Reversing A Mistake
Medical Care: Monday's headline from Reuters — "Soaring costs force Canada to reassess health model" — is a warning. In the not-too-distant future, the headline will be used again, except "U.S." will replace "Canada."
The Canadian health care model is irreparably broken. Rather than reassess, Canada would be better off rejecting in whole a system that is not delivering. The publicly funded, single-payer program provides universal care, but its rationing is also universal — and sometimes deadly — and its costs are simply out of the universe.
Western dabbling in socialism has shown that public health care systems funded by other people's money are unsustainable. The provision of "free" care is a losing game. Because it is perceived to be free, demand in such a system will outstrip supply. Costs can't help but rise.
No country is more well acquainted with this dilemma than Canada, which finds itself, Reuters reports, "taking tough measures to curb health care costs" which "could erode the principles of the popular state-funded system."
And it is popular. Last year a Harris/Decima poll found that 82% of Canadians preferred their government health care system over the mixed system found in the U.S.
Given the widespread, agonizing and sometimes fatal waiting lists that plague the Canadian system, this finding is baffling. Regarding their state-run health care as part of their Canadian identity might be a touching display of sentimentality, but it is also a stubbornness that has led to trouble.
The popularity of the system doesn't make it functional, though. In 2009, health care spending in Canada devoured 40% of the provincial governments' budgets and expenditures have been rising by 6% a year. At that rate, or even half that rate, it wouldn't be long before the provincial governments did nothing but fund health care. The Ontario government says health care spending could consume 70% of its budget within just 12 years.
"We are quickly hitting a point where either provinces can help educate our children, fix our roads and help our poor or they can maintain the status-quo in health care provision," Robert Silver, a Canadian lawyer who says he is "a big defender of aspects of our health system," wrote last year in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
Some of the blame can be placed on an aging population. Reuters reports that one-fourth of Canada's population in 2036 will be senior citizens. But it's the nature of the system, its near monopoly and its ambition to serve every Canadian, that makes it unsustainable. It has grown from 7% of provincial governments' spending in the 1970s to the 40% it is today merely because it is a government giveaway that people cannot get enough of.
To cope with the declining conditions of its health care system, Canadians are moving into a realm where a slim majority of U.S. lawmakers — all Democrats — no longer want Americans to tread: private care. Clinics operating outside of the government system, which were once banned by the law, have been opening across the country. The pace is likely to pick up as policymakers continue to wrestle with the budget problems of the state system.
Two years ago, Claude Castonguay, known as the father of the Quebec public health care system that became the model for the rest of the country, made what had to be a painful admission. Canada's socialist health care program, he said, had reached "a crisis point."
How many generations of Americans will have to endure a costly system of rationed and substandard care before Washington realizes that it set the country on a crisis course? The possibility that we will continue to be governed by party hacks who have learned nothing doesn't exactly inspire confidence on this front. The mistake of 2010 will be reversed only when there's been an extensive roster upheaval in Congress.
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