Challenging Canada’s government health care monopoly

Following on last week’s article by FMF director, Eustace Davie (Canada’s healthcare – money alone does not ensure good healthcare), the FMF has learned of a campaign started by Atlas Network partner the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF), called “Your Health Can’t Wait”. The campaign seeks to raise awareness of a court challenge to the Canadian government’s health care monopoly. Four individuals who experienced harm while on government waiting lists for surgery are suing the attorney general of British Columbia to challenge a law that makes it illegal to seek medical care outside of the government health care system.

As the Atlas Network correctly points out, “Countries that offer “free” health care can seem like an attractive alternative to high medical bills and insurance rates. When health care isn’t governed by price mechanisms, though, it is inevitably rationed instead by time spent waiting in line to receive treatment — and delayed care is a matter of life and death for patients in critical or rapidly deteriorating condition”.

Eustace Davie states, “It would be helpful if SA’s government planners would take note of the deficiencies of government dominated healthcare systems like the one in Canada, and recognise that their [National Health Insurance] plans are likely to reduce and not improve the quality of SA’s healthcare, especially when considering the fact that high levels of expenditure in such systems do not translate into higher quality of care and efficiency in delivery”.

The FMF’s Health Policy Unit’s central theme is that patients will be best served by a rapidly growing private healthcare sector, serving, as incomes improve, a steadily increasing percentage of the population, to the point where the government will no longer need to provide health care to the poor but purchase their health care needs from a competitive private sector.

Author: Jasson Urbach is an Economist and director of the Free Market Foundation. This article may be republished without prior consent but with acknowledgement to the author. The views expressed in the article are the author’s and are not necessarily shared by the members of the FMF.