Canada Still Working Towards Health Care For All

You probably didn’t notice, but Canada will have a federal election on May 2. It’s a big deal up there — and the number one issue is — you’ll never guess — health care! It’s eleven percentage points more critical than jobs and the economy, according to this poll.

You probably didn’t notice, but Canada will have a federal election on May 2. It’s a big deal up there — and the number one issue is — you’ll never guess — health care! It’s eleven percentage points more critical than jobs and the economy, according to this poll.

Canada, of course, is the model for so-called single-payer, government monopoly health care. But the polls tell us that all is not well. The monopoly has been effectively closed since 1984, when the federal government prevented doctors who operated in the system from balance billing or operating outside the system. If any country should have gotten its act together on ensuring access to adequate care, surely it would be Canada.

Or, it would be if government planners could bring about such outcomes. In fact, five million Canadians have no access to a primary care physician. (That’s about 15 percent of the population.) Remarkably, the Canadian people’s response to this astounding government failure is to support government-run health care by a ratio of nine to one.

The real question here is how any politician (Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Rick Scott) could resist promising “universal” health care – the resulting dependency is embraced by the people it victimizes, and vastly increases politicians’ power.

The Liberal Party of Canada, which introduced “universal” health care, has learned its lesson well. Its big campaign promise for next week’s election? A National Food Policy! Canadians have done without one for centuries. I wonder how long it will take for five million Canadians to go hungry, after the Liberals impose their National Food Policy?