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

People walk toward the entrance of Maisonneuve-Rosemont hospital in Montreal on Sept. 17, 2024. The Canadian Press/Graham Hughes

Commentary

If you have never read William Watson’s book “Globalization and the Meaning of Canadian Life,” you should.

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.

A poll released last month by Navigator points to our torment. Consistent with recent trends, it showed that increasing numbers of us are losing faith in our system, as we are in most of our public institutions. Seventy three percent of us believe the systems (health care is a provincial responsibility) are in need of reform. Just two years ago, that number was 59 percent.

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.

Canadians with the financial ability to do so have been pouring across the border to the USA and paying for cancer treatments, heart surgeries, hip replacements—you name it—for decades. I personally know people who have travelled to Britain and paid for hip replacements there, and it’s fair to assume there are many other locations welcoming health-care-hungry Canadians. Statista estimates about 2 percent of us leave the country annually to buy foreign health care, with hip replacement hospitals and clinics in places close to the border such as Whitefish, Montana, apparently prospering.

A 2019 report by a health-care think tank, SecondStreet.org, indicated more than 217,000 Canadians had left the country to access medical services.

Even more confusing is that while last month’s Leger poll showed two-thirds of us unwilling to allow people to buy health care within Canada, an Ipsos poll conducted for Global News in January indicated that 42 percent of us would travel to the United States to buy health care, with even 38 percent considering doing so for emergency care.

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.

Worse, we have persisted in comparing ourselves only to the USA, while 17,000—you read that right—of us died on waiting lists for treatments and surgeries in 2022–23. That should have people crying out for change and for a national we-must-do-better conversation free from political pandering and scare tactics.

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.

In Germany, for instance, public health-care insurance—paid jointly with contributions from employers and citizens—is mandatory. People earning more than 69,300 euros a year may, however, buy additional private insurance.

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.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.