Two-tiered healthcare is coming to Canada, and it is nothing to celebrate
Healthcare systems across Canada have been chronically underfunded and understaffed in the face of an aging and increasingly-unhealthy population. And then the pandemic hit.
What was a problem is now becoming a disaster. As hospitals became overwhelmed with COVID patients, on top of everything else, doctors, nurses and other staff have been retiring or seeking jobs elsewhere. Provinces, including Saskatchewan, have promised to do something about it. But when these shortages even extend into the “private healthcare utopia” of America, it is clear that there isn’t going to be an easy, short-term fix.
What is also clear is that the introduction of a two-tiered system, as Ontario has recently announced it is doing, will not fix these problems. The only problem this fixes is the desire for those with means being able to avoid having to wait for procedures like the rest of us plebs have to.
By introducing the profit motive into our healthcare system, what it will do is: give those who can afford it the opportunity to receive premium services that will not be available to those who can't; cost the healthcare system even more by taking away precious resources and funding from public services, driving up overall costs to the taxpayer even further; increase pressure to cut corners to appease greedy shareholders; and create a stronger incentive for the general population to not avoid the healthcare system, but to require it, in an effort to create customers and increase profits.
The United States spends twice per capita than what Canada does on healthcare, but yet that increased spending doesn't result in better health outcomes for ordinary citizens. If patient care and care provider health and safety is what we want to improve, the American system is not one we should be emulating. This conservative, market-fundamentalist push for privatization and economic growth at-all-costs needs to end. The priority must be put on uniting as a country, working with care providers on solutions and creating an egalitarian public service that improves outcomes, and not on a two-tiered system, driven by private interests, which focuses on profit growth.
To hear a physician's view on Ontario's privatization efforts, click here.
How will diverting publicly-funded surgeries to for-profit enterprises reduce wait times, cost less & not impact public hospital staffing? pic.twitter.com/hoGPHWlPD1
— Michael Warner (@drmwarner) January 16, 2023
For more coverage on this story, check out David Doel’s video on it here.