Canadian Healthcare "In Ruins"

I have and others at Dakota Voice have written in previous posts of our concerns about a single-payer health care system such as that of our northern neighbors. I have written about how costs can be contained only by rationing services. No amount of taxation or other revenue sources can ever keep up with the demand for “free” healthcare. When a desirable commodity is believed to be free, supply can never meet demand. Besides the Canadian system another good model of this phenomenon would be the Veterans Administration hospitals that control costs by rationing and making services contingent upon navigating a maze of regulations and prerequisites and ultimately denying services except for the most basic low-cost variety.

Investor’s Business Daily has an editorial about Claude Castonguay that should give Americans reason to pause in our headlong rush to government run healthcare. Castonguay is called “the father of Quebec medicare,” because it was he who first proposed and engineered Quebec health care back in the 60s, later expanding to all of Canada. Mr. Castonguay has now written that the Canadian health care system is “in crisis” and is advocating a return to some form of private healthcare and private insurance as the only way to maintain high-quality care for Canadians.

Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: ‘the father of Quebec medicare.’ Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in ‘crisis.’
‘We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,’ says Castonguay.

But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: ‘We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.’

I hope Americans are paying attention. We may get what Obama and Hillary have been promising and we may find ourselves having to go to Canada in the future for timely, state-of –the-art medical care.

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