Saying no to private health care

By Guy Caron
The Daily Gleaner
January 30, 2008

Dr. Brian Day is almost halfway through his term as president of the Canadian Medical Association, and we are still waiting for him to put forward a solution to health care access problems that does not involve privatization.

He has been promoting, as a quick fix, opening private clinics much like his Cambie Surgery Centre in Vancouver, B.C.

Patient-focused funding, in which hospitals and private clinics are paid by the number of people they treat, is the latest quick fix that he has been promoting. Like many of his other proposals, it is a system that has failed to improve access or control costs.

Day partially acknowledged this at the Provincial Congress of the B.C. Conversation on Health last June when he said, "They did make mistakes in Britain, but they learned from their mistakes."

The system worked so poorly in Britain that last November, British health secretary Alan Johnson announced the halt of the expansion of National Health Service contracts with the private sector.

At the Council of Canadians, we support solutions that do work. Through advanced access, patients at the Saskatoon Community Centre can now be seen within two days, where they previously had to wait three weeks for an appointment and two years for a physical, with the added bonus that hundreds more patients can be seen annually.

Public joint replacement surgery centres in Richmond, Ottawa and Alberta have decreased waiting times for hip and knee operations by 75 per cent by streamlining waiting lists and standardizing surgical processes.

The average time elapsed between mammograms and the referral to surgery in Sault Ste. Marie (including ultrasounds and biopsies) decreased to 18 days from 107 days by bringing all the services for breast exams under the same roof.

These successes have one thing in common: they are within the public system and thus didn't turn a profit for anyone.

If New Brunswick Health Minister Mike Murphy are genuinely interested in improving access to health care, they should look at the many proven, made-in- Canada public alternatives instead of blindly jeopardizing the future of public health care by fixating on the profits they can bring to businesspeople.

Profit is not the cure for health care in New Brunswick.

Guy Caron, Health Care Campaigner, The Council of Canadians