What makes sense?
Met a fellow from the United States recently who assured me Canada’s medicare system is pure socialism and therefore doomed to disaster. He said individuals should look after themselves rather than rely on government handouts.
He’d heard there were any number of British Columbia people who were regularly trekking to the U.S. for treatment because they had to wait forever in Canada’s hospitals.
I didn’t agree and we had an interesting debate. I argued that if medicare was wrong then it should be equally sinful to use tax money to build highways many of us would never use.
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But isn’t it neat the way politically minded people can wrap things up in neat packages and discard them? Socialism, communism, fascism, right-wing, left-wing, liberal, conservative used in the pejorative sense can be labels used to discard issues rather than deal with them.
It has been said that the U.S. always has to have an enemy in order to maintain its sense of focus.
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, finding a meaningful enemy has been difficult. If you can’t rail against communism, try socialism or even liberalism.
This is one reason I have always felt comfortable about being Canadian. We tend to be pragmatists.
Medicare makes sense to us. Perhaps we did try to include more than we could afford and are now in a painful readjustment. But the basic idea is sound and the vast majority of Canadians would vote to retain it.
If the Americans wish to retain their freedom to bankrupt themselves paying medical bills that should be their democratic right.
