The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Advocates of for-profit health care have barely been able to contain their glee since Health Minister Pierre Pettigrew let the cat out of the bag last week about the Martin Liberal government's plan to allow more private for-profit health care in Canada. The government's response to Mr. Pettigrew's statement has been textbook damage control; minimization followed by deflection. First they tried to minimize it by saying that just because they are going to allow for-profit health care does not mean they encourage it, as if Premiers like Alberta's Ralph Klein and B.C.'s Gordon Campbell need to be encouraged to sell off health care. Then they deflected it by suggesting that it does not matter that health care will be delivered on a for-profit basis as long as Canadians do not have to pay out of pocket for the service. Expect "health cards, not credit cards" to be a Liberal slogan in the next election. What then is the difference between public health care and for-profit health care if patients still do not have to pay out of pocket? This is a fair question that many Canadians have been asking. The problem is not privatization per se. Non-profit private organizations like the Victorian Order of Nurses already play valuable roles in our health care system. The "for-profit" part is the problem. For-profit health care funnels tax dollars away from patients and into the pockets of Liberal-friendly health service companies. It does this by taking health dollars now used to provide services directly and uses them to pay for-profit middlemen to provide the same services instead. These middlemen typically take a 10% to 15% profit margin. You do not have to be a math whiz to see that the more money the government funnels into for-profit arrangements, the less this leaves for actual services. Some Liberal and Conservative politicians argue that for-profit health care will actually improve service because for-profit service providers are more 'efficient'. This argument has been discredited in study after study, in such prestigious journals as the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. Patient death rates are higher in for-profit hospitals than in non-profit hospitals because for-profit hospitals cut corners to increase their profit margins. Despite all evidence, advocates of for-profit health care cling to the bogus efficiency argument to try to justify what is really just another Liberal scheme to make a few companies a lot of money on the backs of Canadian taxpayers and sick people desperately needing health care. So if for-profit health care costs more and gets us less, why is the Liberal government so hell-bent on opening the door to it? The only ones who stand to benefit from for-profit health care are the companies who will be making the profits. One of these companies, MDS Health Group Ltd., employs the Earnscliffe Strategy Group, an Ottawa lobbying firm with close ties to Paul Martin. Health Canada recently hired Earnscliffe to give them strategic advice. What kind of advice will such a firm give Health Canada on whether or not it should allow for-profit health care? Canadians deserve high quality health care from the federal and provincial governments. It is true that, when you are in the emergency room or the doctor's waiting room, you do not really care whether the hospital or clinic you are in is for-profit or publicly run. But Canadians will not be pleased when they start to experience for themselves the further deterioration of health care quality that for-profit delivery will bring. Nor will they be pleased to see more of their hard earned tax dollars being siphoned off to Liberal-friendly companies, especially when these dollars could be used to improve our existing public system or expand our woefully inadequate home care and pharmacare. In the coming election, do not be fooled when the Liberal government talks of "health cards, not credit cards." If they are allowed to go ahead with their scheme to bring in for-profit health care delivery, a scheme the Conservatives support, the service you get with your health card will only get worse. Non-profit delivery has been proven to be the most cost effective and fairest way to deliver health care. The last thing we should be doing now is diverting funds from our existing non-profit hospitals and clinics to the pockets of unneeded for-profit middlemen. Bev Desjarlais is the New Democratic Party Health Critic, the Member of Parliament for the Churchill constituency in Manitoba, and a former healthcare worker.
