"Hopefully Americans will look at the human tragedies unfolding in Canada and Great Britain — and ... [+]
In my last column, I wrote that Canada's healthcare system was no model for the United States. Perhaps Canadian officials were listening.
Earlier this month, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that Canada's largest province would take a page from the U.S. playbook—and expand private care in order to provide some relief to the millions of Canadians waiting for treatment.
Ford recounted that a CEO had told him, "There's only two places in the world that have the health care that we have . . . Cuba and North Korea."
"We need to improve," Ford said. "So we're making the changes with the support of the CEOs and with the associations." Ford's push to expand private care is a necessary step out of the socialist wilderness. More importantly, it signals a shift in the popular consciousness. How can progressive Americans advocate for Medicare for All with a straight face when their beau idéal, Canada, is going in the opposite direction?
The Ontario premier has proposed a three-step plan to provide care to over 200,000 patients currently stuck in line for treatment. First, the province will reroute 14,000 cataract surgeries to new private healthcare facilities in three Ontario cities. Last year, patients in Ontario faced a median wait of 20 weeks to undergo cataract removal after being referred by a general practitioner, according to the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-based think tank.
Ontario will also invest $18 million in the province's private healthcare centers to fund gynecological and ophthalmic surgeries, as well as a variety of diagnostic tests. But according to Ford, even that sizable investment will only cut waits back to pre-pandemic levels, not eliminate them entirely.
That brings us to step three—issuing more licenses for private healthcare facilities to encourage their proliferation.
Critics, including unions who represent Medicare employees, say that Ford's plan will actually increase wait times and lead to worse outcomes for patients. This attitude is common among defenders of Canada's healthcare system. They claim that allowing private care will create a "two-tiered" system in which the wealthy pay to escape queues, leaving the truly needy stuck waiting for care.
But that system already exists in Canada. Canadians routinely leave the country to seek medical care that their public system can't or won't provide in a timely fashion. Canadians spent $690 million on health care in other countries in 2017 alone, a recent study found.
Many of those people are rich, famous, and powerful people who have the means to escape. In 2010, former Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams flew to the United States for heart surgery. "This was my heart, my choice and my health," Williams said. "I did not sign away my right to get the best possible health care for myself when I entered politics."
Canadian singer Michael Bublé decamped from Vancouver to Los Angeles in 2016 when his young son was diagnosed with liver cancer. His son received treatment, including chemotherapy, at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. Bublé credits doctors at the hospital with saving his son's life. Thankfully, his son's cancer remains in remission today. Millions of Canadians don't have the resources to flee to the United States for top-notch care.
The story is similar in Great Britain's government-dominated system. Just this year, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak caused a scandal after revealing that he had received private care while publicly singing the praises of the United Kingdom's socialized National Health Service.
Fortunately, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, it seems that all eyes are opened, or opening, to the false promise of single-payer health care. Hopefully Americans will look at the human tragedies unfolding in Canada and Great Britain—and make clear to progressive lawmakers that they have no interest in Medicare for All here.
