Today the Toronto Star is carrying an op/ed column by Michael Rachlis that should hold some shocking revelations for many Canadians.
The subject of the story is a study by The Commonwealth Fund comparing the health care systems of Canada, the United States, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand.
In the study, the United States had the worst health care system overall. This is no surprise.
What may surprise a great many Canadians is that the study ranked Canada's health care system -- a source of national pride -- second last. Canada's health care system ranked dead last in timeliness of access, effectiveness and overall quality.
Canada's health care system scored an alarming second-last on efficiency.
Worse yet, the five countries that scored better than Canada did so while spending a smaller portion of their Gross Domestic Product on health care. The results of this study should be sobering for all Canadians.
According to the study, Canada suffers most in terms of primary care. We've struggled to retain family doctors, while the closure of community clinics continues to effectively hamstring our health care system. It seems that Jack Layton is right when he points out that the lack of family doctors in Canada is problematic. But does he have the right solution?
The question seems to revolve around whether or not Canada will maintain its current system, or rebuild it from the ground up.
An examination of what is happening within Canada's system as it stands may shed some light on the matter.
A 2009 study by Alain Vanesse, Sarah Scott, Josiane Courteau and Maria Gabriela Orzanco determined, among other things, that doctors tended to migrate from Quebec, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Martimes to Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia.
As it so happens, these three provinces are bastions for a feared prospect in Canadian health care: privatization. More private health clinics exist in these three provinces than anywhere else in Canada.
This should be an alarming prospect for Canadians who favour a strictly public system, as it determines that the favoured model of practice for Canadian doctors is a privatized model.
The question Canadians must have for Jack Layton is this: were he to become Prime Minister tomorrow, how would he solve this particular problem? By seeking to satisfy the profit motives of individual doctors within a fully public system, by restricting the freedom of doctors to establish private practices, or by creating a hybrid system such as the one that exists in many of the other countries subject to this study?
That, by the way, includes the Netherlands. According to The Commonwealth Fund, they rank #1.
Two things should be fully evident to Canadians: that there is significant room for improvement in Canadian health care, and that simply throwing more money at the system is, in itself, not the solution.
(Britain, ranked #2 in the study, spent the second-least money per capita on health care in 2007.)
For a country that prides itself on public health care, a sixth place finish in a study such as this is no more an acceptable result as is seventh place in Olympic hockey.
Yet while Canadians would brand one of these results an outrage -- and did precisely this in 2007 when Canada's men's hockey team finished behind Switzerland -- one of these results has been cause for complacency.
No more. It's time to change the Canadian persepctive on health care, make it about more than simply a comparison to the United States, and start to improve our health care -- both in terms of quality and cost -- before it's too late.
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