Health-care system is on life support
News
Posted By MINDELLE JACOBS
Posted 20 hours ago
The Fraser Institute, the think-tank derided by left-wing, big-government supporters, must be feeling vindicated.
For years, the fiscally conservative body has been calling for an overhaul of our teetering medicare system. A government-run monopoly over health care is unnecessarily expensive and inefficient and we don't get a lot of bang for the buck, the institute maintains.
On Monday, the cautiously analytical Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) came out with a report saying the same thing.
The sustainability of health care is the elephant in the room that Canadian politicians are terrified to face because recognition of the looming problem means commitment to change. And if there's one thing our politicians will do anything to avoid, it's a national debate over the future of medicare.
The OECD has dragged the issue out from under the carpet in a no-nonsense report that dispassionately discusses Canada's health-care deficiencies and proposes reasonable solutions that will give the left a migraine.
It suggests user charges to raise much needed revenue. Such a notion is anathema to the medicare purists who believe everything should be free.
The report also proposes a public/private health-care regime, including private health insurance. To those who believe a few tweaks to medicare are all that's necessary to sustain the system, the OECD study is surely heresy.
Too bad they haven't clued in that the world has changed since Tommy Douglas ushered in what became universal health care.
Canada is the only member of the OECD that prohibits people from buying private insurance for medically necessary procedures. The enduring myth is we have the best health-care system in the world.
Tell that to all the Canadians on surgical wait lists -- often in pain and unable to work or enjoy their usual daily activities. Someone needs to remind the blinkered ideologues praying at the medicare shrine that universal access doesn't mean getting on a wait list. It means reasonably prompt treatment.
The only way Canada has been able to maintain some control over rising health-care costs has been through rationing -- limiting hospital beds, diagnostic equipment and doctors, the OECD notes.
"With rapidly growing demand, rationing has been necessary and queues have been endemic," says the report.
In the long run, the soundness of our public finances will depend on how we manage our health-care system, it warns.
The Canada Health Act should be changed to permit private insurance for core services and mixed public/private contracts for doctors, the study adds.
"We think that it's important to get private providers into the system so that they could compete with public providers," Peter Jarrett, senior OECD economist, said in an interview Monday.
"If we don't reform the system to get better value for money, the choices facing ... finance ministers will be to either cut real muscle out of the health-care system or raise taxes."
We have options. Canada doesn't need to stick with a rickety Cuban-style health-care regime.
"The fact that we spend more than most countries in the OECD and get less in return should be an indication that we're not doing things correctly," says Brett Skinner, of the Fraser Institute.
We can't cure the patient, folks, until we cut out the rot.
And they came to this conclusion without even asking me what I thought