Recently, Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams, a strong supporter of Canada’s public health care system, decided to undergo heart surgery in the United States. When asked why he did not get treatment in Canada, he responded that he wanted to “get the best possible health care,” and “wanted to get in, get out fast, [and] get back to work in a short period of time.” These are damning words, and yet the Premier still claims to have “utmost confidence” in our health care system.
This mentality is symptomatic of a national derangement: we love our health care until we are sick and actually need it. At that point, we face the reality that the Canadian system is deeply flawed and inferior to American-style private health care.
Sick Canadians are confronted by a largely irresponsive, and at times inaccessible, bureaucratic health care monster. Simply finding a family doctor can take months, if not years, and wait times and wait lists for important surgeries are notoriously long. Premier Williams himself implied that getting quick treatment means “jumping a line.” It’s a testament to the failure of the system that many Canadians flee to America’s private health care system. In some cases, the government even sends patients to private hospitals in the United States. The Hamilton Spectator reports that Ontario alone paid for 12,000 of its residents’ medical cases in the United States in 2009 (with a projected cost of $164.3 million in 2010)!
Many Canadians imperviously respond that at least our health care is “free.” Nothing in life is free. We pay every day in exorbitantly high taxes. Example: my single mother makes about $48,000 a year, and the state plunders her for roughly $12,000 through federal, provincial, municipal, and property taxes. For what? To support social leeches like substance abusers and the homeless? That money could be used to buy cheaper and more effective private insurance, and at least those with unhealthy habits do not have to explain themselves to other taxpayers.
There are problems inherent to the public system because it produces a perverse incentive structure. First, doctors are in such high demand and receive such relatively low per-patient funding, that instead of competing for patients, they rather try to maximize the number of patients they see, but the quality of care does not improve. Second, patients want to get as much out of the system as possible. Under a public system, the state and taxpayers inevitably consider special needs children, the elderly, and the chronically sick as socially undesirable burdens on the system. Finally, fiscal constraints degenerate into a pretext for the government to stick its nose into how much I drink, eat, and smoke.
But it gets even worse: the health care system is morally indefensible. Conscientious objectors to abortion, for example, are not only forced to tolerate the practice, but are also coerced into paying for these $800 procedures through taxes. Health care in many provinces also funds such “life-saving” procedures as sex-change operations for a mere $20-30,000.
The entire health care system is predicated on confiscating resources from the reasonably healthy population, rendering them dependent on the state for medical treatment, and then screwing them over when they get seriously sick.
Some opponents of private health care allege that the poor die on the streets. The reality is that any private system is de facto a two-tiered system, because hospitals cannot refuse someone in need. If hippies and timid professors are so afraid of the private system, they should band together and form their own, social-justice-equality-peace-and-love health insurance. Oh wait, that would be like an evil insurance company maaan!
The raison d’être of the Canadian health care system is to redistribute money and wealth, which, in practice, restricts freedom and reduces efficiency and quality of care. Canadians simply cannot afford their “free” health care because it is predicated on ideology instead of the value of their health.
