Free and timely health care for all is fiction: Neil Macdonald - Politics - CBC News - 0 views
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How the system fails to live up to Canada's half-century-old social compact
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Earlier this week, Quebec's stolid health minister stood outside Montreal's dysfunctional new mega-hospital and effectively predicted what lies ahead for aging baby boomers.
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Hospitals have fixed budgets and must not run over them the way the mega-hospital has been doing, Gaétan Barrette warned. You can't just keep accepting patients and treating them once the money has run out. It won't be tolerated.
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Barrette, who is a doctor himself, might not be the canniest of politicians. Usually, Canada's elected leaders at least publicly play along with the fiction that every Canadian receives proper treatment, free of charge, in a timely manner.
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First, there is no "Canadian health-care system." There are a bunch of health-care systems, one per province, with all the inherent inefficiencies that suggests, partially funded by the federal government, which is supposed to oversee things, but gave up ages ago.
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The Conference Board of Canada says that if you live in Ontario, you get better health care than you do if you live in Quebec, where you will pay far higher taxes.
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Second, the system is somewhat corrupt; if you have influence or an elite education or some "in," you'll get better care than a fellow who doesn't.
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None of that, of course, is to mention all the Canadians who head to an American city (or somewhere like India) and pay, in order to circumvent Canadian waiting lists for other procedures.
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The oldest boomers are now 70, and it's at age 75 that people really start to soak up medical care. So will the system expand to accommodate the surge in need that's coming?
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But everyone knows you can pay for a private MRI scan in many parts of the country if you don't want to wait nine or 10 months or longer for one in a hospital.
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And if you don't want to languish in unbearable pain, there are places in Canada where you can buy a private hip replacement or orthopedic surgery. By and large, the federal government just pretends it doesn't see.
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The federal government, which has been increasing its health-care transfers to the provinces by six per cent a year, wants to cut back, claiming the provinces haven't been spending it all on health care anyway.
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As Di Matteo puts it: "If you are willing to let people cross the border and do it, why not give them the option in Canada, where they live" and save them the trip?
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Doctors remove a cyst from a male patient's knee at the Cambie Surgery Centre, a private clinic in Vancouver that's at the centre of a landmark case before the B.C. Supreme Court. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press)