Protecting
Public Health
Care – In Your
Own Words
Council members share their stories
Last year the Council of
Canadians undertook an
extensive survey of our
members asking them to
tell us their stories about
public or private health care
– we received thousands
of responses. Many people
talked about the benefits
of public health care and their experiences
receiving timely, quality health
care with no medical bills, their fears
about increasing privatization and doctor
shortages, and their experiences with
health care delivery in other countries.
People rightly asked what Canadian governments,
both federal and provincial,
are doing to protect public health care,
which continues to be Canada’s most
treasured social program.
Doctor shortages
Deep health care funding cuts through
the 80s and 90s by both the Mulroney
and Chrétien governments led to a
reduction in federal health care spending
from 42 per cent to an all-time low
of 10.2 per cent. Spending has slowly
increased in recent years, but the cuts
have left devastating effects. Most pressing,
and most often pointed to by our
members, are serious doctor shortages
– of family doctors and general practitioners
in particular. People rely on these
doctors as their entry point to the health care system. Without one, many will
instead visit hospital emergency rooms,
face delays in getting referrals to specialists,
or have difficulty obtaining timely
medical care.
A number of years ago my wife and I
moved from downtown Edmonton to a
suburb of the city after our family doctor
became ill and moved to B.C. We
have been unable to find a new family
doctor and so have to rely on a local
medical clinic for prescriptions and
health care. We regard them merely as prescription writers. I am coming on to
92 years of age, and we would like to
have the services of a family doctor to
continually assess our physical needs.
The health care needs – especially of
seniors – are certainly not included in
the Alberta government’s priorities.
Brian Davis
Edmonton, Alberta
When my doctor left his practice suddenly
last December, he put about
3,000 people in a position where they
had no doctor. (Other doctors in
my community were not taking new
patients.) This put a tremendous strain
on the emergency department of our
hospital, causing long wait times there.
I was lucky – I was put on a waiting list
and now have a family doctor.
Dorothy Letman
Perth, Ontario
Our region in Peterborough, Ontario,
has had from 20,000 to 30,000 people
with no family physician for years.
When our doctor threw in the towel we
were lucky to find a wonderful doctor in
Toronto. We drive almost two hours and
pay $9 an hour for parking.
Joan Reeves
Peterborough, Ontario
I am devastated that my family doctor,
a relatively young man, is leaving the
profession because of his utter frustration
with medicare as it is now. He can
only give 10 minutes of his time to
each patient per visit. He can no longer
be the good GP he had trained to be.
If you have several (sometimes related)
medical issues, you need to make more
than one appointment. There is obviously
a movement afoot at the government
level to let medicare deteriorate to
a point where the public will beg to have
a privatized system like the U.S. That
must never happen. Medicine is not a
business.
Ruth Hogan
Mission, British Columbia
Experiences in other countries
When speaking about the benefits of
Canada’s public health care system,
many of our members gave their experiences
in other countries as reasons to
keep Canada’s public health care system.
Both the United States, with an almost
fully privatized medical system, and
Britain, with a mixed public-private
system, were offered as examples of the
dangers of health care privatization.
Two hours after landing in Kansas City,
Missouri, I started to feel sick and soon
had a severe pain in my abdomen. My
wife and I took a taxi to the North
Kansas City Hospital. Twenty days and
two major operations later I was released
from hospital. I had had a blood clot in
my small intestine. The bill was approximately
US$100,000. Fortunately, I had
100 per cent medical coverage. The bill
in Canada would have been zero.
Richard Austin
Wyevale, Ontario
I’m a U.S. citizen by birth. One of the
scariest aspects of my life during my
twenties was the possibility of injury. For
me and all my friends, we had no safety
net because we were no longer dependants
on our parents’ insurance policies
and affording our own was out of the
question. When one friend broke his
arm, we debated for hours alternatives to
heading to the hospital because we knew
it would saddle him with years of debt.
Gail Lotenberg
Bowen Island, British Columbia
As a family physician, before emigrating
to Canada in 1974, I practised for
15 years in Britain, where public and
private health care is allowed in parallel
since the inception of the National
Health Service in 1948. It was a disaster
from the start, and still is. In many cases
the quality of care leaves much to be
desired. The specialists choose to treat
only those patients with the highest profit potential and then attempt procedures
without the staff or equipment
to deal with the post-surgical complications.
When this occurs, transfer to a
public facility is the only option. Private
health premiums have risen year after
year and are now the preserve of the very
wealthy. Many of the private hospitals
have closed.
Walter Baxter
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
The growing trend of privatization
Health care privatization advocates like
private clinic owner Dr. Brian Day and
new Canadian Medical Association
president Robert Ouellet, who owns
private MRI clinics in Quebec, are waging
a strong battle against public health
care. The Harper government has given
its silent blessing to increased privatization
by allowing a dramatic increase in
private, for-profit clinics that sell health
care services for a price, and by not
clamping down on private clinics that
allow and encourage queue-jumping.
My husband has, for the first time,
been unable to schedule a colonoscopy
through the public health care in
Quebec with the doctor who performed
his previous two colonoscopies. He is
supposed to have the procedure every
three years. When he called the doctor
for an appointment he was told the
doctor could not make an appointment
until next year, but if we wanted have it
done privately at a cost of $450, it could
be scheduled right away. We are trying
to find another doctor.
Chantale Labrecque
Laterrière, Quebec
As a doctor, I see more and more colleagues
charging private fees to patients,
effectively negating the possibility of
referring my poorer patients to them.
Dr. Jean Zigby
Montreal, Quebec
My wife hurt her shoulder last winter
while cross-country skiing. She was in a
lot of pain, but the doctor felt that nothing
was broken and that the separated
muscles just needed time to heal. After
numerous treatments and no improvement
she was put on the waiting list for
an MRI. She waited five months to get
the MRI examination, which revealed
a broken bone. She could have paid the
$500 and had the MRI immediately at a
private clinic. This is not right! We could
have afforded the $500 to jump the
queue, but many people would not have
that option.
Robert Paulsen
Sherwood Park, Alberta
January 11, 2010 because of my age. It turned out the
doctor who was to do the procedure
charged a fee ($40). He said it was for
administration costs and because he was
doing this, pressure on the public system
was being relieved. I refused to pay. I
had to wait only three weeks for the
public system, proving it is not as bad as
some would have us believe.
Herman Sallmen
Ottawa, Ontario
Maude Barlow, National Chairperson
of the Council of Canadians, sums it
up best in the opening lines of Profit is
Not the Cure: A Citizen’s Guide to Saving
Medicare: “We Canadians treasure our
universal health care system. Polls consistently
confirm that, no matter what
turn the economy is taking or where the
political winds are blowing, support for
this core foundation of Canadian society
never wavers. Yet we are currently experiencing
the most sustained and deliberate
assault on medicare. Unless ordinary
Canadians from every part of the country
rise up to defend it, our public
health care system will not survive.”
Jan Malek is the Publications Officer for the
Council of Canadians.
Printer-friendly version: Protecting Public Health Care in PDF Format (128kB)
Photo: The Cambie Surgery Centre, located in
Vancouver, British Columbia, is one of an
estimated 200 private health care clinics now
open in Canada. Credit: Jan Malek
