health “outcomes” are often in the bottom half of all the statistics (liberals also hate it when I mention that fact!).
Because they’re so anti-American, and because liberals automatically assume everybody agrees with them, they think all Canadians are too, so they like to claim that changing our system would mean it would turn into an “American-style” healthcare system. Then they thrust of o’ these in your face as soon as the Liberal-Friendly Ad Firm from Quebec can put it together….
Which of course they follow-up with on o’ these (sad face of poor Canadian who “isn’t rich enough” to pay for vital operation for her three-year-old daughter in the new “Conservative Party’s American-style health system”)
And of course it’s all a lie. Nobody ever said we should go down that road, not that it would be the worst mistake in the world. France (the liberals’ beloved), Sweden (about as socialist as Canada but smarter in some ways), and Japan (sushi!) all have universal-access systems that combine private enterprise and public, and in many or even most cases have little or no lineups.
It is against the law for Canadians to spend their own money on their own basic health care for themselves and their families. Only North Korea and Cuba have similar draconian communist laws. Canada has a North Korean-style healthcare system—or what liberals like to call a “perfect system we can all be proud of, vote liberal.”
[…] Fixing the government hospital monopoly has been tried repeatedly, and failed each time. Nor is lack of taxpayer dollars the problem. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, total public health spending in the country has increased 75% in the past decade, after adjusting for inflation—yet over the same period, median waiting times have skyrocketed.
It’s clear that the best way to reverse this trend is to expand the number of private, for-profit caregivers operating within our single-payer system. While no one should have to worry whether he or his family can afford to get well, that doesn’t mean patients should have their options limited to government-run facilities.
Private hospitals and clinics, reimbursed by the government as part of our single-payer system, would help shorten waiting times because—unlike government-run hospitals—they have a built-in market-driven incentive to balance supply with demand. What is a waiting list, anyway, except an indicator of a market waiting to be tapped?
Notwithstanding politicians’ knee-jerk suspicion of any private involvement in the health care system, such reforms needn’t be frightening. Public payment coupled with private provision is favoured in much of Europe—and with the exception of Britain, waiting times are markedly shorter there than here despite an older population.
Five years ago, the Swedish government moved to privatize all care in the Stockholm region—clinics and hospitals alike. Already, the move has led to waiting times 25% to 40% shorter than in the old, statist system.
Despite federal resistance to altering the status quo, the trends are moving in this direction here as well. Indeed, some Canadians are so fed up with waiting lists that they are they are opting to pay twice just to get the care they need in a timely fashion—once to our universal system through their taxes, and again to an American surgeon or Canadian private clinic. Over the past 10 years, the share of health expenses paid for privately in Canada has risen from 27% to nearly 31%—and that doesn’t include the money spent by tens of thousands of Canadians annually for faster care south of the border. And Montreal, in particular, is witnessing the rapid expansion of private health centres, including hospitals and emergency rooms.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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