Our Sacrosanct Health Care

There's been a slow and steady erosion of timely provision of health services in Canada over the past decade and more. Leaving far too many vulnerabilities in an obviously over-stretched and inadequate system. One that worked remarkably well for generations, relieving Canadians from the fear of not being able to acquire the medical treatments they need when they needed it, at a cost families could never quite afford.

When the original federal health care act was brought into law, many Canadian doctors were furious at the anticipated interference in their profession. There were dire warnings that the system of universal health care availability would collapse, would never work. Experience proved otherwise, and eventually most doctors lapsed into acceptance. Some, indeed, are now among the most enthusiastic advocates of continued, unalloyed, public health care.

They appear to be dwindling in number, however. Roughly approximate, one supposes, to the numbers of ageing practitioners. And in tandem with the certain knowledge that the system is stumbling into failures on many fronts. Not the least of which is the ageing of public infrastructures and equipment, right along with the doctors. Along with a top-heavy bureaucracy that cannot seem to control expenditures.

The increasing cost of increasingly-prescribed tests and pharmaceuticals. The inescapable fact that the country has an unfortunate dearth of general practitioners, made all the more desperate by the large numbers of soon-to-retire physicians, leaving far too many people dependent on walk-in clinics, without the comfort of a family physician. The result of a truly unfortunate decision a decade and a half earlier to churn out fewer medical practitioners.

And isn't it telling that the Canadian Medical Association has elected to its presidency two medical practitioners in swift succession who own private health care practises. The first, Dr. Brian Day who advocated for a public-private system working in tandem to create better access to health car; effectively a two-tier system for low-income families as opposed to those who could afford supplementary and presumably superior treatment.

His thriving eye-care clinic gave him the confidence to enthuse about the possibilities of eschewing symmetry in health care provisions for the general population. Now the election of Robert Ouellet, a Montreal radiologist with his own clinic, tells us that "it is inevitable" that some measure of private care will evolve in this country. In fact, we do already have "some measure" of private care here, supplemental to public care.

Canadian law, however, prohibits private insurance purchase for health care. And if individuals choose to take advantage of private health care facilities seeking treatment not covered by the universal health care plan, they pay for it out of their own pockets. Now the CMA is advocating for more choice for Canadians who wish to pay for additional care through their discretionary income. Beyond what is currently available.

We're informed that only private health care clinics can offer the latest medical health technologies; that Canadian public health lags far behind other developed economies in acquiring new diagnostic technologies. We're well below the OECD countries in the public use of MRIs, CT scanners and other diagnostic machines, it appears. Our infrastructure requires replacement; we need additional devices, but haven't the wherewithal.

Whatever happened to doctors' diagnostic skills? One supposes they've withered away, gone the way of the Dodo, just as reading and numeracy skills have declined with the almost universal use of computers.