Manitoba farmer Linda McNair was paying close attention last week to a health-policy debate half a continent away. In Sydney, N.S., Canada’s doctors debated a proposal to promote a pay-as-you-go tier of medical care as a supplement to publicly funded services.
In Winnipeg, meanwhile, Canada’s once-great Progressive Conservative Party listened to young Tories argue that those who can afford it should have the option to buy better health care.
The Reform Party, English Canada’s government-in-waiting, said it supports the idea that Canadians be “allowed to exercise health-care choices outside of medicare if they so chose.”
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In plain English, it is called one system for the rich and one for the poor.
Defenders say it would reduce pressure on the public system because waiting lines would shrink, shed of the affluent who leave to buy coverage which would take them to the head of the line.
Detractors say resources would flow to the private system and those paying taxes to support public health care while buying their own care would begin to pressure for an end to their compulsory tax support of a system they do not use.
The young Tories, presumably, think they always will be able to afford good private care.
McNair, a Carman-area farmer and western women’s representative on the Canadian Federation of Agriculture board of directors, said rural people should be concerned about these attacks on universal medicare. “I don’t see it as rural or urban,” she said. “I would say we all need a system of core essential services available to everyone.”
She said it is important that the medicare system not become so costly that it collapses.
Yet having access to decent health care in rural as well as urban areas is an important mark of Canadian citizenship.
Hospital closings and the difficulty of attracting doctors to rural areas already are major threats to rural health care.
Private medicine would not help the cause.
In the end, the Canadian Medical Association voted last week merely to lead a national debate about private medicine.
And health minister David Dingwall told the doctors the Liberals would never oversee the dismantlement of the universal medicare system.
It was smart politics. Liberals’ polls have shown that Canadians do not want a weakening of the system.
“When it came to health care, spending was untouchable,” said an Earnscliffe poll conducted for the finance department late last year. “Most people said they’d increase taxes before they would cut spending on health care.”
Still, Dingwall’s bravado is a bit shallow.
The federal government has been cutting health dollar transfers to the provinces and increasing numbers of provincial governments are looking for replacement private dollars.
The decisive battle for universal medicare is on. For Canadians, rural and urban, the stakes are high.
Like the Canadian Wheat Board, medicare lost would be almost impossible to put together again.
